Lizard Illuminati?

I've admired @bariweiss since she courageously opposed anti-Semitism at Columbia many years ago. I admired how she responded to vicious hate with kindness and grace since she arrived at the Times. I admire her intellectual independence and courage today: https://t.co/jGrwJHoTrT

— David French (@DavidAFrench) July 14, 2020

I've read Beloved, but never The Color Purple.  Probably because Beloved was not my cup of tea, and I don't mean because the themes or the subject were off-putting.  Alice Walker is just not the kind of writer who engages my interests (my loss, I always figured).  But then I read Bari Weiss' resignation letter (who?  Still dunno, except she wrote for the NYT, and now she doesn't.  I'm still wondering if her story is akin to that of Molly Ivins, who was hired by the Gray Lady because they liked her "voice," and then did everything they could to squash it out of her because it's "The New York Times."  It was the "cluster pluck" story that broke the camel's back, by the way; but I digress.)

This is how we get from Bari Weiss to Alice Walker:

It took the paper two days and two jobs to say that the Tom Cotton op-ed “fell short of our standards.” We attached an editor’s note on a travel story about Jaffa shortly after it was published because it “failed to touch on important aspects of Jaffa’s makeup and its history.” But there is still none appended to Cheryl Strayed’s fawning interview with the writer Alice Walker, a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati. 

Most of the letter, to that point, was "inside baseball" to me; under the stitches, some of it.  I get the Tom Cotton reference (and what WERE they thinking to publish that steaming pile?). But I'm not an NYT devotee and I don't see the world from 9th Avenue (I do see the country as Texas and "everywhere else," so....), and I'm still not sure who Bari Weiss is (again, my ignorance is my loss, and I'm not saying she's unimportant because I don't know of her).  But "lizard Illuminati"?  Surely she's grossly exaggerating.

No, she isn't.  Google is your friend; it's also your tormenter.  Remember that age when you were young and reading everything you could lay your hands on, and finding books and stories and news about things too bizarre to be real, and some weren't, and some were, and felt like somebody'd opened the trap door and you were just falling?  That's what this Vox (Vox, for pity's sake!) article brought back to me; that same sense of vertigo, of worlds I didn't know existed, and didn't need to know about.

No, I don't mean lizard Illuminati who are hybrid lizard/human overlords who only look Jewish!  I mean people who think up such stuff, and the people who champion them as "brave thinkers,"  I'm just glad I never admired Alice Walker, because the woman is off her rocker.  I mean, I thought Oprah was New Age-y credulous.  Oprah is a stone cold sober empiricist by comparison with Alice Walker. I mean, whatever it takes for you to make sense of the world, I guess; but keep it to yourself!

Two a month?
Royko weeps. https://t.co/16hJBQfX33

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 14, 2020

Still don’t know who Bari Weiss is; still don’t care. Still wish I’d never heard of Lizard Illuminati.

Corrections Accepted Dept:

Quick correction (I think): "Beloved" is Toni Morrison, not Alice Walker.

The Lizard Illuminate is a new one on me. Don't know how I missed them.

Well, you're right. I do confuse those two writers, mostly because I never paid much attention to either of them (just not my cup of tea.  Enjoy them if you do, and pay no mind to me.  A lot of modern fiction leaves me cold and uninterested.)  I'd blame the Lizard Illuminati, but that mistake is mine alone.