no it's not money, it's this, it's having to be a manager on tippytoes about what you say communicating with the woke kiddies. He was told like a month or two ago to get off twitter, to stop publicity opinionating, to tone it down, but he wants to write what he wants to write. There was tension between him and Ezra on that, I remember seeing it on Twitter. Turns out it was a trans employee complaining about him signing that "Harper's Letter," being offended by it. That's dangerous, they'll like sue or go on strike if you don't kowtow

[...] “there was an inherent tension between my status as a co-founder of the site and my desire to be a fiercely independent and at times contentious voice,” he wrote in his first post on Substack, adding on Twitter, “I’m looking forward to really telling everyone what’s on my mind to an even greater extent than I do now.”

In our interview, Yglesias explained why pushing back against the “dominant sensibility” in digital journalism is important to him. He said he believes that certain voguish positions are substantively wrong—for instance, abolishing or defunding police —and that such arguments, as well as rhetorical fights over terms like Latinx, alienate many people from progressive politics and the Democratic Party.

“There’s been endless talk since the election about House Democrats being mad at the ‘Squad,’ and others saying, ‘What do you want, for activists to just not exist? For there to be no left-wing members of Congress?’” Yglesias told me. “But there’s a dynamic where there’s media people who really elevated the profile of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a couple of other members way above their actual numerical standing.” Many outlets, he argued, are missing something important.

“The people making the media are young college graduates in big cities, and that kind of politics makes a lot of sense to them,” he said. “And we keep seeing that older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities, just don’t share that entire worldview. It’s important to me to be someone to step outside that dynamic...that was challenging as someone who was a founder of a media outlet but not a manager of it.”

One trend that exacerbated that challenge: colleagues in media treating the expression of allegedly problematic ideas as if they were a human-resources issue.

Earlier this year, for instance, after Yglesias signed a group letter published in Harper’s magazine objecting to cancel culture, one of his colleagues, Emily VanDerWerff, told Vox editors that his signature made her feel “less safe at Vox.” Yglesias had been personally kind and supportive of her work, she wrote, but as a trans woman, she felt the letter should not have been signed by anyone at Vox, because she believed that it contained “many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions,” and that several of its signatories are anti-trans. The letter’s authors reject those characterizations. I asked Yglesias if that matter in any way motivated his departure. “Something we’ve seen in a lot of organizations is increasing sensitivity about language and what people say,” he told me. “It’s a damaging trend in the media in particular because it is an industry that’s about ideas, and if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it’s very challenging to do good work.

The issue, Yglesias believes, is not limited to Vox. “We saw that in the way the New York Times people characterized their opposition to Tom Cotton’s op-ed,” he said, and “we saw it in what Emily VanDerWerff wrote about me––and Vox to its credit has not [been] managed in that way exactly, but it is defiinitely the mentality of a lot of people working in journalism today, and it makes me feel like it’s a good time to have an independent platform.’

The New York Times’ Opinion editor, James Bennet (a former editor in chief of The Atlantic), was forced out over the publication of the Cotton op-ed. The Times Opinion staffer Bari Weiss left the newspaper soon afterward, alleging in her resignation letter that “if a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome.” The two had been charged, in part, with offering Times readers a greater diversity of opinions. Whether the Opinion section will still carry out that mission remains uncertain [....]

See what is common now, is that the kiddies raise issue with things the boss says on Twitter or signs a group letter or whatever and they threaten to sue. Or get a gang together of like minds and threaten group action like strike or just bad publicity. 

The issues in The Atlantic letter are real, academics and journalist and writers do feel a teeny little bit like Salman Rushdie recently.

This is very common in the museum world right now, the young employees gang up if you offend them with something in curatorial or similar, it's very easy to smear an institution on social media. You don't even need to threaten to sue, get a lawyer or start a union. All you have to do is yell "wolf!" on social media and all of a sudden you have a rep as an evil oppressive institution.

 Everything is on tippytoes, you have to be politically correct. If you're not politically correct at every moment you can get into big trouble. This is what happened at the NYTimes. First they went for hiring lots of young people in order to attract the new demographic and surprise surprise surprise, old time reporting types have to walk on tippytoes around them or they sue (Glenn Thrush one example I suspect. He's back reporting after being put on "sabbatical" but he doesn't go on social media anymore and he used to do short quippy old crank tweets that were very deadpan funny, I really liked them, I suspect he used the wrong words once or twice.)