Nicky’s Nullification:
Schadenfreude in Oregon

2,158 words

There is good news, and there is bad news. The good news is that Walter Duranty II, aka Nicholas Kristof, is not going to be Governor of Oregon — not soon, anyway. That’s good news if you believe that a man whose 37-year career consisting of scribbling for the New York Times and producing inspirational slide shows of his tours through Third World hellholes has no business bossing anyone around, much less the people in an entire state. It’s also good news for those who relish watching a carpet-bagging, anti-white propagandist chastised by reality.

The bad news is that Nicholas Kristof is not going to be Governor of Oregon. There were those of us who were hoping to see how “Hate has no home here” works with the BLM predators of Portland, and to watch a know-it-all with the Dunning-Kruger effect do a spectacular crash and burn:

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe they are smarter and more capable than they are. . . . The term lends a scientific name and explanation to a problem that many people immediately recognize — that fools are blind to their own foolishness. As Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

For Kristof, change that to: “invincibly blind to his own foolishness.” What he lacks in self-awareness, practical experience, and an ability to detect fakers he makes up for in boundless confidence.

In case you thought Walter might have been chastened by failure, from the Willamette Week:

“One of the advantages of losing one’s job very publicly is that you get a lot of job offers,” Kristof told New York magazine in an April interview. “Running a foundation, running a news organization, running a couple of universities. But I like journalism, and I think it’s hard to beat the journalistic toolbox for making a better world.”

Kristof will never be mistaken for a modest person. In typical grandiose fashion, he told his interviewer that “[h]e would not rule out entirely the hypothetical notion of working in the Biden administration [as Secretary of a Better World, perhaps] in the event that the president called.”

Mr. President, Nicholas Kristof is available!

What about his toolbox?

“Making a better world” has long been the marketing centerpiece of Kristof’s dog-and-pony show that he pretends is journalism. The barely concealed subtext of his overwrought disseminations to his readers and followers is how lucky the world is to have Nicky Kristof about saving it, however. The man has never run anything as complex as a lemonade stand, but why settle for some middling gig like running a university, a foundation, or whatever when your “toolbox” equips you to fix the world?

When he decided to dial his ambition down a notch and start by fixing Oregon, Kristof didn’t seem to think that the state’s constitutional requirement for legal residency should be an obstacle to his being Governor in a state he had not lived in for decades. After all, Oregonians were hurting. They were calling to him for help. So, he descended from his lofty perch in Gotham, and with his Big Apple wife, Cheryl Wudunn, a former private wealth advisor for Goldman Sachs in tow, headed west. So then, let the healing begin. The rubes in Oregon, weren’t of much interest to his big-city, private wealth advising consort, however. Again, from the New York magazine piece:

[Wudunn] is funny and quick and a lot more fun than her husband. She wore a cropped leather jacket and pretty pastel eye makeup. “I am not an Oregonian,” she said. She grew up on the Upper West Side, and when I asked if she missed New York at all, she raised her eyebrows. “Oh, I’m going back to New York!”[1] she said. [“You couldn’t think I actually like it here!”] Like, immediately. She was flying out for a visit the following week. She had meetings to attend, she said.

She didn’t mention when she was coming back.

Kristof may not be much fun — that seems to be the consensus of people who know him[2] — but it’s highly entertaining to follow the course of his Talmudic legerdemain as it sets him apart from the “dirt people”, as the Z-Man calls them, and bolsters his image of vast moral superiority. From New York magazine interview in April:

“I don’t think that most people appreciate that most years, alcohol kills more people than drugs,” Kristof told me, though he clarified that he does not believe this is true of the type of alcohol that he makes. (italics added)

Kristof’s residence outside of Yamhill, Oregon is a keypad-protected, multi-million-dollar gated property that produces and sells cider and Pinot Noir. Pinot Noir is the fashionable beverage of the smart set that Kristof is a member of, not remotely the kind of lower-priced hooch consumed by people who work for living.

[ Kristof] also does not think that profiting off the sale of alcohol and lowering rates of alcohol addiction, two of his stated immediate goals, are in conflict. “You know, I’ve lost friends to alcoholism, but I haven’t lost any to Pinot Noir alcoholism,” he said.

Presumably with a straight face.

Then follows a billow of verbal smog full of the right buzz words — “social good,” “social capital,” “bring people together” — that when listened to carefully makes you realize that this is a grifter talking, thinking he’s slipping one past you.

“I wouldn’t be in favor of barring alcohol in general. I think that wine can be, or cider can be, a social good and can create social capital. Things that bring people together, I think, are good for society [like antifa mostly peacefully protesting]. I think alcohol can do that, and I think that’s true of wine and cider.” Sure, everyone knows how good Pinot and cider are for you [everyone Kristof knows, anyway]. Every bottle sold is more social capital.

Not to mention more Kristof capital.

But I think . . . the mortality from alcoholism, it’s driven really by working-class Americans, and it’s in kind of bulk hard liquor particularly. I don’t think that good wine and cider add significantly to the problem.

The interviewer, whose eyes must have started glazing over at this point, has just experienced how slippery syllogisms work for the wordsmith Houdinis who collect their paychecks from the New York Times.

I make the world a better place, starting modestly with Oregon.
I make alcoholic beverages in Oregon; good wine and cider that sophisticated people like me drink, not bulk hard liquor consumed by the dirt people that turns them into non-Pinot Noir alcoholics.
Ergo: My alcoholic beverages make the world better.

In the inimitable Kristofesque “tribute to my service to humanity” style, Nicky bid his New York Times readers a mawkish adios when he decamped for Oregon. “Farewell to My Readers, with Hope,” column. “Hope”? It worked for Obama. “I’m bucking the journalistic impulse to stay on the sidelines . . . and it feels like the right moment to move from covering problems to trying to fix them.”

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s new novel When Harry Met Sally here.

Now Kristof, who never misses a beat when trumpeting his globetrotting journalistic achievements and recounting his hobnobbing with the current movers and shakers, somehow forgot to tell his readers what problems in his entire career he has ever fixed. It’s safe to wager that this feminized bloviator and the entire clique of NYT propagandists have never fixed or improved anything other than their investment portfolios.

Try this thought experiment. Imagine that suddenly, all of the New York Times and Washington Post columnists and investigative reporters disappeared for good. What difference would that make in your life? Would you be any worse off? Would you care? Compare that with your reaction to the disappearance of people who probably don’t drink Pinot Noir and boutique cider: truck drivers, auto mechanics, and plumbers. Policemen, maybe?

Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan determined that Kristof didn’t qualify for the ballot. Her opinion was upheld by the state’s Supreme Court. Kristof, who is all about shining the light from his toolbox on corruption and exposing shysters like Trump, refused to supply documents to prove his eligibility to run for office. Think of Kristof, with his refusal to submit documentation, as the Leona Helmsley of political aspirants: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

From the Oregon Capital Chronicle:

A long-time journalist, Kristof didn’t submit these records to the Secretary of State’s Office and rejected a request for them from the Capital Chronicle. Kristof also didn’t answer questions about other public documents obtained by the Capital Chronicle or about his sworn statements regarding his farming operation outside the rural community of Yamhill. He also didn’t respond to an email sharing elements of this story to check for accuracy.

Kristof then showed the people of Oregon how a man bringing them “transformative change” acts when he’s expected to be transparent and honest about his personal affairs: “He hired lawyers and corralled a stable of allies to argue his case in the media, which was that voters should decide if such rules matter.”[3] How could the state constitutional requirements possibly matter when the New York Times’ chief virtue-signaler arrives in town, claiming he’s the new sheriff?

“Instead of working to end homelessness,” Kristof sniffed, “they’re working to end my candidacy.”[4]

Another Kristof syllogism:

Whatever I do makes the world a better place.
Someone wants me to follow the little-people rules, which interferes with whatever it is I do.
Ergo: That person doesn’t want the world to be a better place.

Kristof — doing the frog calling someone ugly — went on to accuse Fagan of being a “political Establishment insider,” fighting the threat posed by someone “outside the political Establishment.”[5] This was coming from Hillary Clinton’s chief amanuensis at the New York Times during her 2016 presidential campaign: “I want to pitch you the reasons to vote for Clinton and not just against Donald Trump. I’ve known Clinton a bit for many years . . . [She’s] a morally serious person.”

The New York magazine article went on to say, “In its first fundraising disclosure, the campaign unveiled a donor list that could well double as a flight manifest for a charter to Davos.”[6] Melinda Gates, Thomas Bernthal, former national producer of NBC News, and former World Bank President Larry Sommers were among the “political outsiders” who contributed to Kristof’s campaign.

President Biden, absorbed in reruns of Gilligan’s Island and Mr. Ed, has yet to offer Kristof a job in what passes for his administration. So, he’s going back to the New York Times to do the only thing he knows how to do: make the world a better place by chanting, “This goldarn world should be a better place!” — 37 years and still counting. First, he has to complete a “journalistic memoir,” yet another book about himself and the thrill of poverty tourism.

He says that he will stay in Oregon. “’The plan is to continue to base myself on the farm here in Yamhill, but spend a week every month or two in New York,’ he tells WW.” He adds: “I’ve no plans to ever run for office again.”[7] That has the same level of believability as his vouching for Hillary Clinton’s integrity, his “political outsider” status, and his take on “Pinot Noir alcoholism.”

The New York magazine article concludes, as you would expect, by trying to put a happy face on the embarrassing Dunning-Kruger effect that slow-learner Kristof provided for all the world to see:

There is a version of the myth of Nicholas Kristof in which he plays the fool, riding into town on his white [microaggression alert] horse only to get pulled over by a traffic cop. But there is another version in which the fools are the people who would never risk appearing foolish just to live by their political ideals.[8]

I would go with the first, Occam’s Razor version. There are two problems with the second. First, a Dunning-Kruger-effect fool like Kristof never figures out he is a fool, and so can’t imagine he’d look like one: a midget emperor with no clothes. Second, “ideals”? Come on, mate. We are looking at Walter Duranty II, a guy who has risen high by sucking up to his powerful patrons and relentless self-promotion. His substack, Some News About Me, captures how shamelessly he flaunts his egotism. The fool is someone who thinks Nicholas Kristof is a serious person.

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Notes

[1] Shades of Bob Dylan, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”: “I’m going back to New York City. I do believe I’ve had enough.”

[2] “A former Times colleague said, ‘He’s super-earnest. He’s not fun.” Olivia Nuzzi, “Nicholas Kristof’s Botched Rescue Mission,” New York magazine, April 12, 2022.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Rachel Monahan, “Former Candidate for Governor Nick Kristof Will Return to His New York Times Column,” Willamette Week, August 1, 2022.

[8] Olivia Nuzzi, “Nicholas Kristof’s Botched Rescue Mission.”