My Former Boss Is Going Viral For A Bad Tweet. Is This A Blessing?

It's certainly funny.

One day, after working at Mother Jones for five years, my DM’d me.

"Have you been telling people I'm Amish?"

"Yes. I tell everyone. It's one of my favorite weird facts about you."

"I am not Amish."

"What?"

"I am not Amish."

"Well, I know you're not practicing. You're one of the Amish who broke bad or whatever. But I just tell everyone you were raised Amish."

"I WAS NOT RAISED AMISH."

"Didn't you tell me you were raised by the old-timey agrarian Christian group in Pennsylvania that makes oats and doesn't have rock music?"

"Quaker! Quakers make the oats! We have rock music. The Amish don't have rock music."

To a secular Jew from the Western United States, if you're a Quaker or an Amish, you might as well be Assyrian. We don't have those in the West.

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I tell this anecdote once in a while because it's a funny, self-deprecating story about how I'm a moron. I told it, coincidentally, last week on Twitter.

Why is it a coincidence? That boss was Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery, who is the main character of Twitter this weekend for a tweet about Christianity!

If you didn't find it funny before, try imagining it happened to the author of that tweet!

My first thought when I saw Clara's bad tweet was that it was almost quaint. It reminded me of the low-stakes, absurd, toxically unpopular culture war bullshit of a simpler time. The natural state—disrupted by the Trump years—of Bay Area liberals is to whine about plastic straws, how Hollywood makes action films that make guns look cool, and that someone somewhere was too openly religious. But Clara's tweet is slightly more interesting than that, so we will discuss it.

DISCLAIMER: Clara and I were once very close. I knew her before I worked at Mother Jones. She hired me. I reported directly to her for most of my time there. We were friends outside of work. She stood by and defended me during a million controversies, then—to my great shock and extraordinary hurt—she fired me amidst a newsroom moral panic in 2021. We are no longer friends, lol. We haven't spoken directly since that Zoom call where I was let go. We probably never will again.

But we were friends for a long time, and I know she has many great qualities. My anger at her for my dismissal has long since cooled into contempt. Having said that, this isn't a tattle-tale post. If I ever write that post, I will do it with more forethought. This is just a disclaimer so we all understand I am not claiming to be objective (though I am trying to be).

Ben's Good Thoughts About Clara's Bad Tweet