I’m pleasantly surprised to see Jimmy Fallon in that group. I left him out of my earlier appeal because I’d assumed he would show up to request permission to rub Bannon’s gin blossom nose while giggling. I wasn’t aware of the following, so credit where credit is due.
Here’s a thought for Remnick: maybe find a way for the opportunity to interview Bannon in a more traditional setting not to present itself. The NYT wishes they could go back and do that after their interview of the “Nazi Next Door” ran.
Also, the following from Remnick’s statement is BS:
The main argument for not engaging someone like Bannon is that we are giving him a platform and that he will use it, unfiltered, to propel further the “ideas” of white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, and illiberalism. But to interview Bannon is not to endorse him.
That’s not the main argument. The main argument is that The New Yorker (and The Economist - Next!) was lending the credibility of its platform to someone reviled for the thoroughly discredited ideas he propounds (and paying him for the favour).
Remnick goes on, disingenuously:
Which is why Dick Cavett, in his time, chose to interview Lester Maddox and George Wallace.
In Cavett’s time (early 1970s), Maddox’s and Wallace’s openly racist views as elected officials were, shamefully, still mainstream ones in entire states in the American south.
Or it’s why Oriana Fallaci, in “Interview with History,” a series of question-and-answer meetings with Henry Kissinger and Ayatollah Khomeini and others, contributed something to our understanding of those figures.
Khomeini was not an American elected official and Kissinger, though he wasn’t an elected official, was still an appointee who wielded unusually enormous influence on Nixon at the time of the original interview (the book Remnick mentions was a collection published years later). Also, to be frank, Remnick is nowhere near the vicious interviewer Fallaci was (and wouldn’t be close to it in front of a live audience with a paid guest).
