You wanna know how stupid I am? Here we go…
Autism Family
After Bari Weiss left the New York Times, I started following her work. I liked what she was doing enough that I became one of the early Founding Members of Common Sense, the publication that eventually became The Free Press.
Mike to Mike: “You are so smart. You really know how to find the Patriots!”
Then autism entered the picture.
The Free Press gave
@JillEscher a platform to present the familiar argument from an autism parent who believes vaccines were not responsible for her children’s autism.
Fine. She is entitled to that view.
But there are autism parents with very different experiences and very different questions — particularly around vaccines, immune dysfunction, environmental exposures, and the direction of autism research.
And right now,
@FogelSylvia and others at HHS/IACC are trying to widen that conversation:
x.com/FogelSylvia/status/209…
So when Bari and
@TheFP hosted Jill, I politely asked:
“Why not have a discussion between autism parents with different views?”
Not a shouting match.
Not censorship.
A discussion.
Crickets.
Eventually, I dropped my Founding Member status at The Free Press. Lesson learned?
I thought “independent journalism” meant being willing to question every institution and every orthodoxy — including the ones your own audience may be comfortable with.
Apparently, independence can have boundaries too.
Military Family
Oh yeah - we’re also a military family.
So now I’m watching Bari Weiss at CBS News and wondering whether this new era of “independent thinking” will include a serious examination of America’s record of Middle East regime-change wars - their stated goals, their human cost, their unintended consequences, and whether the establishment press adequately challenged them at the time. Don't get me started on The Pentagon...
The New York Times is now covering Bari’s arrival at CBS:
nytimes.com/2026/05/28/busin…
Funny how the circles keep closing.
I started this journey thinking I had discovered the people willing to challenge the system.
Now I have a simpler test:
Will you challenge the system when the subject is uncomfortable for your own side?
Because eventually—
“There’s a man goin’ ’round takin’ names.”
And I’ve been keeping notes.
Independent journalism isn’t about questioning their orthodoxy. It’s about being willing to question your own.
“And the fastest way to do that now - after months of concerted effort to persuade the wary and reach the disenfranchised - is with vaccine mandates.”
Arthur Gregg Sulzberger is publisher of The New York Times and chairman of The New York Times Company. He holds a B.A. in political science from Brown University and built a career as a reporter and family-dynasty executive. He has no medical, scientific, epidemiological, or public health qualifications of any kind.
As publisher during 2021–2022, Sulzberger presided over the paper that became the prestige amplifier of vaccine coercion. Times editorials and news framing treated mandates as both scientifically settled and morally obligatory: require shots for indoor dining, gyms, theaters, public employees, teachers, and health-care workers.
Coverage relentlessly labeled resistance a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” while the institution itself operated as a high-status New York workplace that expected compliance. The paper’s reach turned elite opinion into national pressure.
The fourth-generation owner of “all the news that’s fit to print” used the most powerful newsroom in America to insist that bodily autonomy ended where his journalists’ sense of safety began - then watched from the publisher’s office while nurses, cops, and teachers were fired.
A political-science major with a last name decided whose livelihood was expendable. The paper that lectures the country on democracy never applied the same scrutiny to the human cost of the policies it championed.
Ink-stained coercion: the Sulzberger who inherited the printing press never had to inherit the consequences.