Rachel Cohen, a third-year finance associate at Skadden, Arps, &c &c “posted screenshots on LinkedIn of the resignation email she said she sent to her entire firm,” which included the following statement:
Paul Weiss’ decision to cave to the Trump administration on DEI, representation, and staffing has forced my hand. We do not have time. It is now or it is never, and if it is never, I will not continue to work here.
On Bsky, the prominent legal commentator Ken White (currently styling himself “Domestic Enemy Hat”) commented:
Our cultural default will be to sneer at Rachel Cohen, dismiss her as privileged, question her tone, scorn her ability to make a difference, conclude that by working at BigLaw she’s part of the problem. Among other things, that’s a self-indulgence you can’t afford during fascism.
THIS. For decades now, I’ve watched with growing dismay as more and more the left1 has fallen down the well of reactionary righteous moralism: every petty foible is inflated into the seed of some cosmic evil, every problematic association is treated as a terminal infection, every dubious word or deed is a stain that won’t wash out, everyone and everything is “complicit,” and every shred of skepticism is a revelation that someone “really” an unrepentant, unreconstructed revanchist orc bent on restoring an imaginary joyless, endless night. This obsessively tragic worldview is like the embrace of a drowning man. It’s played a pivotal role in the left’s political failures. And the worst part is that, even though this rubbish pervades so much thinking on then left, the only people who actually, genuinely, seriously believe it are the damaged bitter-ender nihilists who’d rather “burn it all down” than live with ambiguity or ambivalence. You think I’m exaggerating? The day before Rachel Cohen (whom none of us had ever heard of) published her letter, she would have been written off a priori as a privileged corporate robotic stooge and oppressor; the day after she published it she’s ‘speaking truth to power.’ That transformation is so sudden and total that it might as well be the Eucharist — except instead of consuming the body and blood of Christ, someone consumed, like, an article in Slate or an episode of Democracy Now.
And he’s right: we can’t afford this self-indulgence anymore.
EDIT: Here she is, talking about it on Tiktok.
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Yes, Peanut Gallery, I know no one gets to generalize about the left because we’re all unique. In fact, the contemporary left is the only ~group in all of world history that no one can generalize about because everything about is special. 🙄 ↩