Fun with Drew Magary

My former blogging mate took every step to prevent himself from being cancelled for his old scumbag behavior. Once safe, he kept his place by throwing everybody else under the bus, including me.

In late October 2017, weeks into the explosion of MeToo, when a grassroots social movement was appropriated by powerful cultural institutions in a top-down effort to absolve themselves of widespread problems with sexual misconduct, my former colleague Drew Magary wrote a piece for Deadspin titled “The Reckoning Always Comes.”

At the time, a handful of women in media diagnosed his supposed mea culpa for what it was: self-serving, disingenuous horseshit - an obvious attempt to get out in front of his unseemly past and control the narrative. However, his friends and associates publicly praised Magary for showing what they said was maturity and bravery.

I thought about that piece quite a bit this past summer when similar things happened during the racial reckoning that played out in privileged circles - parallel to the protests in the streets - following the killing of George Floyd. For example, Tina Fey’s coming forward to apologize and call for the removal of blackface episodes of “30 Rock” from streaming services, despite no one having complained about them. A blatant attempt to avoid bad press by “owning” her ironic racist creative choices, always better than being called out and dragged by someone else for it. What stopped her from “owning” that decision for years until it became a trendy thing to destroy careers over? Nothing, just as Magary had no reason to remain silent about his missteps until his hand was forced. Transparent self-preservation and marketing, both for Fey and for Hulu, and it’s no coincidence that Magary worked for years in marketing before he made the plunge into life as a writer and online brand.

In “The Reckoning Always Comes,” Magary admitted to targeted harassment of a woman who gave his first book a bad review. He declined to mention whether he ever tried to apologize to her. His displays of remorse are only for you, dear reader. He also copped to general piggish behavior: writing a blog post in defense of crudely objectifying women, threatening a prominent writer by suggesting he would post photos of their daughter, using offensive language that drew a complaint from a LGBTQ+ rights group, among other examples in the early years of his writing career.

Magary’s rhetorical trick was admitting all this while pitting himself against the likes of Clay Travis and David Portnoy, whom he described as “deeply shitty men who crave attention any way they can get it.” More important than that, however, is that Travis, founder of OutKick, and Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports, are the ideological enemies of his peers, the in-crowd of largely NYC-based online liberal media. By trashing the reactionary-and-proud-of-it Portnoy and Travis while depicting himself as uniquely capable of growth and redemption, Magary was able to get away with building his career doing many of the same things as “shitty men,” suffer no consequences aside from having to pen one groveling personal essay, and be seen as a good guy. Neat trick, huh?

To his credit, I suppose, it worked. Magary’s writing career is going well, he remains a privileged media liberal in good standing; he even published another book this year. Two years ago, when Barstool dug up a few rape jokes that Magary’s Deadspin/Defector colleague Barry Petchesky made on the site in 2006, a similar thing happened: Petchesky wrote one groveling blog post (albeit one in which he cynically used politically loaded language to describe himself as being “Gamergated” by Barstool writers, others might have said “exposed”) then he was fine. No harm done. When you’re part of the protected in-group, you get the chance to grow and evolve, to be forgiven. At least you get to be forgiven when the other side is coming for you. After all, nobody wants to give their enemies a scalp.

Magary turned into such a cheerleader for the cultural orthodoxy of his rarefied media circle that this past summer, while liberals and conservatives debated the idea of “cancel culture” to the point of incoherence, he weighed in with a standard sanctimonious rich liberal take: that cancelling people - rendering them unemployable social outcasts - is in fact always righteous and good and every single one of the cancelled folks had it coming. That’s a shockingly conservative argument from a side that typically presses for rehabilitation for those who are punished by conventional process of law. When it comes to the targets of social justice cops, brutality is recommended in every case.

Of course, were Magary less professionally connected or had that woman he harassed decided to take him down at the right time, he would be among the cancelled. Only by mere circumstance and cynical maneuvering did he avoid it. To maintain his place and reputation, he has to enthusiastically get behind the sloppy and punitive moral crusades of his peers, lest they eventually turn on him too.

Faced with the possibility that powerless individuals might be punished excessively or wrongly by online mobs, abetted by media members monetizing collective rage and twisting it for their own purposes, Magary suggested such a thing would only just begin to make up for countless atrocities carried out against marginalized identities over the course of centuries. Interesting that others are forced to absorb the burden of historical injustice while rich boy Magary (shout-out Phillips Exeter Academy class of ’94) skates scot-free. Who got to make that decision? Seems like he did.

One journalist outside his crew showed some critical thinking skills after reading the piece. Drew did not respond to him.

Magary now speaks mockingly of the cancelled - they’re dipshits! Stupid people who should have known like him to insulate themselves from the consequences of their behavior! People smeared by media insiders who abandoned long-held professional standards to exercise grudges, destroy rivals, and provide PR cover for their industry - wow what a bunch of idiots! Not like the smarty smart members of the digital journo in-crowd. Midwit centrists love to lionize these types, yet the public is beginning to realize that if throwing you, random citizen, under the bus is necessary to protect their interests they will do so in a nanosecond.

Here’s a fun little secret: Drew and I both know a guy still working in media who did something for which he would easily be cancelled. If “cancel culture” is getting all the right people, as Magary claims, why did that man never get called out? I would love for Drew to defend what he did. His offense, while not violent and well in the past, would undoubtedly bother everybody in today’s climate. When asked about it at the time, the man in question showed no remorse and hasn’t publicly acknowledged it since.

I’m certain this man would not do what he did again, so I have no intention of ripping apart his life. I’m sure some would frame it as sour grapes if I did, and they wouldn’t be wrong. When I hear smug liberals laud brutal and disorganized public shaming campaigns as “accountability culture,” I can’t help but think of him and be furious. Without question, there are many men like the mutual associate Drew and I have - ones who acted terribly yet got away with it. One common complaint about The Shitty Media Men List from women was that because it was active for fewer than 24 hours and available only to a very privileged NYC-centric corner of the industry, it didn’t catch a lot of the guys it could have. How long would that list have been were it allowed to stand? Would only about 10 percent of the list have been investigated then?

I’m guilty of much of the same piggish behavior that Magary, Petchesky, and tons of other men openly engaged in during the 2000s and early 2010s, when that type of transgression was an accepted part of mainstream culture. The difference is I received devastating, seemingly never-ending punishment, and no one can tell me exactly what I did, or who dropped the ax on me. Despite wielding no power myself, I was one of the scapegoats for a powerful industry, one that did an about-face as soon as Joe Biden faced disqualifying allegations. I suffered the consequences so two-faced, bloodthirsty careerists like Drew Magary could pile dirt on me to keep the mob off their tail.