If you work at the New York Times, you’re not allowed to like Chick-fil-A.
A screenshot of an article is going viral on Twitter talking about an employee’s first day at The New York Times. When HR asked him what his favorite type of sandwich was and he responded with the popular chain's Spicy Chicken Sandwich, he was roasted for liking a sandwich from somewhere that supposedly didn’t support gay people.
Yes, that’s actually what happened.
Adam Rubenstein, who was hired by the Times in 2019 for their Opinion section, wrote about how he was considered a “heretic” at The New York Times in a piece for The Atlantic published early Monday morning.
Related: SHOCKER: New York Times Highlights Detransitioner Stories
The employee discussed his experience at orientation his first day where he, along with other new hires, did an icebreaker. The question he was given asked about his favorite sandwich. Being that it was his first day and he didn’t want to come across as presumptuous and snobby with his actual favorite (the Super Heebster from Russ & Daughters’), he said instead, “the Spicy Chicken Sandwich from Chick-fil-a.”
Immediately, he says, the HR representative in the room shut him down and said, “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.”
Are. You. Kidding. Me?
He adds the other new hires immediately began snapping their fingers in agreement.
“I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage,” the man admitted before noting that he “sat down, ashamed.”
The screenshot of the story was posted Monday morning and already has almost 700,000 views and thousands of reactions.
"What's your favorite sandwich?"
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) February 26, 2024
“The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A.”
"Wrong!" pic.twitter.com/4A72FSL11N
“And they say Republicans are a cult,” one user replied on X. “Any ideology or political movement that says you can't like a certain sandwich is one to steer clear of,” wrote another, while The Post Millennials Senior Editor Andy Ngô commented, “What a sick culture in that news room.”
Unfortunately for Rubenstein, his discomfort while working for the Times' didn’t stop there. Coming from outlets that were not outwardly or obviously on one side of the political isle or another, he often found that his questions were “unwelcome.”
He reflected on his experience surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop story that an MRC poll shows may have cost Joe Biden his presidency had it been reported responsibly.
“Many of my colleagues were clearly worried that lending credence to the laptop story could hurt the electoral prospects of Joe Biden and the Democrats. But starting from a place of party politics and assessing how a particular story could affect an election isn’t journalism,” he wrote.
Rubenstein also once contributed to a story surrounding the Black Lives Matter riots after George Floyd died, saying that lies, misinformation and rumors took over throughout the outlet. Rubenstein said coworkers insisted he was some sort of "fascist," eventually causing him to leave the paper, as “It had been made clear to me, in a variety of ways, that I had no future there.”
Rubenstein had to learn the hard way something that only a few of us seem to really understand: the media is overtly biased, and places like The New York Times will only stand up for leftwing ideas and people who support them.
If the Times or any other outlet aims to cover America as it is and not simply how they want it to be, they should recruit more editors and reporters with conservative backgrounds, and then support them in their work. They should hire journalists, not activists. And they should remember that heterodoxy isn’t heresy.
And as an aside, liking the taste of a sandwich doesn’t mean you’re homophobic. It just means you like the chicken sandwich.
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Since when is having more words to explain your views a bad thing? pic.twitter.com/yIbdSVhOSi
— MRCTV (@mrctv) February 23, 2024
