1 year ago
To understand the motivation of Aaron Sibarium, Yalie, Gen Z reporter and conservative media darling, it’s instructive to travel back in time to last December, and do a little eavesdropping.
Right outside D.C., in a small studio apartment tucked inside an urban-suburban complex in Arlington, Virginia, Sibarium chats it up with libertarian writer Richard Hanania in a video call for a podcast exploring “the right-wing echo chamber.” In other contexts, on other podcasts (like his own), you can find Sibarium leaning into his more conservative opinions, but this is not one of these moments. He’s here to punch right.
“Everyone on the right wants to write essays and have their grand theories about political economy and the American Right taken very seriously from the time they’re young,” he says, “and the problem is that A) when you’re 22, you don’t really know anything and B) there’s a surplus of that writing already.”
What he values, he says, is something different from the conservative hot take-machine: real investigations, seeking out scoops, digging for data. As he sees it, he’s providing a rare service, occupying a narrow journalistic niche: old-school, shoe-leather reporting from a conservative point of view.
“It’s rare to see someone who will cover something like, say, race-based treatment of Covid drugs … who also is like not a crank and has an IQ above 120,” Sibarium says, cracking half a smile.
This quip is effectively Sibarium’s Statement of Purpose. In the 2½ years since he became a reporter, he’s snared some major scoops: There was his piece exploring how states, advised by the FDA to do so, used racial preferences in rationing scarce Covid-19 drugs, giving preference to young people of color over older white people. (Some of the states stopped the practice soon after he reported on them.) He broke a story that exposed the Columbia Law School’s plans to require video statements from applicants, presumably to evade the Supreme Court decision banning the consideration of race in admissions. (Columbia abandoned that plan, insisting it was a mistake, when Sibarium asked them about it.) And he uncovered Yale administrators’ bullying of a non-Black student who called his apartment a “trap house” in a party invitation, a scandal that brought personnel changes to the school.
Sibarium, a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon, is 27, diminutive, nasally and “formerly autistic.” (More on that later.) He’s become a force on the right who’s drawn praise from conservatives as far apart as Tucker Carlson and David French, who called Sibarium “a rising star reporter.” Sibarium doesn’t see his project as wholly new, as there has been conservative reporting for decades, but he’s trying to do something a little different.
“What maybe is new-ish about my personal project,” Sibarium says, is that he is trying “to report on the culture war in a way that is fairly aggressive and combative.”
As Americans’ trust in media has cratered, driven almost entirely by independents and Republicans, Sibarium has hunkered down, abstained from flirtations with fascism and racism (in imagery, group chats or pseudonymous op-eds) and done what some people have long been begging conservatives to do more of: pure reporting, digging up and revealing new information. Sibarium has done that, quietly, without sting operations — and without the millions of eyeballs turned on pundits like Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino and Carlson.
When I meet Sibarium afterward to talk to him about his life and career, he isn’t as blunt about the state of the right’s journalism, but he isn’t satisfied either. He talks at length about the “talent problem” within conservative journalism, after his qualification that conservatives do more good journalism work than liberals let on, but still less than he’d like.
This talent problem is widely acknowledged: His boss, Free Beacon editor-in-chief Eliana Johnson says, “Talent acquisition and talent retention is the most daunting challenge I think for any journalistic organization on the right.” (Johnson is a former POLITICO reporter.)
Why? When it comes to conservative media’s “talent problem,” Sibarium says it’s “partly education polarization, resulting in there just being fewer overall smart conservatives.” (Research backs up his assertion that liberals are, on average, more intelligent and more educated.) To Sibarium, who graduated from Yale in 2018, it’s obvious there are fewer “smart” conservatives than liberals — just look at how few conservatives attend elite colleges: “It does not seem plausible that the reason liberals are so overrepresented at elite schools … is entirely due to liberal bias.” After all, he says, it is conservatives who insist disparities do not imply discrimination.
Another reason for the dearth of rigorous conservative investigative reporting, according to Sibarium, is that the so-called smart conservatives don’t go into journalism. The Supreme Court is not short on smart conservative judges or smart conservative clerks. The Federalist Society is not short on members. There are enough savvy conservatives to staff Republican congressional offices. As Johnson tells me, conservatives are just “not attracted to journalism. ... They’re going to law school, they’re going to med school, they’re going into finance.”
Journalism also pays poorly compared with other jobs that require the same education and skills, and a young, smart, hardworking conservative has the same options that young liberals do for financial success: consulting, finance, medicine, tech and law.
“The competition isn’t between, ‘Well, do I want to work for this major daily regional newspaper or do I want to work for this conservative magazine?’ It’s, ‘Do I want to work at BlackRock or do I want to work at this conservative magazine?’ And that’s hard competition.” That’s according to Ryan Wolfe, who is director of the Center for Excellence in Journalism at The Fund for American Studies, where he oversees the most prestigious prize for early career conservative journalists, a $35,000 grant known as the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship.
Beyond the money, there’s also prestige. Journalists at explicitly conservative outlets get little of the prestige that mainstream journalists get that compensate for their low salaries — and conservative eyes and ears are mostly focused on TV and radio anyway. Then there’s the fact that conservative reporters are the aberration in a movement led by a man who calls the press “the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”
But for Sibarium, the fact that very few others are doing it is precisely the reason he wanted to.
“I feel like, look, if there’s only 10 or 20 people in the country who are willing to do this and good enough to do this,” he says, “I should do it.”
This opportunity to do work that few others are doing, coupled with a contrarian impulse and a “visceral” opposition to wokeness, is what led Sibarium to a career in conservative journalism.
Even though he’s not much of a conservative himself.
Sibarium is a “liberal but,” in the words of fellow conservative journalist Charles Fain Lehman (as in “I’m a liberal, but … ”). He’s “reluctantly pro-choice,” somehow “not dogmatically opposed to affirmative action,” an unmarried, secular Jew who lives in a dense metro area with proximity to fast casual, who voted for Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden — a kind of rogue liberal who ended up in the trenches of conservative journalism after being disturbed by what he viewed as woke excess on and off campus.
He was raised on the outskirts of D.C., in ritzy Chevy Chase, Md., by his mother, a homemaker who once worked as a psychiatric nurse for patients of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and a father who is an antitrust lawyer. The house Sibarium grew up in was left-leaning, pro-choice, loyally Democratic and pro-gay marriage before it was popular.
When he was 4, Sibarium was diagnosed with autism. As he wrote in a column for the Yale Daily News, “I flapped my hands, compulsively and uncontrollably, until I was almost 6 years old. I barely spoke until I was 3. I had no true friends until I was 7.” His parents, he says, “hired a coterie of experts to improve my speech, motor and social skills and eventually enrolled me in a school for students with special needs.” By age 7, “a team of child psychologists” told his parents he no longer fit the criteria of autism, and by age 9, he was “pronounced autism-free.”
Today, though, he says some of those traits persist, particularly a “kind of mild disagreeableness and willingness to just argue about stuff and not really care that much what others think.” He also has no trouble turning a single question into five or ten minutes of uninterrupted speech; he sometimes laughs for longer than seems appropriate; and he often closes his eyes for 5, or 10, or 15 seconds while talking in depth about things. He says he’s got a “lust for order,” although that cannot be observed in his apartment, which is crammed with old papers and open envelopes.
Before Sibarium left for college, his basic political opinions were that “political correctness goes too far and free speech is good, but [then-President Barack] Obama is right about pretty much everything.” Yale is where Sibarium developed his political views, which are, in a nutshell, anti-woke.
“I don’t think there was really ever one single radicalization moment, so to speak, for me. It was a series of incremental things,” he says. Some of the incremental things: the left-liberals in the Yale Political Union who wouldn’t watch Comedy Central’s Tosh.0 because its host made a rape joke, and the Yale Halloween Costume Scandal, where students protested an email sent by a lecturer saying students should figure out the merits of potentially culturally appropriative costumes without nudging by the administration. The latter event was especially annoying to Sibarium because, as editor of the opinion section of the Yale Daily News, he had to write the editorial board’s endorsement of the protesters.
Yale is also where Sibarium fell in love with philosophy, which in turn, nurtured his “visceral” opposition to wokeness. “I was the kid who really liked just taking nerdy analytic philosophy classes and debating crazy, esoteric, and at times perhaps even offensive thought experiments.” He says the culture of speech-stifling that took place and still takes place at Yale (and many other schools) made fun, clarifying and potentially morbid intellectual conversations (he brought up a thought experiment about whether to shoot a baby strapped to the front of a tank heading toward you) rarer and more fraught.
After leaving Yale and working at the now-defunct magazine The American Interest for two years, Sibarium landed at the Washington Free Beacon, an online publication that is explicitly conservative and dedicated to “combat journalism,” but which is somewhat grudgingly respected in liberal circles. Ben Smith, longtime media critic and current editor-in-chief of Semafor, wrote of the Free Beacon in 2019 that it was “alternately parodic and wire-service serious.” The description still rings true. You could read a story about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez misclassifying her fiance as a spouse on an official House Ethics Committee filing, possibly to exploit House ethics loopholes, and after you read that piece of reporting, you could read a story titled, “FACT CHECK: Is Tom Brady’s New Girlfriend Jewish?,” featuring four different pictures of the purported girlfriend in a swimsuit and the line, “Other than winning his eighth Super Bowl, dating a Zionist smokeshow would be the ultimate rebuke to the vegan shiksa who tried to ruin his life.” (Brady was raised Catholic.)
It wasn’t always clear to Sibarium, who interned at The Atlantic after high school, that he’d wind up at a place like the Free Beacon. When he heard they were looking for an associate editor (his original role), “I was like, ‘Alright, this is a little more right-wing, frankly, than I am.’” Ultimately, it was the reporting that brought him in: “I was looking at their stuff and was like, ‘it does have some of the conservative trolling, but it also does serious reporting and they’re not lying, they’re not printing falsehoods, they seem to be pretty responsible overall.’”
Within a few months, Johnson, the top editor, made him a reporter instead. For her, the point of the Free Beacon is to do reporting, where the right has lagged, rather than opinion, where the right has excelled. “I believe strongly that the right has always outperformed the left in the realm of opinion,” Johnson says, “so, Fox News crushes MSNBC and CNN and the ratings and in talk radio.” This opinion domination didn’t even help the right, she argues: “What did the right get for all of this success in opinion? Not that much. It’s new information that really moves the needle, not opinion, and the real service you can provide to the public is putting out new information.”
Sibarium seems to enjoy his life at the Free Beacon, poking mainstream, liberal-leaning institutions with small questions and getting big stories. And while he hasn’t ruled out becoming the star op-ed columnist every young conservative dreams about being (always Ross Douthat, sometimes Christopher Caldwell), he’s just fine for now being “a normal, nerdy kid” — the kind who thinks the upcoming Modern Warfare video game is going to be “freaking cool” and the kind who takes himself to pet stores to play with the birds because “the plumage is really beautiful.”
“Whenever I’m on a career advice panel for young conservatives, I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry,” Sibarium tweeted in July.
The tweet was viewed 5 million times. It went viral because it was worrying — why is this a necessary piece of advice? Why don’t young conservatives already know to steer clear of people who use the N-word, for example?
“Let me just say this, it is simply a sociological fact that many young right-wingers are in social proximity to very far-right edgy group chats,” Sibarium says, “that’s the water people swim in and you’re going to be exposed to this stuff, and so it’s important to be on guard from it.”
According to Sibarium, it’s obvious that racism is bad (“bad for your soul,”) and it is to most young conservatives too. They’re spouting racist claptrap precisely because it’s considered bad — it’s a form of rebellion against “woke moralizing.” (Hanania, the podcast host from earlier, got into hot water recently when it was discovered that in the past he wrote racist articles for white supremacist sites under a pen name — once outed, Hanania admitted “I Used to Suck”).
If you remember that being a young conservative is weird (young people are overwhelmingly liberal) and being an educated conservative is even weirder (educated people are overwhelmingly liberal), then the people who are young, educated conservatives are “really very weird,” as Democratic guru David Shor told Sam Adler-Bell for a widely read piece in The New Republic on young conservatives. Even more so if they come from an affluent, liberal family in a deep-blue area, like Sibarium from Maryland, or Lehman from Pittsburgh or Nate Hochman from Oregon, the DeSantis staffer fired for making promotional material for DeSantis with Nazi symbols.
As Lehmann told me, conservatives from high socioeconomic, liberal areas, “have a certain contrarian streak.” In May, in a column about conservative media’s “audience problem,” Douthat wrote, “the political right has become the natural home for outsider narratives of all kinds, from healthy forms of skepticism to deeper paranoias.” Sibarium agrees with this point. “I respect the contrarian impulse,” he says, “but I think that if your entire philosophy just becomes contrarianism, that’s stupid and bad and tends to lead to a lot of problems.”
While Sibarium hates wokeness, he doesn’t seem to believe its progenitors and professional pushers are evil; his grand theory of wokeness is a charitable one of “legibility” — that the Civil Rights Act and the fight against racism became wokeness through decades of trying to interpret laws and executive orders in ways that were comprehensible, measurable and enforceable.
Ultimately, Sibarium doesn’t hate conservatives, young or old, but he doesn’t think so highly of them either. His 80-minute podcast episode with Hanania mostly entails them making fun of the right and lamenting how unproductive and closed-minded it is. Sibarium says he wants primary voters to have less say in the nominating process and wishes for a technocratic “right-wing version of Elizabeth Warren.”
While it’s telling that the right wing’s most promising young reporter isn’t especially right wing, it doesn’t seem to matter to Sibarium. He wouldn’t want to work at a mainstream publication anyway because, as he told me, “I don’t want to have to watch what I say constantly or be constantly fighting with editors” about framing and style.
Regardless of his personal political ideology, says Johnson, Sibarium’s boss, “he’s a case study in the need for real conservative reportorial outlets.”
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