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.)