Another Someone Who Came from Nowhere

In which I explore where Abigail Shrier has been before I get around to what she's doing.

I first noticed Abigail Shrier when she made the podcast rounds to discuss her first book. I didn’t like her style, but didn’t think much of it. Then she wrote a series of blog posts that claimed to show how “activist teachers recruit kids” into….being transgender, I guess. I wrote about her articles and their shocking ignorance on basic school policy, because it was clear the teachers were lying.¹

She ventured again into school issues with the Free Press article Kindergarten Intifada, once again using shoddy reporting with little understanding of education and, as I was preparing to write about her again, it occurred to me to wonder: Abigail Shrier describes herself as a journalist. She’s published two books to much attention: the first on the danger of transgender treatment, the second on the damage of teen therapy. She recently wrote about teacher unions conspiring to convert students to anti-Israel beliefs for the Free Press.

But how did she become a journalist? What was her history?

I began with her Wikipedia bio, which describes her as an “opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal.” Two paragraphs further down the description changes to “wrote opinion columns for the Wall Street Journal” and those are not the same thing.

The next sequence of events is why I don’t write much.²

Wikipedia first describes Shrier as an “opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal” but then two paragraphs further down changes the description to “wrote opinion columns for the Wall Street Journal” and those are not the same thing. Besides, the WSJ gig was from 2018 to 2020 and Wikipedia lists nothing else.

Wait, what? She’s in her 40s. What did she do before the WSJ?

I checked a long list of Wikipedia references. One is Dan Markel’s pleased announcement of her 2007 wedding, which confirmed my assumptions about her age; the other a 2107 op-ed piece she wrote about her conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Every other piece in the long list is from 2018 or later.

Her education is a whole Wikipedia paragraph with nary a date. I googled interviews with her figuring that at least one of them would include her providing a brief overview of her professional history. But none of the references included such information.

Looking for any other data, I found that her Twitter account opened in 2011 but wow, she wasn’t commenting about anything back then except books and momming. Putting this together along with the education history and wedding announcement, I learned she is the daughter of two judges, went to law school, married a rich guy and quit work to have kids.

And honestly, that’s kind of it for the first decade of the century.

Starting around 2014 or so, she started writing for the Jewish Journal, a publication that she wrote for far more than for the Wall Street Journal. If the bylines are any indication³, she just wrote random one-offs for each publication, and didn’t write very much. Overwhelmingly, her articles centered on Jewish issues of one sort or another.

So until she came out with her first book, Abigail Shrier’s footprint was “Jewish mom who once was a lawyer, dilettante writer”. It’s hard to find her work.

So she wrote very little, then suddenly she’s an author being described as a journalist. She started with the transgender issue, segued into the child depression moral hazard business, and is dabbling now in the schools are biased against Israel brouhaha. Both her books were put out by conservative publishers (Regnery and Sentinel) but she’s not treated in the media like a conservative, you know?

So if you thought Abigail Shrier was a hardworking reporter who had finally put in enough time to get a book published, update your priors. Shrier is one of those people who just popped up from nowhere, from nobody to journalist and intellectual in two easy steps.

Is she a journalist? Maybe if you define the term reeeeeeaaaallly broadly. Not that mainstream journalism has an accuracy and objectivity that’s anything to brag about, but many of her stories involve education and her ignorance is incredibly obvious, untroubled with basic facts that would have been caught by a mainstream publication. She’s not dishonest, I don’t think—just ignorant.

There was a time, long ago, when I naively believed that people coming into public acclaim or recognition did so via some kind of filtering process. If a new author hit it big, it was because some publisher was fishing through a slush pile and found gold, or an agent was wowed by the draft and pitched it hard to publishers. Resumes and research was doublechecked. A book about a topic was written by a person with some knowledge of the topic. People who were in the news as journalists and experts were actually journalists and experts.

And that just ain’t so. JD Vance probably got his book published because he knew Peter Thiel. Emily Hanford has been switching through causes for a decade or so, trying to find advocacy that other groups will shill. In the smaller education world, Doug Lemov massaged his bio into a creation myth that gave him a lot more teaching experience than he actually had and credit for founding a school that he didn’t. I don’t know how Abigail Shrier got her book deal first book deal with Regnery, but it wasn’t her vast experience with transgender, her sterling research, or her superlative written expression.

I’m reminded of the Abe Mikva’s attempt to work in Chicago politics:

When I first came to Chicago, Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas were running for governor and senator,” he said. “I had heard about the closed Party, closed machine, but they sounded like such great candidates, so I stopped in to volunteer in the Eighth Ward Regular Democratic headquarters. I said, ‘I’m here for Douglas and Stevenson.’ The ward boss came in and pulled the cigar out of his mouth and said, ‘Who sent you?’ And I said, ‘Nobody sent me.’ He put the cigar back in his mouth and said, ‘We don’t want nobody nobody sent.’ ”

Maybe nobody nobody sent gets hired, or called, or published.

Eh, it can’t be that bad. Olivia Nuzzi’s a loathsome scumbag but she did actually get noticed as a high school junior by local news editors who spotted her talent. I do believe, really, that genuine talent coupled with drive and reasonable ambition gets people where they want to go. But while genuine talent and intellect is sufficient, it’s not necessary.

What bothers me is reflected in a conversation I had with a very well-known education writer years back, while I was researching the Doug Lemov story. I mentioned my research showed that he hadn’t been a teacher for any period of time, hadn’t founded the school he’d been credited with, and almost certainly wasn’t writing his procedural teaching Bible out of his deep pedagogical knowledge.

And the education writer said something to the effect of “what does this matter? Do you think his work has value? then who cares if he’s misrepresenting his resume or making up his experience? If people believe his work and become better teachers, isn’t that the point?”

I’m not often silenced by astonishment.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Important people think Shrier’s work has value because they can promote her work as support for their own opinions, thus reinforcing the causes they advocate for. She got sent by the right somebody. What does it matter that her past is a blank page, if her work allows others to shill for a good cause?

Fine. But she shouldn’t call herself a journalist, and she shouldn’t allow herself to be described as an opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal if she just wrote opinion pieces for them. She’s a polemicist and a lot of her work is uneducated credulous bullshit, even if it is in support of impeccable causes.

1. And indeed they were, but Shrier never updated her story to mention that.

2. Realize I was checking for some brief stuff to write for an intro to get into my article on kindergarten intifada, and ended up on an hours long delve trying to trace her work history. I need to NOT DO THAT. This is the sort of sinkhole that stops me writing.

3. “Abigail Shrier is a writer and graduate of Yale Law School living in Los Angeles” or “Ms. Shrier is a writer living in Los Angeles.”