The New York Times is having an identity crisis. Is it a newspaper and the paper of record still, which has its own point of view but prints both some hard news and some other opinions? Or is it an “opinion journal,” a magazine like National Review or the Nation, which has one view and sticks with it while patrolling all parts of its turf?
The indications suggest it’s becoming the latter. The 1619 Project is Exhibit A. This project suggested the defining moment of the new country was not its Declaration of Independence in 1776 but the arrival on these shores of the first slave ships nearly 160 years earlier. In short, racism and the enslavement of black people formed the entire basis for the founding of this nation before the colonies even had names.
Exhibit B is the resignation of opinion page editor Bari Weiss. Weiss realized the gig was up when another editor was fired for running an opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who urged the use of federal troops to suppress riots in several cities. Rage against statues started with statues erected to Confederate leaders and proceeded from there to founders who owned slaves and went on from there to founders and others who didn’t and who, in fact, wanted slavery gone. It was Cotton’s protests against this kind of destruction that aroused the rage of the paper’s woke minions. Does the New York Times have a problem with Presidents Ulysses S. Grant or Abraham Lincoln? With law and order itself? Or Is there something we’re not getting here?
In the statue debate, there are three kinds of people: those who owned slaves and attempted to break up the Union, those who owned slaves and supported the Union, and people who formed or supported the Union and never owned slaves. If the third group is “clean” and the first group is “dirty,” then the second is both large and problematic but should mainly be given a pass. George Washington, who, during the Revolutionary War, came to loathe slavery, expressed his distaste in the 1780s, hoped for a gradual and phased-in liberation, and freed those he owned in his will.
Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson owned slaves and made no moves to free them, but the work they put in in building the Union and/or propping it up in its moment of peril (the nullification crisis of 1832 with John C. Calhoun and South Carolina) helped it survive until 1860. Add in the Declaration of Independence and (in Jackson’s case) the extending of political and economic power to lower-, middle-, and working-class people, and they more than secure their place in the pantheon, despite their sins and the wokened twits at the New York Times.
And as for the New York Times, it should absorb the old law of nature that the more rote your response is to any kind of a question, the less power it wields in the world. In 1964, when many press outlets were owned by Republicans, it was an earthquake of sorts when most of the press deserted GOP nominee Barry Goldwater for voting (for small government reasons) against the Civil Rights Act and going too far to the right.
In 2016, the press went almost 100% against Donald Trump, and that caused barely a ripple. What changed? In 1964, the press went AGAINST its past form, which made people think this was really important. In 2016, it was more of the same, of calling Republicans racists and crazy. But if everyone’s racist, then nobody’s racist. And no one is crazy, either, except for you.
