The New York Times Has Declared War on America; Let’s Return the Favor
by Alexander Zubatov
President’s Trump oft-repeated statement that the “media is the enemy of the people” has been deliberately misinterpreted by the media establishment as a suggestion that Trump is against the free press as such or that the media is inherently evil. In fact, it is no more and no less than a statement that the current media, the entrenched media establishment, is doing harm to our nation. With every day that passes, that media establishment seems more and more determined to prove Trump right. And The New York Times, intent on proving that it is indeed a leader in the industry, is hellbent on blazing the trail.
Let me do a quick recap of the relevant chronology to catch up anyone who’s been napping the past few weeks: after being pounced on by the left-wing mob for publishing a cover story with what was (and what, in the past, would have been) a seemingly uncontroversial straight news headline in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting accurately reporting what President Trump said (“Trump Urges Unity Against Racism”), The New York Times, in an outrageous and unprecedented move, capitulated to the pressure and published a second late-morning edition with the offending headline replaced with an opinion headline criticizing Trump for what he didn’t say (“Assailing Hate But Not Guns”). In the wake of this incident and the widespread criticism that followed, instead of learning the lesson that it cannot bow to the mob at the cost of besmirching what remains of its once-vaunted reputation, The New York Times dug itself in deeper. In leaked comments from a staff retreat, the paper’s top editor Dean Baquet, the man largely responsible for overseeing the Times’ shameful descent into anti-Trump hysteria, had this to say in explaining the paper’s missteps:
Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.
The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, “Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.” And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?
I think that we’ve got to change. I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks? How do we cover the world’s reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump? How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.
Lest you were reading quickly, I’d ask you to just pause for a moment to consider the sheer insanity of what this pompous clown that has the temerity to still consider himself a journalist said here: after admitting that the past two years of news coverage has been a failed attempt to foist a certain story on the American people, the editor of this “news”paper is purporting to lay out a vision of what the news should look like over the course of the next two years. Now, if you know what the news is going to look like over the course of the next two years, you’re either a prophet or else you’re a pathetic and shameless propagandist. Take your pick.
And after proclaiming that the next two years at The New York Times will consist of a relentless attempt to paint Trump as a racist and to engage in non-stop race talk even more than this race-baiting publication already does, the Times wasted no time getting right down to it. The Sunday magazine was devoted to the beginning of a special “1619 Project,” an effort to re-frame the entirety of American history as being founded not with the Declaration of Independence of 1776 or the Constitution of 1787, but rather, with the arrival of the first slave ship on these shores in 1619. The not-so-subtle message is the tired old myopic distortion straight out of any and every single long-winded, repetitive, sententious Ta-Nehisi Coates rant: America was founded on slavery.
Needless to say, this is opinion rather than history. And it’s a dumb, uninformed and hateful opinion at that. Slavery was, of course, a widespread and common practice throughout the world at the time, Africans themselves participated in it as much as anyone, and as for America’s founding, no one can say that the nation’s founding documents and Founding Fathers uniformly, or even generally, embraced slavery without painting with a brush so broad that it can produce nothing but a canvas full of childish smears. If you’re interested in a digestible jaunt through some of the real details, they are here.
The upshot is this: in order to further their stated goal of convincing us that President Trump is some sort of racist or white supremacist, The New York Times’ master propagandists know they must first lay the groundwork by radicalizing and racializing us so thoroughly that our perceptions of what constitutes racism get absolutely unmoored from reality and shift dramatically leftward. To do this, The New York Times’ editors also know that they cannot dwell on the present, when the main forms of explicit and institutional racism are directed against white Americans, taking the form of an epidemic of spiteful anti-white rants (including, of course, by the likes of The New York Times itself), incoherent rages about white supremacy, white privilege, white fragility and whiteness and legalized discrimination in the form of affirmative action policies and diversity quotas at universities, corporations and other institutions, even as the actual empirical evidence shows that such over-hyped indicators of continued anti-black bias as cops disproportionately killing unarmed blacks and mass incarceration of blacks for minor drug offenses are more media-and-academia manufactured myths.
To avoid these realities, The New York Times will have to take us back in time, back to slavery, back to Jim Crow, back to lynchings and the heyday of the KKK, back to a time when American society actually held black people back through real discrimination rather than through the devastating toll wreaked by the Great Society’s welfare state that rewarded single motherhood, broke up the black family and sent black Americans hurling in large numbers into a vicious cycle of poverty, crime, drugs and the rest of the ghetto’s pathologies. The New York Times will have to convince us to see the present as nothing but a continuation of our racist past. It will need to have us seeing phantom relics of slavery all around and invisible white hoods on every white head. And it will have to get us to think of Trump as the would-be Grand Wizard of this conjured-up magic show.
Make no mistake: The New York Times is not doing this because these people care deeply about our welfare. They are doing it because, like any good corporation, they know which side their bread is buttered on. Race sells. Racism, a form of outrage clickbait, inflames passions and drives clicks and subscriptions. And, like the many corporations that do not give a damn about the effects on the rest of us of their maniacal pursuit of their own bottom lines, The New York Times does not care one jot if their hateful and divisive race rhetoric is inevitably going to poison our political atmosphere as surely as Monsanto’s Roundup poisoned our food supply. In fact, to make themselves feel better about their campaign of organized hate-mongering, they have convinced themselves that Trump rather than the identity-politickers on the left that classify and rank everyone based on their race, gender, sexual orientation and other markers of status on the mounting totem pole of holy victimology is the one dividing us. When Trump calls for unity, we know they will make a point of calling for more divisiveness. But we cannot take the bait.
In pursuit of profit, The New York Times has declared war on America. It is imperative that we fight back. We cannot let ourselves become victims of unapologetic propaganda. We must cancel subscriptions, avoid clicking on its headlines and discount anything these sinister race hustlers tell us is true. We must show them we expect — indeed, that we demand — better. If the media is going to act like the enemy of the American people, we must treat it as nothing more and nothing less than that.
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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Tablet, Times Higher Education, Quillette, Areo Magazine, Public Discourse, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, Front Porch Republic, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
