The usually monolithic New York Times has decided, after so many years of incredible wreckage of basic freedoms, to permit a bit of introspective self-criticism. The author is David Brooks, who has traditionally shown a bit more comprehension of big-picture themes than the usual op-ed page propagandist. His column is “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?”
To which every person in the know upon seeing that headline immediately shouted: YES!
After all, it was the NYT that consciously pursued the “Russiagate” investigation of the 2016 election long after it was obviously a dead end. And they did this because of all their predictions ahead of the election that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in. Their election models proved it. But then the models all turned out to be wrong. They could not admit it and so assigned dozens of reporters to vindicate the paper. They failed.
Then they experimented for a few months with running some diversity on the opinion pages until they upset a tiny and insane cohort of their readership and staff. So then they fired their op-ed page editor. The woke revolution at this page was complete by 2017, after which the entire institution became a weapon for destroying Trump and anyone who supported him, or, really, anyone who doubted the wisdom of allowing liberal globalists total hegemony over American public life.
It became pathological during these years.
It got so bad that in late February 2020, the paper threw out 100 years of public-health wisdom and decided to whip up a wild disease panic, all with the hope of destroying the Trump presidency. The idea was to create an association of Trump with a pathogen that was deeply dangerous to the body politic and therefore must be suppressed even at the cost of Constitutional rights and the lives and well-being of children.
I don’t believe for an instant that they didn’t know what they were doing. They did. They knew the astronomical costs of closing down the economy, restricting travel, masking everyone, and unleashing the shot-givers on the unwilling. They knew but they did it anyway, and why? Because their fevered imaginations believed that the Trump administration represented an existential threat to a century of liberal progress. Anything was justified toward the great goal of purging him from public office.
