The Grey Lady is a Tramp

(My apologies to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and to the countless others who have made the same lame pun on the title of their song prior to this)

Bari Weiss’s letter to A. G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, announcing and explaining her resignation from that highly overrated organ of far left propaganda, has gone viral in the metaphorical sense of that phrase. Ordinarily, specifying the sense of gone viral would be unnecessary but in these days of pandemic-induced panic, it is probably wise not to take these things for granted. The letter has certainly generated an explosion of discussion online and it will be very interesting to watch how the newspaper handles the controversy.

Weiss was hired to be an editor and writer by the New York Times in 2017. She had previously worked for the Wall Street Journal for four years, and her recruitment was an attempt by the Grey Lady to expand its thought horizons after Donald the Orange’s rise to power demonstrated just how out of touch they were with ordinary Yanks. It was rather amusing that they thought that hiring someone from the Wall Street Journal would help rectify this. The editorial position of the Wall Street Journal is right-of-centre only in the sense that it fiscally conservative and economically neo-liberal – the elements of right-of-centre thought furthest removed from the mixture of populism, nationalism, and social and cultural conservatism that came together to elect Trump. Unsurprisingly, since their efforts to remedy their own cluelessness were themselves utterly clueless, they failed completely, bringing about the situation in which Weiss has so publicly resigned her position.

She published her letter to Sulzberger on her website, and it has been reproduced in many other places on the internet. Her indictment of her former employer basically consists of two elements. There is her charge that contrary to the paper’s stated intentions when hiring her three years ago, it has narrowed rather than broadened the spectrum of acceptable views. Then there is her complaints about how she has personally been treated at the paper as a consequence of the former element. While I would recommend reading the letter in its entirely, the first element is encapsulated in her sentence “Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else” and the second in the following paragraph:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

Lest there be any confusion about the matter among those unfamiliar with Weiss the people who called her a “Nazi” and remarked about her “writing about the Jews again” were not alluding to anti-Semitism in her writings – she is Jewish and the author of a book published last year entitled How to Fight Anti-Semitism – but rather to her ultra-Zionism. Weiss’s politics, it should be noted, are neither conservative nor centre-right, except perhaps from the perspective of the extremely anti-Zionist New Left or the ultra-Zionist American neoconservatives, but are rather moderately progressive liberal and centrist. This makes her experience at the New York Times all the more indicative of how far to the left this so-called newspaper of record has swung.

All of this, however, only addresses the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the corruption of the New York Times. Last month, James Bennet who was then the head editor of the opinion page, was forced to resign over his decision to allow an editorial by Senator Tom Cotton which expressed the opinion that the race riots which were causing so much chaos and destruction in American cities should be squashed by military force. While this incident goes further towards demonstrating how intolerant the newspaper has become of those who dissent from its party line, the responsibility the New York Times bears for creating the conditions in which the media portrayal of the death of George Floyd could spark these riots in the first place is a much more interesting story. I do not mean that the newspaper bears sole responsibility – in recent essays I have discussed how the Marxist takeover of the social sciences and the humanities and their attempts to dominate even the hard sciences in academe have brainwashed the supposedly educated classes with the lies of wokeness. It can hardly be coincidence, however, that this wave of race riots which crossed the borders of the United States and spread into the rest of Western Civilization and which quickly took on aspects which eerily resembled the Maoist Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s Year Zero, took place within a year after the New York Times launched the 1619 Project.

The 1619 Project, which premiered in August of last year in the magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of the New York Times is a re-interpretation of American history from the perspective of Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory, which began in the 1930s when the Institute of Social Research or “Frankfurt School”, a neo-Marxist think tank, launched an ambitious project of establishing a new theoretical synthesis for both the social sciences and the humanities that would be distinguished from previous theories by its activism, that is to say, that its goal would be to unsettle, disrupt, and overthrow all of traditional society rather than to seek learning and understanding. (1) Initially blending elements of Freudian psychoanalysis with its Marxism, as it spread throughout the academic world its development was influenced by the incorporation of ideas from other disciplines, especially the deconstructive techniques of post-Saussure French literary theorists. Critical Race Theory is the branch of this diabolical technique which tries to delegitimize all of Western Civilization by reading its entire history as the oppression of other races by whites. The 1619 Project which applies this methodology to American history by making black slavery and white racism into the fundamental paradigm by which all events in that history must be interpreted, is the brainchild of Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times staff writer who apparently had a past record of combining anti-white race hatred with pseudoscience and fabricated history, even prior to taking on this project which does the same. Note that Hannah-Jones herself acknowledged and applauded the connection between her project and the riots.

In the past, the New York Times covered up for the crimes of the Soviet Union. Walter Duranty, wrote rave reviews of Stalin’s five-year plan in the 1930s, and denied that Stalin’s government was engineering the Ukrainian famine now known as the Holodomor even though he was fully aware that it was going on. He justified this cover-up – and the Stalinist atrocities he was covering up – with the infamous phrase now often attributed to Stalin himself, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Like Hannah-Jones, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his abominable Communist propaganda. This was neither the first nor the last time that this newspaper would behave like an official organ of the Soviet Union. It heaped plenty of praise on other Communist dictators such as China’s Mao Tse-Tung over the years, as well, and lionized Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara even before they became the epitome of coolness for imbecilic college kids.

Cheerleading for Communist dictators and covering up the atrocities of Communist regimes is one thing, however. Helping to incite a Communist race war and a Year Zero Cultural Revolution is something else altogether. It is hardly surprising that a newspaper that has moved in this direction, would hold its staff to a narrow and rigid party line. It merely raises the question of why they went to the bother of appearing to broaden their perspective when they hired Bari Weiss et al. three years ago.

Perhaps Bari Weiss can address these matters in either a follow up letter to Sulzberger or a column in her next journalistic venture.

(1) I gave a brief introduction to Critical Theory in my essay “It is Time to Criticize Critical Theory” and called for a new Christian apologetical approach to addressing it in my essay “A New Apologetics is Needed.” Anyone who is looking for an overview of it from a perspective far less hostile to it than my own can consult Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011) by Stephen Eric Bronner, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. Anyone interested in the history of the think tank that started it can either consult Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (University of California Press, 1973) or, for the most exhaustive treatment of this history, Rolf Wiggershaus’ The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance (Polity Press, 1994, German original, 1986). Anyone looking for a response to it from the perspective of conservative Christian apologetics is again referred to Dr. Neil Shenvi. For other interesting critiques of it from the right, see William C. Lind’s 2000 speech “The Origins of Political Correctness”, the two sequels Dr. Paul Gottfried, formerly Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and now editor-in-chief of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, wrote to his After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton, 2001) which are Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards A Secular Theocracy (University of Missouri, 2002) and The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium (University of Missouri, 2005), and, for a much more controversial critique, chapter five of Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Praeger Publishers, 1998), which is the third in a trilogy, following A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994) and Separation and Its Discontents (1998) by Dr. Kevin B. MacDonald, retired Professor of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach. Also of interest is the aforementioned Dr. Paul Gottfried’s autobiography Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers (ISI, 2009), in which he discusses attending the lectures of the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse when the latter was a visiting lecturer at Yale prior to his move to the West Coast to become the guru of the Student Revolutionaries and the interesting trajectory that the Critical Theory journal Telos followed after its founding editor, the late Paul Piccone, became largely disillusioned with the New Left and invited contributions from right-of-centre thinkers such as Alain de Benoit and Gottfried himself.