They Have Gone Mad at 'The New York Times'

It started a few days ago with this warning tweet from New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay.

In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery. https://t.co/3OXXRhmpbI @nytimes

— Mara Gay (@MaraGay) August 13, 2019

And now NYT has launched this campaign against white America. In the eyes of NYT, pretty much everything can be traced back to slavery.

Here are some of the reports that appeared in NYT this Sunday:

First of all, America is a republic, not a democracy but aside from that glaring error, the idea that black Americans made it one is absurd. The republic existed long before blacks were let off the plantations. As civility expanded in America, blacks were allowed to vote but voting didn't come about because of blacks on their own. Out-numbered blacks would not have been allowed to vote unless a good number of white Americans thought it was the right thing to do.

Phillip W. Magness has already destroyed this bizarre claim, see: The Anti-Capitalist Ideology of Slavery.

And my favorite absurdity:

Jeneen Interlandi writes in the article:

[T]he National Medical Association (the leading black medical society) [was] in direct conflict with the A.M.A., which was opposed to any nationalized health plan. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, the group helped defeat two such proposals with a vitriolic campaign that informs present-day debates: They called the idea socialist and un-American and warned of government intervention in the doctor-patient relationship. The group used the same arguments in the mid-’60s, when proponents of national health insurance introduced Medicare. This time, the N.M.A. developed a countermessage: Health care was a basic human right.

Well, of course, there is a free market objection to universal healthcare! Because it would be socialist, eliminate competition and creativity, distort healthcare price signals and generally lower the overall standard of medical care in the country. It is not a black-white issue in modern America. It has nothing to do with it, a good part of the country does not want to be part of a socialist universal health care system that is the beginning and end of the current story.

And as far as health care being a "basic human right," there are no "rights" of any kind for whites, blacks or anyone else (See: Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person ).

One wonders what The New York Times endgame is here with its "blame the white man" effort.

Is it an attempt to use the campaign to paint Trump, by virtue of his being white and a rich capitalist, as a racist to push the country toward a Democratic candidate in the 2020 election?

Or are they just mentally fried and caught up in a modern-day SJW version of a Salem witch hunt aimed at white Americans?

Whatever the reason, they are very dangerous.

The kids and the third and fourth hand dealers in ideas are going to sop this nonsense up as truth.

-RW

UPDATE 1

Cathy Young

✔@CathyYoung63

I'm all for examining history. But how did the preposterous claim that the American Revolution was motivated partly by fear that Britain would abolish slavery get past an editor?

UPDATE 2

TakingHayekSeriously

@FriedrichHayek

·

1h

Slavery existed in every corner of the globe. What made America exceptional was British culture of liberal principles which eventually were extended to everyone at the cost of much blood & hard work. The New York Times is staffed by morons.

UPDATE 3
From The Washington Examiner:

The project rollout just happened to come at the same time as the leak of a transcript of a Timesemployee town hall in which the paper's executive editor, Dean Baquet, discussed his "vision" of making race the central theme of Times coverage of the remaining two years of President Trump's term in office.

Baquet spoke frankly about the paper's approach to Trump. For two years, he explained, the Times made a very, very big deal of the Trump-Russia affair. "We built our newsroom to cover one story," Baquet said. But then came the Mueller report, which failed to establish the core allegation against the president: that he and his campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to fix the 2016 election.

"Now we have to regroup," Baquet told the staff, "and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story."

That different story is race — and Trump. "We've got to change," Baquet said. "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?"

Some on the staff appeared both anguished by the president ("it's a very scary time") and more than ready to make race a key feature of Times coverage.

"I'm wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting," one staffer asked Baquet. "Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn't racist, I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting."

The staffer's point brought Baquet back to the paper's new initiative. "One reason we all signed off on The 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that," Baquet said. "Race in the next year ... is going to be a huge part of the American story. And I mean, race in terms of not only African Americans and their relationship with Donald Trump, but Latinos and immigration."

So the New York Times has two big plans. One would be big enough: to focus on the universe of racism accusations that increasingly surround the president at a time when he just happens to be running for reelection. But the other is even bigger: to "reframe" American history in accordance with the values of New York Times editors. It's an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking for people in what used to be known more simply as the news business.

Like I said, NYT has gone absolutely mad.

For more on the 1619 Project see here.