The New York Times Declares itself a Propaganda Organ

The New York Times has been engaging in something it calls the 1619 project. 1619 was the year that the first slaves arrived on the North American continent. The premise, remarkably and unsurprisingly easy to understand, says that slavery is the truth about America, that slavery is the meaning of America, and that the nation’s putative accomplishments pale in relation to the harm that slavery has done. In short, it’s a monumental guilt trip. Get ready for reparations.

Anyway, Andrew Sullivan takes the Times to task in New York Magazine. His is a notably vigorous attack on a newspaper that has turned itself into an instrument of propaganda. You knew that already, but the 1619 project makes it absolutely clear.

Of course, the basis for this transmogrification lies in academic exercises in what is called critical race theory. Sullivan explains, correctly, that the intellectual corruption involved in this paranoid illusion has now escaped the Ivy Tower and has made its way into America’s most respected newspaper, the paper of record, as they call it.

So, here is Sullivan:

The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms. That’s why this issue wasn’t called, say, “special issue”, but a “project”. It’s as much activism as journalism. And that’s the reason I’m dwelling on this a few weeks later. I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them … and yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it. Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory, espoused almost exclusively by black writers, as its sole interpretative mechanism.

For those who did not know, he explains critical race theory:

Take a simple claim: no aspect of our society is unaffected by the legacy of slavery. Sure. Absolutely. Of course. But, when you consider this statement a little more, you realize this is either banal or meaningless. The complexity of history in a country of such size and diversity means that everything we do now has roots in many, many things that came before us. You could say the same thing about the English common law, for example, or the use of the English language: no aspect of American life is untouched by it. You could say that about the Enlightenment. Or the climate. You could say that America’s unique existence as a frontier country bordered by lawlessness is felt even today in every mass shooting. You could cite the death of countless millions of Native Americans — by violence and disease — as something that defines all of us in America today. And in a way it does. But that would be to engage in a liberal inquiry into our past, teasing out the nuances, and the balance of various forces throughout history, weighing each against each other along with the thoughts and actions of remarkable individuals — in the manner of, say, the excellent new history of the U.S., These Truths by Jill Lepore.

Sullivan is standing up for traditional liberalism, the kind that extols the virtue of press freedom. And yet, to exercise its freedom the press ought also to present facts fairly and impartially. And that means, not through an ideological glass… darkly.

But the NYT chose a neo-Marxist rather than liberal path to make a very specific claim: that slavery is not one of many things that describe America’s founding and culture, it is the definitive one. Arguing that the “true founding” was the arrival of African slaves on the continent, period, is a bitter rebuke to the actual founders and Lincoln. America is not a messy, evolving, multicultural, religiously infused, Enlightenment-based, racist, liberating, wealth-generating kaleidoscope of a society. It’s white supremacy, which started in 1619, and that’s the key to understand all of it. America’s only virtue, in this telling, belongs to those who have attempted and still attempt to end this malign manifestation of white supremacy.

The Times is now, Sullivan correctly states, a propaganda organ:

But it is extremely telling that this is not merely aired in the paper of record (as it should be), but that it is aggressively presented as objective reality. That’s propaganda, directed, as we now know, from the very top — and now being marched through the entire educational system to achieve a specific end. To present a truth as the truth is, in fact, a deception. And it is hard to trust a paper engaged in trying to deceive its readers in order for its radical reporters and weak editors to transform the world.