Agony at the New York Times

Tom Cotton, 2006.

The Economist has published a piece by former NYT Opinion editor James Bennet, who resigned following the publication of an infamously irresponsible Tom Cotton op-ed. It is called “When the New York Times lost its way.”

The only problem with the Bennet piece, and really every analysis of l’Affaire Cotton is that it STILL seems no one has read the actual Tom Cotton op-ed. It’s a potage of horseshit, meritless and studded with goofy lies, certainly as egregious as anything Jayson Blair ever wrote. Like every other Ivy League rightwinger in history, Cotton didn’t care about vandalism, violence, police brutality, or even blue lives. He cared about beating up other Ivy League elites.

So the piece hauled out some sub-4chan conspiracy gibberish about extremely rich, extremely woke, extremely fictional instigators in exotic cars that Cotton claimed were filled with people burning down New York City. The National Guard was already out in 30+ Americans states, blue and red. That wasn’t the point. The point was to firehose bile at Times readers and staff who supported BLM and to suggest that, with a phone call, he could roll tanks over them for their occult crime of “wokeness.”

And then when NYT readers and staff who actually read the piece accurately reported what they read, that the piece was not an argument but a threat, they were called enemies of … of all things … FREE SPEECH. And the whole “liberal v. woke” pseudo-debate started in the Times auditorium among elites and spawned whole franchises of Ivy Leaguers playing out crusty campus grudge matches using the bodies of Black and trans people as pieces on a shitty checkers board.