The Laughable Notion of the "Leftist" New York Times
Four Recent Examples
The Republi-fascist right loves to describe the capitalist-imperialist New York Times as “leftist.” The description is course absurd, as is documented in numerous careful studies.
I don’t have time or energy to dive into that research here, but let’s take a quick at four examples from the Times’ columnist roster to reflect on how ridiculous it is to consider the nation’s leading newspaper “leftist.”
“Preposterous”
Look at the leftish liberal Times columnist Michell Goldberg’s recent commentary titled “Pete Hegseth’s Preposterous Selection.” Following the narrow tack of Democrats on the US Senate Armed Services Committee, she criticizes Donald Trump’s nomination of Hegseth as Secretary of Defense on the grounds of Hegseth’s abuse and denigration of women, drunkenness, geographical ignorance, and administrative inexperience and incompetence.
This all matters, of course. Still, like the Dem committee members, Goldberg says nothing about Hegseth’s underlying Christian Crusader Fascism and the grave menace it poses, something that I –- an actual “radical leftist” –- have been documenting at length here on the PSR.
“Preposterous Selection”? Try “Fascist Trump’s Horrifying Selection of the Christian Fascist Pete Hegseth.”
As any actual and serious leftist should know, the Hegseth nomination makes perfect sense in the context of the virulent fascism that has taken hold of the nation’s rightmost/Reich-most major capitalist-imperialist party.
“What Biden’s Legacy Will Truly Be”
Look now at the centrist Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s column on “Joe Biden’s legacy” in today’s Sunday Times. I was very struck by Dowd’s cutting words on the nation’s decrepit and disastrous 46th president:
'When she was trying to lure Joe Biden out of the race last summer, Pelosi said he had been such a consequential president, he belonged on Mount Rushmore. And Biden has made several speeches this week trying to buff his accomplishments. But he will be merely a footnote in the vertiginous saga of how Trump won the White House again, despite a hail of impeachments, lawsuits, insults and lies and an attempted coup that put his vice president, lawmakers and police in danger.
The chip on Biden’s shoulder devoured his judgment about what was good for him, for his party and for the country. His narcissism trumped his patriotism. A new Times article, “How Biden’s Inner Circle Protected a Faltering President,” reveals that Biden was encased in the same sort of delusional bubble as Trump. Mimicking Trump’s self-serving sycophants, Biden’s staff ginned up positive comments from allies to show the boss and protected him from negative stories. Many noticed that Biden was in a fog, or “dans les vapes,” as an aide to President Emmanuel Macron of France called it. But challenges to the Panglossian narrative about the president’s stamina and mental fitness were met with hostility. Jill Biden and advisers spun a Trump-like web of deceit around the White House.
Even Biden himself now admits that he isn’t certain he could have made it through four more years. “Who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?” he recently told USA Today’s Susan Page. But he persisted with his fiction that he was hale and hearty long enough to ensure that Democrats had no time to choose a ticket with a real shot at stopping Trump.
As Biden, baked in Washington tradition, dutifully follows the script on Monday, he should ponder what his legacy will truly be: resurrecting Trump.'
Damn, that was cold, right? And not incorrect. Biden’s deserves the shot. Still, notice what Dowd left out from what Biden’s “legacy will truly be”: funding, equipping, and protecting the genocidal slaughter of 64,000 or likely more Palestinians in Gaza.
No actual or serious “leftist” would delete that from the top of Biden’s legacy. And many of us would add another global crime to that legacy: sparking and waging a reckless and unnecessary imperialist proxy war that has killed and maimed untold hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Russians, and other people in Ukraine.
“Depose Maduro”
Then there’s two examples from the openly right-wing section of the Times’ columnist stable.
Just five days ago, the Times published a Bret Stephens Op-Ed explicitly calling for Trump to “Depose [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro” (the column’s title) “through coercive diplomacy if possible or force if necessary.” In short, one of the “leftist” Times columnists advocates open military imperialist regime change in a neighboring American nation “if necessary,” with all the bloodshed and other ruin (including the death and maiming of US soldiers) that would entail and despite the disastrous outcomes of one US regime change operation after another in the long and recent past.
“America-Hating Communists”
Just two days ago, the Times published a long interview in which the paper’s right-wing columnist Ross Douthat spoke to the right-wing Silicon Valley tech oligarch and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, the co-owner of the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose portfolio includes Airbnb and over 100 A.I. companies. Midway through the interview, Douthat elicit this completely insane neofascist narrative from Andreesen on how US tech titans have shifted from purportedly multi-cultural Clinton-Obama neoliberalism to “broligarchic” white-nationalist Trumpism in 2024:
Andreesen: “After Obama’s re-election in 2012 through ultimately to 2016, things really started to change… the unifying thread here is…the children of the elites. The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists. They fan out into the professions, and our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities, of course. And then, by the way, a lot of them go into government, and so we’re not only talking about a wave of new arrivals into the tech companies. We’re also talking about a wave of new arrivals into the congressional offices. And of course, they all know each other, and so all of a sudden you have this influx, this new cohort. …what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities…for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.”
Douthat: “But when you say they radicalized, what did that mean for Silicon Valley? What did they want? I mean, at this point, you’re a venture capitalist. You’re no longer a start-up guy. So you’re investing in a lot of different companies. So you have a pretty, I assume, pretty wide view of the action. What was it that was desired from the new left-wing politics pre-Trump? …”
Andreessen: “Revolution. What I now understand it to be historically is a rebirth of the New Left. So it’s very analogous. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to David Horowitz about this because he lived through it 40 years earlier. It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from ‘Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society’ to ‘Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.’… The median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: “When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?” …By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”
There you have it from the leading tech capitalist and billionaire Marc Andreessen, courtesy of the “leftist” Times: big tech titans are behind Trump not out of profit-seeking economic self-interest in tax cuts and keeping government regulation and surveillance at bay but because a bunch of their young professional staff became “radical Marxists” who want to “tear down capitalism” during the second Obama term.
That is neo-McCarthyite insanity of the most crass and preposterous kind. I don’t doubt that Silicon Valley saw a fair number of its young workers become Black Lives supporters around the time of the great Ferguson rebellion (2014). I’m sure many of those workers were Bernie Sanders backers in 2015-2020. So what? That’s a far and distant cry from a mass tech youth conversion to “radical Marxism.” No such conversion remotely occurred.
The notion that the nation’s top educational institutions – MIT, the Ivies, Stanford and the rest – were or are turning young adults into “America-hating communists” is neo-fascist/neo-McCarthyite madness on steroids. (I wish! I am a red-blooded “America-hating communist” with ten book publications and a Ph.D and thanks to my actually radical Left anti-capitalist world view and politics the only job I could ever get in one of those militantly capitalist-imperialist institutions of so-called higher education would be in entry-level food service, custodial, or clerical toil!
Some of my readers may recognize the name David Horowitz in Andreesen’s comments. Besides being the father of Andreesen’s business partner Ben Horowitz, David Horowitz is the ex-New Leftist who turned on his portside past and became a prolific and virulent neofascist who has specialized for most of the last half century in preposterous and paranoid-style attacks on the supposed (mythical) grand Marxist conspiracy to destroy America from within. He is a loathsome scumbag of the worst kind, lower than the lowest snails in the lowest snail dens in the world. He is literally one of the most terrible human beings on the planet.
So are the right-wingers Andreesen, Douthat, and Stevens, all prominently platformed on the “leftist” New York Times, whose leftmost columnist (Goldberg) either can’t bring herself to call the fascist Pete Hegseth a fascist or is forbidden from doing so by her editors, and whose venerable sharp critic of US presidents’ individual characters and foibles (Dowd) deletes the sponsorship of genocidal ethnic cleansing from Genocide Joe’s presidential legacy.
None of what Paul revels surprises me. I subscribe to both NYT the WaPo. It is surely important to know what your adversaries in the main-stream media think (and Paul does a superb job of showing us). Moreover, both papers have had superb analytical essays on the IDF genocide (only, of course, they use the passive voice, never, ever use the word "genocide, except to debunk it, and never telling their readers who is doing all the destruction---and why. Nor do they ever point to the American imperialism that sustains that genocide. Just the other day, two brave journalists (by American standards, which is very, very low), one Jewish-American, the other Palestinian American, tried to question Genocide Blinken; he refused---and being dragged out, screamed the truth, one asking him why he was not in the Hague [UN criminal court], the other telling him he had ruined Judaism by insisting that all Jews were Zionists. We are not; a few older ones, myself included, and many younger ones abhor the genocide, with a slogan "not in our name."
I have a strange sort of insight on this. My wife joined a card playing group during the pandemic when they needed another player. My wife was invited due to her friendship with a coworker from the past who is wealthy, divorced and hooked up with someone even wealthier. We are not. But we have been invited to some gatherings with mostly other wealthy folks. The friend and her partner get the NYT. Their opinions and those of their friends are not left leaning. Even though they’re not a bunch of Trumper’s, they’re pretty hooked into their personal wellbeing and skeptical of stuff that is outside their bubble. They still think the US is the greatest. No focus on genocide or the impending fascism coming down the pike.