When people, groups, and institutions wield an enormous amount of power and think that they are morally right and their powerless opponents are deplorable, it’s pretty unusual for them to give up some power. Yet, that is what has happened at the NY Times twice in recent days. The first was the admission that the Hunter Biden laptop story that the New York Post had written about in October of 2020 was in fact correct. The second was their editorial complaining about cancel culture, an editorial which has the far left screaming. See here. The first has led to speculation that the Deep State is about to dump Biden and Harris – see here – but together with the second, that seems less likely. All of this is even more unusual when one takes into account the fact that the Times is not only on the left, but drifting even further to the left, as the incident with Donald G. McNeil shows. Recall that he was fired because he had lost the support of the rest of the reporters for having used the “N” word, although in fact he was not the one who had brought up the topic in the incident in question and anyway had not used it but had merely mentioned it. But it was pretty clear from his firing, together with the resignation of Bari Weiss, that a younger generation was taking over and that they were as woke as woke can be.
So, what’s going on? Has the reality of how bad the Biden administration has turned out to be shocked them into thinking that there might be permanent damage to the progressive movement? Has the war in Ukraine shamed some of them for not only not having military training but also for disparaging what they call toxic masculinity, thus making them question the direction in which the country is going? Has the fact that what used to be the remote possibility of nuclear war is now much less remote made them re-think these absurd negotiations with Iran? Have the bad polls suggested that maybe they should try to curry favor with the likely winners in the next election? Has the fact that their spin doesn’t seem to be working very well anymore shown them that they are losing influence the further left they go? Did one of them have a bad near-death experience, as the philosopher A.J. Ayer is supposed to have had, that made them see that they weren’t the wonderful defenders of “our” democracy that they thought they were but were in fact one of its destroyers?
Or was it all nothing but a weird and random pair of events?
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