So much for alternative points of view in the New York Times. With the news pages devoted to kneecapping the new administration, one would hope that a few right-of-center voices might at least slip into the weekend opinion sections. But the paper’s Sunday Review section is just as predictably, reflexively leftist. In fact, all you really need to read are the titles and teasers.
The front featured a reported essay from the Texas border town of Brownsville, “The Border Town” by contributing writer Domingo Martinez. Keeping to the paper’s tradition of scaremongering on behalf of amnesty for illegals, the subhead read: “Like America, this place is split in two. One half is barbequing. The other is in danger of losing everything.” The online headline: “How Scared Should People on the Border Be?”
It included this phrase comparing border control to the "papers please" environment of World War II.
I’m a citizen, born in Brownsville; I have no personal reason to worry. But I do, now, carry my passport and another form of ID with me when I leave the house, as if this were Eastern Europe in the buildup to World War II.
The other story on the front, “The Government Gorsuch Wants to Undo," was co-written by Emily Bazelon, staff writer for the paper's Sunday magazine. The teaser seems designed to scare liberals, but would probably make Trump voters even more likely to support him: “His judicial philosophy would undermine the administrative state.” By insisting on the apparently bizarre and antiquated notion that Congress, not federal agencies, make rules.
And so the slant continued, from front cover to back cover.
An op-ed by David Kirp was teased on front, “What Tulsa can teach Betsy DeVos,” the education secretary.
Slate columnist Michelle Goldberg contributed “Why Is This hate Different From All Other Hate? – We’re on high alert for anti-Semitism, but the real bigotry is hiding in plain sight.” While truculently admitting that the major anti-Semitic incidents could not be blamed on the right (“Perhaps we have given Trump-era anti-Semitism more emphasis than it deserves”) she still blamed Trump and his circle for “mining the anti-Semitic far right for images and arguments.”
Inside the section, there was Frank Bruni’s column, “Manhood in the Age of Trump,” with the distressed text box: “Raging lust. Boiling anger. Imperious authority. Is this masculinity?” The following page featured the not-at-all-paranoid opinion piece, “Trump Is President. Encrypt Your Email” by Max Read, editor of New York magazine’s technology site.
Another writer worried, “Do Millennial Men Want Stay-at-Home Wives?” with the text box, “New research shows a possible retreat from gender equality.” There was more standard male-bashing in “Jerks and the Start-Ups They Ruin.” The text box used a liberal insult phrase aimed at young men: “Bro C.E.O’s will keep destroying companies until people stop paying them.”
“My Son’s Growing Black Pride,” by WNYC editor and Los Angeles Times critic Rebecca Carroll, talked of “white privilege” and the “white supremacy of the Trump administration.”
The editorial page provided no respite. The lead editorial, “Pick Your Favorite Ethical Offender” in the Trump White House, accused the administration of “offering the country a graduate-level course in the selling of the presidency,” starting with his family (this from the paper that dismissed concerns about the Clinton Foundation selling access).
On the editorial page, right-of-center columnist Ross Douthat contributed the provocatively titled “Trump Needs a Brain,” about the lack of a brain trust in the White House, along with the truly anti-Trump offerings from Nicholas Kristof, “In Trump Country, Shock at Trump Budget Cuts,” and Donald Berwick, “Obamacare Will Outlast the Republicans.”
