Clay Waters

The New York Times is again trying to police the boundaries of allowable debate, with a supposed controversy over a scheduled meeting at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort by a group reviled by the left for its documentation of the threat of radical Islam: “Mar-a-Lago Again Under Fire for Hosting Group That Promoted Islamophobia.” Reporter Mihir Zaveri used two discredited pressure groups to make his case against the Center for Security Policy: the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic pressure group which the U.S. Senate has tied to terrorism, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the fundraising mill targeting gullible liberals.

New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer’s profile of Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, and how his military career has bolstered his political one, made Thursday’s front page. “A View Outside the Wire Lifts Buttigieg Onstage.” Reading Steinhauer’s loving profile of the South Bend, Indiana mayor is instructive in how easily the liberal press sheds its cynicism toward military heroes in politics when they happen to be Democrats. It also shows how differently she treats Republican presidential candidates.

The latest New York Times Sunday Review was graced by Justin Gillis, who served as chief environmental reporter for the paper until late 2017 and is now a contributing opinion writer free to spout in even more partisan and hysterical tones about the “troglodytes” and dangerous deniers who don’t see impending climate catastrophe: “Our Climate Future Has Arrived.” The online headline deck was a call to vote Democrat: “Fire, Floods and Power Outages: Our Climate Future Has Arrived -- The most urgent imperative now is to turn our fear and frustration into votes.” The tone was confidently alarmist: "Now we suffer the consequences."

New York Times political reporter Thomas Kaplan performed impressive damage control on behalf of rising Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday. But he really raised his game in his Friday “news analysis” entitled, “As Warren Rises, Republicans Probe Her Biography for Points of Attack,” which was even more shameless in its feminist favoritism toward Warren. Kaplan hurled the “sexism” card at the GOP for daring to show Warren lied about the circumstances of her leaving a teaching position in 1971.The text box: “Looking to a tactic that is often used against women.”

New York Times reporter Thomas Kaplan played damage control for Democratic candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren in  “Warren Details Account Of Losing Teaching Job Because of a Pregnancy.” It turns out Warren has told two different stories over the years about leaving her teaching position. Previously she had claimed she left because of insufficient educational qualifications. But later she claimed she was fired for being pregnant. But the story’s headlines gave no hint of a possible contradiction in Warren’s account of her “firing” over the years. The Times instead feverishly tried to protect her reputation, even talking on Twitter of Warren “refuting a conservative news site's challenge of her account” when she did no such thing.

New York Times reporter Jennifer Vineyard had a rundown of commentary on the controversial new movie “Joker,” a grittier-than-usual take on how the clown prince of crime came to be. Predictably, Vineyard hit all the liberal panic buttons in “‘Joker’:" Is it incel propaganda? Might it even be dangerous? The film arrived in theaters last week accompanied by F.B.I. warnings about the threat of related gun violence..."

The scuzzy new “supervillain” movie "Joker” has caused a strange moral panic among the left, who are equating the empathetic portrayal of the Joker to sympathy for the circumstance of “incels” – troubled men rejected by potential sexual partners. But New Yorker critic Richard Brody found a novel left-wing angle in his attack. He constructs an edifice of racism, plucking specific notorious attacks from the pages of New York City’s notorious crime history and overlays them on specific, superficially similar violent scenes from the movie -- then nervily called out the filmmakers for not hewing to the truth of the actual events (again, in a fictional movie about a comic-book character).

The New York Times has used the term “unsubstantiated” with embarrassing regularity to talk about the charges of Biden family nepotism highlighted by President Trump. Virtually every Times story on the Biden allegations employs that adjective as a warning, signaling Republican partisanship. It’s quite the double standard. The sharp contrast was also demonstrated during the 2004 presidential campaign pitting incumbent George W. Bush against Democratic Sen. John Kerry, whose Vietnam war record came under assault by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. “Unsubstantiated” was also the paper’s favorite word to describe the allegations.

Peter Baker, New York Times White House correspondent, reviewed Tom Lobianco’s book “Piety and Power -- Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House,” but reserved his most hostile, pungent criticism for Pence’s boss: "How does a devoted evangelical Christian serve a foulmouthed, thrice-married vulgarian who boasts of grabbing women by their private parts and paid hush money to a porn star alleging an extramarital affair?"