Tag: nyt

Oops! I Think the NYT Just Said the Quiet Part About Deportation Out Loud

Tell me you’re out of touch without telling me you’re out of touch. 

I wasn’t planning on writing anything today as I’m knee-deep in a house cleaning project, but I took a little break to peruse the news and saw an article in the New York Times that had me wondering if I’d accidentally stumbled upon a satire site like the Babylon Bee. It was about how deporting illegal migrants would have a negative impact on the wealthy people who have homes in the Hamptons. You know, the real victims in all of this.  

The article is entitled “They Help Make the Hamptons the Hamptons, and Now They’re Living in Fear.” The subtitle reads “Latino immigrants care for some of America’s most lavish beachside mansions. Their disappearance would affect the wealthy, too.” But wait, it gets better. The article begins: 

The party dresses must be double-pressed, the hedges shaved into sharp rectangles. The hand soap and lotion dispensers must be formed into neat lines along bathroom sinks. Caterers need to slip out of view as soon as the oysters and cocktails are served.

Wealthy residents of the Hamptons demand perfection. Now, many of the people who make it so — Latino immigrants, some of them undocumented — are panicking about President Trump’s deportation orders.

It goes on with great quotes like this one: “Some of the wealthy are quietly beginning to make calculations about what it would mean if their undocumented workers were deported. Who would mow the lawn?”

(Note: their undocumented workers)

Or this one from Marit Molan, director of Hamptons Community Outreach: “Everyone relies on housekeepers and carpenters and tree cutters and grass cutters. People come to the Hamptons to enjoy their houses, and who is going to take care of their houses?”

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Trump Blames Ukraine: What The New York Times Gets Right and What The New York Times Gets Wrong

On February 18, for the first time since the war in Ukraine began, high ranking U.S. and Russian officials met to begin talks on ending the war. The U.S. delegation included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East and a favorite negotiator Steve Witkoff and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. The Russian delegation included Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin’s foreign policy advisor, Yury Ushakov.

Following the meeting, U.S. President Donald Trump stunned reporters at a press conference by blaming Ukraine, and not Russia, for the war in what The New York Times called “Trump’s Pivot Toward Putin’s Russia.” In its cross examination of Trump’s case, The Times gets some things very right. But they got some things very wrong.

As he walked out of the talks, Sergey Lavrov said, “We weren’t just listening to each other, but we heard each other. I have reason to believe that the American side started to better understand our positions.”

The position that the American side seems to have better understood is the Russian narrative that the war did not start on February 24, 2022 and that Russia did not start it. Russia has long insisted that the war began with the U.S. supported coup of 2014 and the failure to protect the linguistic, religious and cultural rights of the ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens who felt abandoned and threatened by that coup.

Lavrov has consistently argued that Russia is not demanding preconditions but that they are demanding that the West fulfil its previous agreement not to expand NATO eastward to Russia’s border and its previous commitment to settle the crisis in Ukraine based on the UN Charter that stipulates the principle of equal rights and self-determination. The first was broken with the promise that Ukraine was on an irreversible path to NATO; the second was broken with Kiev’s “extermination of everything Russian, including language, mass media, culture, and even the use of the Russian language in everyday life.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to this narrative that the Americans now “better understand,” was intended to prevent the first and protect the second.

So, The New York Times complains that “[a]s far as Mr. Trump is concerned, Russia is not responsible for the war that has devastated its neighbor. Instead, he suggests that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s invasion of it.” Following the meeting of the American and Russian delegations, The Times complains that “American officials did not dwell on Russia’s violation of international law in attacking Ukraine.”

About this, The Times is right. Trump is wrong more for what he did not say than for what he did. “By contrast,” The Times says, “Mr. Trump uttered not one word of reproach for Mr. Putin or for Russia.” Putin is to blame for the illegal invasion of Ukraine, and the discussions on ending the war must put this on the record and address it, at least in security guarantees for Ukraine.

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New York Times Complains Labeling Mexican Cartels Terrorist Organizations Will ‘Hurt The U.S. Economy’

As Donald Trump gets to work on his agenda, left-wing media organizations like The New York Times are already making fools of themselves.

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order designating Mexican drug cartels as foreign terror organizations.

His order stated:

The Cartels have engaged in a campaign of violence and terror throughout the Western Hemisphere that has not only destabilized countries with significant importance for our national interests but also flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs.

The Cartels functionally control, through a campaign of assassination, terror, rape, and brute force nearly all illegal traffic across the southern border of the United States.

In certain portions of Mexico, they function as quasi-governmental entities, controlling nearly all aspects of society.

The Cartels’ activities threaten the safety of the American people, the security of the United States, and the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere.

Their activities, proximity to, and incursions into the physical territory of the United States pose an unacceptable national security risk to the United States.

However, The New York Times is now arguing that this move will damage the U.S. economy because of the risk of businesses in both countries violating sanctions against terrorist groups.

Their article states.

The foreign terrorist designation could lead to severe penalties — including substantial fines, asset seizures and criminal charges — on companies and individuals found to be paying ransom or extortion payments.

U.S. companies could also be ensnared by standard payments made to Mexican companies that a cartel controls without the American companies’ knowledge.

As a result, companies in the risk-averse American financial sector may simply refuse to wire money to a Mexican factory, for example, to facilitate cross-border production and trade, or to wire money between personal accounts.

…

If money transfer companies like Western Union also stop transactions to Mexico over worries about properly vetting Mexican clients, it could affect the remittances the country relies on.

That would be devastating for the Mexican economy, which received $63.3 billion in remittances in 2023, nearly 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

The Mexican peso has suffered as a result of the designation, as well as the looming threat of tariffs and trade barriers.

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NY Times Admits Polls May Be Underestimating Trump Again

The New York Times has suggested that polls in the run up to Tuesday’s election showing president Trump ahead of or level with Kamala Harris are likely to be underestimating Trump.

The Times’ Nate Cohen pointed out that the non response bias of their final polls was as bad as 2020, meaning that a trump supporters are less likely to engage in polling than Democrat supporters.

As commentator Collin Rugg notes, a highly dubious poll highlighted in the Des Moines Register is claiming that Harris has suddenly surged to a three point lead over Trump in Iowa.

The same poll had Trump up by 18 points over Biden in June. 

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NYT and Washington Post Push YouTube To Censor Election “Misinformation,” Lament Podcast Censorship Challenges

The New York Times, Media Matters for America, and The Washington Post are stepping up their pressure on YouTube to demonetize and censor election “misinformation,” particularly statements that the 2020 election was rigged or insecure.

As these organizations push for stricter speech suppression, questions are raised about the implications for open discourse on the platform and the legacy media and activist attempts to get it shut down.

In the past months, Media Matters undertook an extensive review of content from 30 prominent conservative YouTube channels, identifying 286 videos containing what they classified as election misinformation, which collectively garnered over 47 million views. This report, backed by verification from The New York Times, pointed out that YouTube profited from ads placed on many of these videos.

Highlighted in the Times article were figures such as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, all of whom have voiced skepticism regarding the legitimacy of various aspects of the 2020 election process.

According to The New York Times, “Giuliani, the former New York mayor, posted more false electoral claims to YouTube than any other major commentator in the research group.”

Surprisingly, YouTube’s stance, as relayed by a spokeswoman, stresses the importance of open political discourse: “The ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial, is an important value — especially in the midst of election season,” she stated, defending the platform’s approach to content management.

However, YouTube did still remove three of the videos that Media Matters flagged.

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Bret Stephens Says the US Must Attack Iran

High upon his perch atop the New York Times editorial page, Bret Stephens offers a full-throated call for the United States to launch a war of aggression against Iran.  This featured opinion piece in the “paper of record” is noteworthy because it reflects the detritus that’s currently swirling around the minds of U.S. foreign policy elites concerning a big war with Iran.

Mr. Stephens serves up so many glaring omissions in this op-ed that when you finish reading it your eyes will burn as if you had been staring at the sun.  He begins with a paragraph-long quotation from the late Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who Israel assassinated on September 27th with over 80 two-thousand pound “bunker buster” bombs in the Dahiya Shia quarter of South Beirut.  He uses the quotation to strongly suggest that Nasrallah’s only real motive in fighting against the Israelis was to “kill all Jews.”  Stephens knows how to get a rise out of his readers.

By smearing Nasrallah as nothing more than an “antisemite” he purposely overlooks the reasons for Hezbollah’s existence in the first place.  There was no Hezbollah until after the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its military occupation of the country that lasted for eighteen years.  The IDF and their Lebanese proxies killed approximately 17,000 civilians.  Nasrallah was born in Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon on August 31, 1960.  He was a young man during the years of Israeli occupation; and like many Lebanese, he wasn’t very keen on seeing a large piece of his country become another Gaza Strip or West Bank.  In 1985, a new resistance group bounded onto the scene as part of the ongoing struggle to push the Israelis out of Lebanon: Hezbollah, “The Party of God.”

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The Sins Of The Gray Lady (Or Why The Press Hates You)

Readers of the New York Times know the news may change, but the message is always the same in their paper of record. It will play up every Republican kerfuffle and downplay Democratic scandals while presenting the choice between the two parties as a Manichean struggle between good and evil. Now clad in rainbow colors, the Gray Lady will, in the name of inclusion, celebrate a wide range of heretofore marginal behaviors – homosexuality, polyamory and transgenderism – while sowing divisions by separating Americans into warring camps based on race, gender, and ethnicity.

The transformation of the Times, and much of American journalism, during the last decade from a traditional newspaper that largely reports the news into the daily call sheet for the “woke” revolution that seeks to undermine the traditional pillars of American society is now so complete that it may seem unremarkable. Both its defenders and critics know exactly what to expect when they open its pages. Such acceptance, or resignation, is dangerous because it normalizes the great sin of the New York Times: the betrayal of hitherto bedrock journalistic principles of fairness, objectivity and pluralism that made the Fourth Estate a pillar of American democracy during the 20th century.

The paper’s radical reinvention of itself into a results-oriented tool serving leftwing social change has happened quickly – the Times of 2010 bears little resemblance to the paper published today. But enough time has passed so that we can identify both the key incidents and the dynamic political, cultural and economic forces that have transformed America’s most influential newspaper, and thus the nation itself.

That story began to come into focus on August 7, 2016 – the day American journalism crossed the Rubicon. That’s when the New York Times published a front-page article arguing that Donald Trump was such an “abnormal” candidate that “normal standards” of reporting on him were henceforth “untenable.” From now on, the paper made clear, the news columns of the Times would be taking sides. “If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous,” Jim Rutenberg wrote, “then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional.”

The article never explained why the normal standards of objectivity were insufficient. If Trump were truly a danger to the Republic, wouldn’t an honest accounting of his behavior be enough to expose him?

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NY Times Calls Trump Would-Be Assassin Ryan Routh a ‘Crusader For Causes Large and Small’

The New York Times penned another glowing profile of Trump would-be assassin Ryan Routh, portraying him as a “crusader for causes large and small.”

Just two days after Routh was arrested on two gun charges after he had been waiting in the bushes of Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course with a scope-mounted rifle and GoPro camera, the New York Times published a flattering editorial of the 58-year-old mercenary.

From The Times:

How Mr. Routh, a peripatetic activist and building contractor with an extensive criminal record, came to possess a semiautomatic rifle, learn of Mr. Trump’s weekend whereabouts and wait for him on the edge of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., remains unknown.

But a review of public records and Mr. Routh’s writings, as well as interviews with people who knew him, suggest that he saw himself as an active and influential participant in momentous world events, while becoming estranged from at least some of his family and nearly destitute in the process.

Mr. Routh has been a serial crusader for causes large and small dating back to at least 1996, when he campaigned against graffiti in Greensboro, N.C., where he lived for decades. In July, he urged President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the social media platform X to visit the victims of the assassination attempt against Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., writing that “Trump will never do anything for them.”

“Show the world what compassion and humanity is all about,” Mr. Routh wrote on July 16.

In other social media posts, he tagged world leaders and celebrities like Elton John and Elon Musk, often providing his phone number and email as if expecting a response.

The paper described how Routh began recruiting for Ukraine after he was denied a place on the frontline due to his age and lack of experience.

“Mr. Routh had set up a website called ‘Fight for Ukraine,’ in which he explained how to travel there and join the Ukrainian army as a foreign fighter. For the better part of a year, his main focus was getting hundreds of Afghan soldiers, who had fled after their country’s government collapsed, to fight for Ukraine,” the Times wrote.

While The Times noted that some of his recruiting methods were illegal, the paper commended his tenacity.

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NY Times Turns On Kamala! Publishes NUMEROUS OpEds on ‘Weak,’ ‘Phony’ and ‘Ignorant’ Democrat Nominee

We didn’t expect this on our 2024 bingo card!

The Old Gray Lady turned on Kama-Kama-Kama Kama-chamelion.

Has The New York Times turned on Kamala, the nation’s most unpopular vice president?

It’s hard to imagine.  The Times on Friday posted a hit on Kamala Harris titled, “Joy is Not a Strategy.”

Then, on Monday, The NY Times published an op-ed titled, “Trump Can win on character,” something that must have made the leftist elites vomit in their mouths.

It didn’t take long for the happy boost from the fantasy convention to flatline.  On Monday night, former Biden spox Jen Psaki faced a harsh reality when Don Lemon told her that “no one” knows who Kamala Harris is in the swing states he visited last week.

Maybe that’s good news, though? The more people learn about Kamala, the less they like her.

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NYT Uncritically Reported Israel’s Version of Golan Bombing

As the US-backed genocide in Gaza continues, US media assist in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to widen the war, parroting the words of the aggressor. A consequential example of US press support for escalation was Western media’s coverage of the July 27 strike that killed 12 Druze children on a soccer field near the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

Israel and the US immediately blamed the Iran-backed Lebanese organization Hezbollah for the strike—citing Israeli intelligence reports of an Iranian Falaq-1 missile being found at the soccer field (BBC, 7/28/24).

But, in a move that Hezbollah expert Amal Saad called “uncharacteristic” (Drop Site, 7/30/24), the group adamantly denied responsibility for the attack. Saad, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, noted that targeting the Syrian Golan Heights—where many inhabitants are hostile towards Israel—would be “illogical” and “provocative” for Hezbollah. Further, if the organization had accidentally committed an attack, Saad pointed to a precedent of the group issuing a public apology in a case of misfire, with the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrullah, visiting families of victims.

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