If you're part of the American left and you don't know how to feel about a certain issue, you can always count on the New York Times to tell you what's morally right. Earlier this week after Neo-Nazis feuded with Neo-Commies in Charlottesville, Virginia; President Trump was criticized for his reaction to the incident. People said he was too slow to disavow white supremacists and that he was using a "dog whistle" to speak to the alt-right.
Enter the New York Times. Yesterday New York City's most infamous news outlet ran the following headline...
In the article author Lindy West criticizes Trump for his reaction to the violence at the event:
Saturday afternoon, President Trump, in a statement that should taint his family name until human extinction, decried the violence “on many sides.” He personally did not mention white supremacy specifically until Monday, and then only under fierce pressure from the public and the media. Abruptly but unsurprisingly, on Tuesday afternoon, he doubled back to his original stance and again blamed “both sides.”
New York Times, like a lot of left leaning news outlets, is damning Trump for what he didn't immediately say: that “Neo-Nazis” are bad. Trump claims he didn't immediately identify the white supremacists groups at the event because he was waiting to receive more information from his advisers about who was there and what they were doing leading up to the most violent parts of the weekend. Of course, the President did disavow bigotry and violence, and eventually used language that seemed to resemble what the left was asking for, but it didn’t happen until two days latter. Much like Obama with Occupy and the BlackLivesMatter movements, he didn't specifically name the groups responsible for displaying the worst behavior at the Virginia rally [an admonition that most reasonable people would grant to both the alt-right and Antifa].
In their angry diatribe the New York Times also went to extreme lengths to play down the behavior of the left-leaning extremists at the event:
On one side, you see, you have white nationalists and neo-Nazis carrying assault weapons and advocating for a white, Christian, fascist ethno-state in America. On the other side, you have people who would prefer not to be systematically exterminated.
Strange that the NY Times would point out how the alt-right demonstrators were armed with weapons, but not Antifa (who carried with them a variety of baseball bats, pepper-spray, riot-shields and balloons filled with what was described as either urine or vinegar). If the alt-right went to Virginia looking for a fight, how would your average non-involved individual describe the actions of the leftist extremists at this event? Going through the video footage from the rally that has surfaced online, it’s not difficult to pinpoint moments when Antifa and left-leaning individuals engaged in violent activity. While someone who doesn’t live in Charlottesville might see this footage and think, “Yeah, the Nazis got what they deserved,” imagine being a resident of this geographic region. Do you really think the locals wanted a race war in their backyard? If the alt-right’s demonstration was bad, then the left’s reaction to their vulgar behavior clearly escalated the tension.
But, the New York Time's glorification of left-wing extremists aside, it's their criticism of what Trump said that's really notable here [or rather, what he didn't say]. As I said earlier, the New York Times is claiming that two days was too long to wait for the President to use vivid language that criticized white supremacists. They wanted it to happen sooner. They believe this would have been the morally-righteous way to respond to the violent rally. And maybe they're right - but if they are it means they're guilty of the same behavior on a far more extreme scale because in the NY Times tried to cover up the holocaust.
Stop for a moment and forget it's the year 2017. Re-imagine your world as being the mid-20th century at the height of the Nazi's occupation of Europe. This was the time when the Nazi's most horrific crimes against humanity were at their peak. The concentration camps and gas chambers of the holocaust were the primary basis of mankind's outrage over the Nazi-regime – even school-aged children know this to be true. There's nobody that would disagree with that notion. Lots of totalitarian regimes have attacked other nations, spreading the concept of imperialism, but it was the Nazi's treatment of minorities that put them on a new level of disgusting and grotesque behavior. The holocaust was one of the worst things to happen to human beings in the history of the world – this is indisputably true.
And the New York Times tried to cover it all up.
From the beginning of World War 2 until its end the NY Times actively published articles about the action overseas. They published over 23,000 stories during that time period. Roughly half of those stories - about 11,500 - were specifically about the war. And of those 11,500 articles the NY Times mentioned the holocaust about two dozen times. That means the NY Times acknowledged the existence of the holocaust roughly 0.22% of the time that they were covering news about the war.
The NY-Times, who once called themselves the "paper of record", literally tried to downplay the horrors of the holocaust. President Franklin Roosevelt claimed to have read this paper every morning. Why wouldn't the NY Times editors want to alert our Commander in Chief of one of the worst crimes against humanity in the history of the world? Because they certainly knew it was happening.
The answer is, unfortunately, exactly what you expect. According to many historians the NY Times were trying to mirror the opinions of American society at the time. In the 1930s and 40s antisemitism was not uncommon in America. In fact, it wasn't until July of 1942 that the NY Times finally acknowledged the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto when they published a story on the 7th page of their paper. They didn’t even consider it to be a front-page-worthy news story. This was a strange business move for a paper that was, at the time, published by a Jewish man named Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Sulzberger, by the way, once published a letter in the paper to explain that, while he is a Jew, he didn't feel any affiliation with "those people" beyond his religious beliefs.
Finally the war ended and there was no more Nazi-related news for the NY Times to cover. Time passed by, weeks turned into months turned into years turned into decades.
And then, finally in September of 1996, a half a century since the end of WW2, the NY Times issued the following statement:
“The Times has long been criticized for grossly underplaying the Holocaust while it was taking place. Clippings from the paper show that the criticism is valid.”
It took over 5 decades for the NY Times to acknowledge the horrors of the holocaust – the worst atrocity in modern history.
Now I ask you, was two days too long for President Trump to specifically acknowledge the white-supremacists in Virginia? Maybe five-decades would have been better? The NY Times certainly seems to think so.