Ep. 41 - The NYT Is Trash： An Historical Retrospective
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Summary
A writer in the New York Times accused Ben Shapiro, Molly Hemingway, Ben Domenech, and me of pandering to our audiences. On today's show, we will examine the various and sundry ways in which the NY Times is trash, an historical retrospective. Then, Ali Stuckey and Jacob Airy join the panel of deplorables to discuss Rex Tillerson's reported castration, a congressional candidate abducted by aliens, and the latest navel gazing meme in the wake of the Weinstein scandal.
Transcript
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A writer in the New York Times accused primarily Ben Shapiro, but also Molly Hemingway, Ben
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Domenech, and me of pandering to our audiences.
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So, playing against type as always, on today's show we will examine the various and sundry
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ways in which the New York Times is trash, an historical retrospective.
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Then, Ali Stuckey and Jacob Airy join the panel of deplorables to discuss Rex Tillerson's
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reported castration, a congressional candidate abducted by aliens, E.T., not S.A., and
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the latest navel-gazing Facebook meme in the wake of the Weinstein scandal.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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This Times piece may have been the great highlight of my weekend.
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It was called The Hollow Bravery of Ben Shapiro.
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And, look, I do not need to defend Ben Shapiro.
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Twitter excoriated this poor chick at the New York Times and really showed her piece to
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And I've never been one to accuse the New York Times of standards, but even below their
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paltry standards that they once had, perhaps just in my imagination.
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It linked to my episode last week or two weeks ago on Christopher Columbus.
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It just said this was evidence of pandering and frivolous journalism.
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It likes people taking history seriously and philosophy seriously.
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So if that's pandering, then I suppose we're pandering, right?
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We're pandering to people who want an alternative to anti-historical, ridiculous partisan narratives
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But it gave me this great opportunity today to take a brief walk down memory lane in all
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of the ways that the New York Times is absolute garbage.
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It's true that campuses tend to be hostile places to conservatives like Mr. Shapiro, Charles
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But the notion that they are the cultural underdogs is bogus.
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What Mr. Shapiro does on campus is shadowboxing, meant to pander to his conservative fans whose
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If he wanted to be genuinely brave, he'd challenge some of the wrongheaded ideas held by his right-wing
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Instead, he uses his megaphone, the website The Daily Wire, to reinforce what they already
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Now, I'm not sure of this, but I think Jane, who wrote this article, should have Googled
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Ben Shapiro, the leading anti-Trump voice during the election, the guy whose entire year was
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spent making enemies out of conservatives because he told them things they didn't want to hear.
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This is the guy that she holds up as an example of someone who panders to the right.
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It – she goes on – I guess the more egregious claim – Ben is Ben.
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But the more egregious claim is that conservatism is the dominant culture in America.
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When can you go look at a poster, even on the Internet, even with censoring of conservative
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videos by YouTube, by Facebook, alleged censoring by Twitter?
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Where can you look where conservatism and conservative thoughts are not under fire?
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People being fired, having to leave their companies.
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Brandon Eich at Mozilla forced to leave his company because he supported the definition
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of marriage that everyone agreed on until the day before yesterday.
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People are being fired from Google for passing around basically unobjectionable memos questioning
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You talk about the hollow bravery of Ben Shapiro.
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When he went to Berkeley, it cost $600,000 to defend Berkeley against a 5'9 Jewish guy
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who's completely in the mainstream of conservative culture and is even so nuanced about it that
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He calls it balls and strikes and calls it like he sees it.
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It's basically like the president coming to town.
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They're shutting down the city, but one conservative who has mainstream ideas is so terrifying to
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the left, so unpopular, so censored that it costs that much money to bring him into town.
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I don't think we need to go much further than that.
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I'm, believe it or not, even shocked that the Times would run it.
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But then I rethought about this and I thought, lest we think this is an isolated incident,
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Just today, there was a headline in the New York Times that said,
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Aiding transgender case, Sessions defies his image on civil rights.
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And he's defying that image because it's a false image.
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It's a slanderous, smearing narrative that you're painting of him.
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The whole article was about what a terrible guy Sessions is, and then it just explains away all of his work.
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Critics and supporters agree that Mr. Sessions is more likely to pursue civil rights matters in individual cases rather than trying to address larger systemic issues as the Obama administration did.
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He has promised to punish any police conduct that violates civil rights, for example, but is skeptical of efforts to force department-wide overhauls.
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He supports prosecuting those who commit violence against transgender victims but opposes reading the law in a way that broadly extends discrimination protection for transgender people.
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This is not that complicated for people who aren't in the ideological bubble of the New York Times.
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He doesn't think we need a gigantic federal government that's solving all of our problems for us because as it tries to solve those problems, it will create many more that we can't foresee.
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So, yes, he's prosecuting these cases, but he doesn't believe that we need these sweeping powers created by unaccountable, godless bureaucracies that are not accountable to the American people.
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This example here is called the Fox-Butterfield effect.
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But it's an example specifically in the New York Times where they look at a situation and they see a paradox where really there's a causal connection.
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So they say it doesn't make any sense that Jeff Sessions would prosecute these cases, but he doesn't want huge sweeping programs from the federal government.
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Of course it makes perfect sense that he understands the role of his department and it comports perfectly well with his view of politics and his view of the government.
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Wall Street Journal editor admonishes reporters over Trump coverage.
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Gerard Baker, the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, has faced unease and frustration in his newsroom over the stewardship of the newspaper's coverage of President Trump, which some journalists there say has lacked toughness and verb.
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Some journalists there or some journalists at the New York Times.
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He said, sorry, this is commentary dressed up as news reporting.
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So he's taking some of the stories that were too hard on Trump.
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He said, you're injecting your commentary here.
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He wanted to say, could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?
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So he's suggesting that the news organization do what news organizations are supposed to do.
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The only way they can view this is that it's soft coverage.
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It's keeping the opinion separate from the news reporting.
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This used to be done or at least attempted in the mainstream media, but for years it has not been, which is why you see the nonsense that comes out of the New York Times as it does.
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Then there was a letter from the publisher, to our readers, from the publisher and executive editor, and President Trump described this as an apology for all the terrible coverage that they did of him and their awful predictions about the election, none of which came true.
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The paper pushed back and said the New York Times never apologized, but the New York Times public editor herself, Liz Spade, admits that they blew it too.
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So in this letter, they say, after such an erratic and unpredictable election, there are inevitable questions.
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Did Donald Trump's sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?
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What forces and strains in America drove this divisive election and outcome?
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The second part, the second sentence, that's the part.
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Yes, you did misunderstand half of this country.
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But then, and you acknowledge this, you apologize for this, and then you immediately follow it up and say, what led to this awful, divisive, terrible election?
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It's only divisive because you make it divisive.
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Half the people vote for one guy, roughly half vote for the other guy.
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But only you, because of your horror at Donald Trump and your total inability to understand why anybody would oppose your narrative, would vote for your preferred candidate, only then is it divisive.
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And so even in their apology, of course they don't see it as an apology because it's a false apology.
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They're saying we did something wrong, but really we didn't do anything wrong.
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It was on half of the country that made us do it.
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And every one that I picked out turned out not to be a lie.
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They said, quote, this was a quote of Donald Trump's.
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You had millions of people that now aren't insured anymore.
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The Times adds, the real number is less than one million, according to the Urban Institute.
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Sure, I guess it's according to the Urban Institute.
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But of course they can't disclose that in their reporting.
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And even the Washington Post admits that after Obamacare was passed,
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28 million people still lacked health insurance.
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And it's true that many millions got health insurance because of Obamacare.
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What they leave out is that they had previously lost their health insurance.
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Barack Obama said, if you want to keep your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
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Another one in the Trump lies section, it's gotten to a point where it is not, this is
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from Trump, it's gotten to a point where it is not even being reported.
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And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it.
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And the New York Times adds, terrorism has been reported on, often in detail.
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The question is, what is the volume of stories being run?
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Are they spending 10 hours on one thing, on Russia, which you'll notice nobody is talking
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about anymore because it was completely frivolous, and then one hour on terrorism?
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Or are they prioritizing as the American people would prioritize?
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White supremacist Dylann Roof shot up that historically black church in Charleston.
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There was wall-to-wall coverage of this for weeks.
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There's a national conversation about Confederate monuments and Confederate flags and guns and
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Recently, a Sudanese immigrant, Emmanuel Kadega-Sampson, shot up a historically white church in Nashville.
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The only reason the shooting wasn't worse than it ended up being is that the usher there,
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who the guy had pistol whipped, was able to wrestle him to the ground, caused the shooter
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to shoot himself accidentally, and then pulled out his own gun because he was carrying because
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they were in Nashville, and that's what people do in Nashville.
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Of course, the coverage of this was paltry, barely existent compared to the coverage of
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Now, both cases, it appears, were rationally motivated.
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Dylann Roof admitted it, and Sampson, this killer in Nashville, wrote a note that appears
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They are parallel stories, but it contradicts the New York Times narrative, and if it contradicts
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their narrative, they're just not going to give it too much ink.
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Another example is the Orlando nightclub shooting.
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This was the New York Times headline, Orlando gunmen attacks a gay nightclub, leaving 50 dead.
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All of the Dylann Roof coverage mentioned his name, but they don't mention his name because
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Nowhere in that headline does it mention that Mateen swore allegiance to ISIS, that he was
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But all of the New York Times coverage of Dylann Roof, that uses his name because that name,
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it's clear from the context of that story what was behind that shooting.
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And now, you know, the Dylann Roof brings us to another lovely New York Times headline.
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Quote, Sessions, Trump, Dylann Roof, your Tuesday evening briefing.
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Jeff Sessions is the Attorney General of the United States, former esteemed senator from
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There's a Donald Trump, real estate magnate, reality TV star, president of the United States,
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and a white supremacist killer named Dylann Roof.
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But the Times, they can't even hide it sometimes.
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There is so, I think, especially in the age of Donald Trump, although they behaved this
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way during George W. Bush, they get so riled up.
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And they humiliate themselves in headlines such as that.
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How about this op-ed that the New York Times allowed to run?
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Quote, Why We Are on Hunger Strike in Israel's Prisons.
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Okay, it's a pro-Palestinian piece about the alleged occupation, all the alleged atrocities
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Now, the article originally stated Marwan Barghouti is a Palestinian leader and parliamentarian.
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Except the New York Times public editor, Liz Spade, later wrote a piece, even she, criticizing
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the Times, for omitting that Barghouti is a convicted murderer who is serving five consecutive
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He's a vicious murderer who's serving five life sentences for killing innocent civilians.
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No, no, no, the Times editors, we've got to leave that one out.
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Now, trash is not a new quality at the New York Times.
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In 2004, reporter Fox Butterfield published a headline that would make him legendary.
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The headline is, quote, More inmates, despite drop-in crime.
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So, more people are going to prison despite the drop-in crime.
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I think Wall Street Journal's James Taranto named it that.
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The Butterfield effect is when someone makes a statement that is ludicrous on its face,
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but it reveals the speaker's own biases, right?
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So, they express it as though it's a paradox when really there's a causal relationship between
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Possibly because we're throwing all of the criminals into prison.
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But to Fox Butterfield, to the New York Times, they're living in an ideological fantasy land
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wherein there can't be a connection between imprisonment and crime.
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We all know how unjust the prison system is anyway.
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We should probably open up all of the jails anyway.
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And this effect, this bias, pervades their reporting.
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Who can forget Lincoln Steffens, the New York Times reporter who returned from the Soviet
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Union and declared, I've seen the future and it works.
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This was what Bill Buckley reacted to when he launched National Review.
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He said, a conservative is one who stands at the word history yelling stop.
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He was referring to that, the future and it works.
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That future doesn't work, but he was shilling for the Soviet Union.
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Of course, this isn't the only times the New York Times has shilled for the Soviet Union.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Walter Durante famously wrote a series of 11
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articles on the Soviet Union in 1931, I believe it was.
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He denied the man-made famine that killed between 7 and 10 million people.
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That, this goes pretty, this is almost a century back now.
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And I will, I will talk more about the New York Times in my final thought, what we should do about it.
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But now, I think we have to get away from fake news.
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So it's time to bring on our excellent panel of deplorables.
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But, listen, I want you to be able to watch it.
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I'm hoping, I know they've got a lot of great stuff to say.
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We have to talk about aliens, illegal aliens and Martians.
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We have to talk about Bob Corker saying Rex Tillerson is castrated.
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But you can't watch it unless you go to thedailywire.com right now and subscribe.
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We want to thank everybody who already has subscribed.
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You'll get the Ben Shapiro Show, biggest podcast on the right.
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The Leftist Tears Tumblr, the single most coveted item in the United States, I believe.
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It is the perfect way to just collect all of the Hollywood tears, all of the news tears.
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I'd bring it outside of the New York Times building, and then I could take a shower and
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It goes really well with a little Daily Wire punch over here.
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You pour that in, it makes a delicious cocktail.
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Go over there right now, and we'll be right back.
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We need to rush right into all of the important news on the memes.
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There is the Me Too campaign, which has been launched on Facebook and Twitter.
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If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote Me Too as a status, we
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might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.
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So then you might have noticed your Facebook feeds have just got a lot of lefty people
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Allie, there seems to be a pretty wide gulf between sexual assault and sexual harassment.
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Is this an important gesture to show how widespread the problem of sexual misconduct is, or is
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it disrespectful and absurd to conflate rape with being winked at at work?
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I also think that there's a problem when sexual assault or the idea of sexual assault and people
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being sexually assaulted becomes a trend in which people feel like they have to jump on
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And I think that's kind of what we see happening here.
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If you haven't been sexually assaulted or sexually harassed, then you're thinking back, trying
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to rack your brain, oh, maybe that employer that one time did wink at me, or maybe he did
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And it absolutely minimizes the cases of real assault and harassment that are happening when
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people are simply adding themselves to a trend to either look or sound cool.
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A girl wrote, you know, I wasn't sure if I'd write Me Too.
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But then I just thought even the fact that I couldn't tell, I wasn't certain, you know,
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if the guy winking at me, if that constituted it, that made me realize that I am a part
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Jacob, sexual harassment can include unwanted sexual advances.
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Sexual assault can be a guy at a bar, a drunk guy, you know, trying to kiss you a little
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too much or being too aggressive in his come-ons.
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And there may be indeed a spike in sexual assault on campuses or wherever when there's
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a lot of booze and no social mores and people who have a lot of hormones that are flying
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But the same feminists who insist on conflating harassment and assault also seem to be the
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ones who are supporting this hookup culture, this culture that makes sex basically not
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So therefore, if sex isn't a big deal, then why is sexual assault so much worse than
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Can one coherently list sexual harassment among the most widespread social problems but also
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I mean, people were saying, oh, when the Harvey Weinstein story broke, people are saying,
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The creator of Family Guy, you know, he joked about it when he hosted the Academy Awards
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and he was saying, I was trying to bring attention to it.
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Why didn't you just say that he was a sexual harasser?
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I mean, if you really want to bring attention to it.
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So I think that, you know, all these ladies are coming forward and I think that it's important
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But these other people who said, well, I knew about it, but I just didn't say anything.
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I think that that is them encouraging this culture.
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There's not a rape culture on Yale University's campus.
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And that's a really difficult question to answer.
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If sex doesn't matter, if sex is just like any other act, it's like giving someone a high
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five, if sex is without any moral significance, then why is sexual assault so much worse than
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We would all agree that sexual assault is much worse than punching somebody in the face or
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Obviously, there is a moral weight to it, which flies in the face of the hookup culture that,
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But we'll stick to sexual organs because a new report from Bob Corker, the showboating
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Senator Bob Corker, suggests that the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been castrated.
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I want to ask about Senator Bob Corker, who said something about you.
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He says that you're one of the best things about the cabinet.
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And he's dismayed he thinks President Trump is constantly undermining you.
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This is a Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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He said that the president has, quote, castrated you before the world stage.
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Well, as I indicated earlier, Jake, I think this is an unconventional president.
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He uses unconventional techniques to motivate change.
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Again, I would say I am fully committed to his objectives.
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How he wants to use his own skills tactically to push things toward change, I'm there to
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That's all you, you're a cattle, you have a cattle ranch.
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You don't want to say anything about the Senate, Senator calling, suggesting you've been gelded
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But, Allie, the question remains, has Tillerson been castrated politically, if not physically?
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I also love how Jake Tapper brought up that he has a cattle ranch as his segue into that
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News is not his forte either, but definitely not comedy.
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Well, we have some people saying, okay, this was Trump playing good cop, bad cop.
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This was Trump's way of kind of, I guess, taking the credit for being tough on North Korea
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I kind of actually lean into that camp rather than thinking this was some big strategic heroic
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I think that he should leave diplomacy up to Rex Tillerson.
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We've already seen that that's not Trump's forte.
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But Tillerson also knows how much Trump values loyalty.
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And that's the game that he's playing with the media right now.
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And I have to say, I think he's doing a pretty good job of it.
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For a guy who spent his career as a private businessman, CEO of ExxonMobil, obviously you
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But he has been absolutely agile, completely adept in politics.
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Jacob, should Tillerson have answered the question about calling Trump a moron?
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In this interview, he said, you know, people say you called Trump a moron.
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And the question seems to me like the usual mainstream media treatment of, do you still
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Or should he say, I'm not going to dignify your question with a response?
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I think it would have been better if he had denied it.
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But I honestly don't see his, I'm not going to dignify that with a response.
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But I think either way he is saying, no, I did not.
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I'm not going to play this game with the mainstream media.
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Because Trump's mistrust of the media, the well-deserved mistrust, I think it trickles
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And so I think Tillerson's saying, look, I'm not going there.
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I think he's just saying, I'm not playing your game.
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I think that he was actually saying, or he wasn't saying that he didn't say that.
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I think that he would have flat out denied it if he had called Trump an effing moron.
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I think, and ironically enough, he said, you know, those are the games of Washington.
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I think that he was playing the game of Washington, which is good PR or want to be good PR.
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But I said, you know, I'm not going to dignify that with a response.
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That's a really, really good way of saying, oh my gosh, I don't want to talk about that.
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I'm really torn on this because I don't know if he called Trump a moron or not.
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I just certainly believe that in no instances should people be dignifying these little grade
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school questions from the mainstream media with a response.
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Even if, maybe he did call him a moron, but even if he didn't, I think that Tillerson should
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You know, Jake Tapper, you're supposed to be a serious news reporter.
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Mainstream media, you're supposed to be reporting news.
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I'm not going to mention which little insults I've thrown at my boss and colleague.
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It's just, it's below the dignity of the Office of Secretary of State.
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A congressional candidate claims to have been abducted by aliens at age seven.
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The Miami area politician, of course it was a Florida politician, Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera
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says, aliens brought her onto their space shift.
00:29:20.900
They predicted that ISIS would develop and they telepathically explained that God is
00:29:34.660
Allie, in the grand scheme of things, is this woman any nuttier than your average member
00:29:42.400
I would say the only difference between her and a Congress person is that she's owning
00:29:50.860
Yeah, I'm thinking she actually has a leg up on most people in Congress, that she's just
00:29:54.960
being honest about the fact that she's completely mentally unstable and she might not get anything
00:29:59.940
At least she's telling you beforehand, and honesty is something that she has more than the average
00:30:07.580
Some of those other psychopaths in Washington, they're able to hide their psychoses a little
00:30:14.220
And she, I think this was in Federalist 15, when Madison and Hamilton are explaining that
00:30:21.120
the purpose of the Congress is to throw all of the crazy psychopaths into one room so that
00:30:26.180
they could fight each other and not destroy the country.
00:30:32.200
Jacob, this woman claims that God is a universal energy, not a person.
00:30:36.740
Which seems to favor pantheism over a theistic religion, such as Christianity or Judaism.
00:30:45.840
They say, you know, the universe is really good to me.
00:30:50.280
The universe is bringing it all together, right?
00:30:52.780
They talk about material things instead of metaphysical things.
00:30:55.820
C.S. Lewis claims that this sort of pantheism is the natural state of man.
00:31:01.380
This is the natural temptation of man in thinking about his surroundings and that theistic religion
00:31:07.600
only comes from the ancient Greeks and the ancient Jews, basically, who realize there's
00:31:14.320
Are all people naturally pantheists, both crazy congressional candidates and regular old
00:31:22.060
I think that if you really get down to it, everyone has had some sort of cathartic metaphysical
00:31:28.500
experience, but they don't want to admit that there is a God out there because then they
00:31:36.360
And that's why Ahn Ren said she was an atheist originally.
00:31:39.400
Later, she came back and said, no, I'm just smart.
00:31:42.440
But I honestly think, yeah, people want to believe in something bigger than themselves,
00:31:50.200
So I think, yes, we're predisposed to this pantheism because it gives us a reason to
00:31:54.760
believe in something without any consequences to our actions.
00:31:58.980
Allie, looking around the world at our situation today, is it more likely that we're being
00:32:03.880
telepathically controlled by aliens or that there is a just and loving God?
00:32:09.140
Yeah, well, I think C.S. Lewis also said if there's a longing inside of us for something
00:32:13.560
other than this world or bigger than this world, there must be something actually bigger
00:32:18.040
And I think that that is a commonality that all of us have innately, that we have this
00:32:23.560
And exactly like Jacob said, we want to attach it to something.
00:32:27.300
But instead of attaching it to something that might have moral standard that's going to
00:32:31.280
demand an action, we want to attach it to this relative amorphous, crazy being, ethereal
00:32:39.320
being like the universe or energy or vibes or something like that.
00:32:42.880
Something that's going to make us feel good, but not actually have us do something.
00:32:46.180
I think that we're going in the direction of moral relativity, which is why you're seeing,
00:32:53.440
but we're also going in the direction of wanting to feel good.
00:32:56.800
And so I think that we're going more towards agnosticism than we are atheism.
00:33:02.360
We want to believe that there is something bigger that's going to send us good vibes and
00:33:05.800
good feelings, not something that's going to tell us what to do.
00:33:08.840
And I think that's why we're seeing this kind of a pantheistic, ethereal, weird, I don't
00:33:18.800
But it's certainly becoming, I guess, more prominent when members of Congress are espousing
00:33:28.740
Both of you touched on it, that we're afraid of these moral standards.
00:33:34.940
So then the thing that's higher than us has to be physical.
00:33:39.160
It has to be the aliens or it has to be the universe.
00:33:44.440
You can't derive a moral standard from a physical thing.
00:33:47.860
So we have to move away from these metaphysical gods into physical gods, whatever that may be.
00:33:53.720
Otherwise, we're going to have to feel bad, man, and not have all the good feels, you know?
00:34:00.860
Allie Stuckey, conservative millennial from The Blaze.
00:34:14.140
Andrew Klavan calls The New York Times a former newspaper because, he says,
00:34:18.980
they used to be a decent paper until they completely sold out as a mouthpiece for the Democrat Party.
00:34:25.020
The reporters, as opposed to the editors and opinion writers at The New York Times,
00:34:30.840
But The Times has always had a strange relationship with the truth.
00:34:34.060
And over the past decade and a half, it has decayed into utter trash.
00:34:38.540
Some Republicans fall prey to their promise of mainstream or left-wing validation.
00:34:45.780
whom The New York Times would praise when he criticized Republicans,
00:34:48.960
only later to smear him when he ran against one of their guys.
00:34:52.680
The promise here is that The New York Times can offer the patina of credibility,
00:34:57.280
a desirable sheen for politicians, artists, and cultural figures.
00:35:04.040
The only patina or sheen it can offer is muck because it is premised on a lie
00:35:08.900
that The New York Times offers fearless, unbiased journalism,
00:35:12.580
when in reality they are the most powerful Democrat communications firm in the country.
00:35:17.060
To cite a personal example that gives me endless joy,
00:35:20.640
my best-selling political tome, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide,
00:35:25.140
outsold the number one New York Times best-selling book the week that it came out
00:35:31.800
But The New York Times refused to name it on their list.
00:35:34.640
Unlike virtually every other news source in the world,
00:35:38.940
only finally running an op-ed that half-mentioned my book
00:35:42.280
in order to suggest a handful of humorless blank book titles that mocked Republicans,
00:35:47.340
Ted Cruz's friends at work, that sort of thing.
00:35:56.340
seeking their favor or indulging their nonsense.
00:36:06.320
Tune in to Andrew Klavan's conversation tomorrow,
00:36:08.300
and also turn back here, and we'll do our show all over again.
00:36:32.140
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