The New York Times ran an appropriately sober editorial Sunday, by the whole Editorial Board, condemning white nationalist terrorism and the sorry state of our great nation, and calling on law enforcement and political leaders to do more to fight the hateful ideology. It was a New York Times editorial, as starchy and uprighteous as you'd expect, and starts off by pointing out that if the two mass shootings over the weekend had been perpetrated by Islamic radicals, we'd already be well into a full mobilization of government to fight the jihadists, complete with equivocal regard for civil rights when it came to mosques and online forums.
No American would settle for "thoughts and prayers" as a counterterrorism strategy. No American would accept laying the blame for such an attack on video games[.]
All well and good, and had the editorial been written a day later, it might also have noted that Donald Trump's teleprompter reading exercise would certainly not have stopped at merely calling on all Americans to speak with one voice against Radical Islamic Terror.
It was a perfectly normal New York Times editorial, which made one completely batshit paragraph near the end stick out even more.
It came as part of a recitation of what should be done: All good people should condemn white nationalists, tech companies should refuse to host white nationalists, advertisers should pull their ads from programs that "flirt with white nationalism or advocate it outright" (yes, that means Fox News, and Tucker Carlson especially), and so on. And then this steaming pile of a weird call for action:
Those who sympathize with the white nationalist ideology but who deplore the violence should work closely with law enforcement to see that fellow travelers who may be prone to violence do not have access to firearms like semiautomatic assault-style weapons that are massively destructive.
Somewhere, a turd in a punchbowl read that and whistled in admiration.
Yep, it's time for the nonviolent elements of the racist white power movement to behave responsibly and work to rein in the more excitable members of their community. Or at least work for gun control. What's next, some praise for the White Citizens' Councils for nonviolent work to protect segregation? After all, they eschewed the Klan's tactics of bombings, lynchings, and terror. Good on them for their moderation.
Maybe there are some in the white supremacist community who deplore violence -- they're probably the very fine people who love them some Confederate statues but were shocked, shocked to find themselves at a march organized by Nazis.
Could the good grey editorial board have been attempting snark here? Maybe that graf was intended as a counterpoint to what the authors said would surely happen in the wake of an attack by Islamist terrorists:
In predictable corners, moderate Muslims would be excoriated for not speaking out more forcefully against the extremists in their midst. [...] Politicians might go so far as to call for a total ban on Muslims entering the United States "until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on."
If so, someone should have thought the comparison through a bit more: Is it a great idea to suggest the average Muslim is roughly equivalent to the average white supremacist?
If that's what the editorial board was aiming for, we have a better suggestion: Maybe it's time to consider all white Americans responsible for cleaning up the hatred and ideology of white supremacy in their community. They'd better root out the rot, because normal people just aren't buying that "white people are peaceful" line anymore.
Then again, we guess we shouldn't expect a hell of a lot of coherent thought from the New York Times, whose first edition this morning carried this headline about Donald Trump's teleprompter speech: "TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM."
If we thought the Times capable of irony, we might appreciate the ambiguity there: Is Trump urging Americans to unite against racism (which his speech did, superficially)? Or did he simply urge Americans to unify, instead of urging racism, the way he usually does?
The second print edition went out with the far less ambiguous "ASSAILING HATE, BUT NOT GUNS," and even the hed of the secondary story suggested Trump's speech might not have been an outpouring from his broken heart.
As Stephen said in the Wonkette Sekrit Chatcave, the New York Times is the Inspector Clousseau of newspapers.
[NYT / Photo: JavierDo, Creative Commons license 3.0]
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