Motus Mentis

If any of you had any lingering illusions about the New York Times being any sort of impartial “news” agency, you can put them to rest. In an all-hands staff meeting last week, executive editor Dean Baquet announced in explicit terms that, the paper’s propaganda war against Donald Trump having suffered a defeat in the Russian-collusion campaign, it would now pivot to attacking both Mr. Trump and the American nation itself as irredeemably racist. It is committing itself to what it calls the “1619 Project” (named for the year the first African slaves were brought to the North American continent) and will devote the next two years to persuading its readers that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”

This is startlingly irresponsible. At a time when social cohesion is collapsing before our eyes, public discourse is as venomous as it has been at any point in our history, and both historians and laymen warn that we seem to be drifting toward civil war, the Times has chosen to fan the flames of faction and hatred. And where the Times goes, so goes half the nation: what was already a bitterly polarized national election will now become a holy war, and very possibly a race war.

It is apt that this follows by only a few days the essay by Michael Anton that we linked to last week, and from which we excerpted this passage:

This is how the script goes: target a complex system that has been in place for centuries or longer; impose a new agenda in conflict with natural limits; stress that system beyond the breaking point; blame the inevitable reactions less on actual, individual bad actors than on an entire ecosystem of bad people; punish those bad people as a class; impose mass “reeducation” and “training” via ham-fisted propaganda; intensify the stresses on the system even further.

The people at the Times know very well what the effect of this “project” will be: by intensifying the zeal of its own army of cryptoreligious crusaders, it seeks to encourage new extremes of policy and local action against the enemy (i.e., traditionally minded white Americans). It will accelerate the denunciation and repudiation of every aspect of the Founding, and of the greatest names in American history and the national mythos. Washington, Jefferson, Madison — where will these names be in a few years if the Times has its way? If it is the duty of True Believers to cast out sin, and the American nation and its Constitution rest upon a foundation of unforgivable sin, then must not that foundation itself be broken up and cast away? The thing speaks for itself.

Half the nation, of course, rightly sees this crusade as a holy war against everything they honor and cherish, against everything that their fathers labored to build for their children, and that many of them fought and died for. They will not go quietly. They will react, and they will fight back. And so the flames will rise.

But let’s say the Times and the adherents of its Jacobin cult carry the day (they won’t, but let’s just say they do). The ancien regime is toppled, the Constitution discarded as nothing more than a manual of injustice, the names of the Founding Fathers disgraced and stripped from the nation’s books, places, and currency. Then what?

The lesson of civil wars and revolutions throughout history is that it is far easier to burn a civilization down than to build one up; one pile of rubble is more or less the same as another. When your dreams come true, Dean Baquet, and you are standing at last upon the rubble of what was once the United States of America, I hope you will forgive us for asking: what now?