The Times, They Aren’t Changin’
Thoughts on Sunday’s New York Times’ half-assed Covid mea culpa op-ed.
Imagine my surprise when, Sunday, I read a New York Times editorial admitting that “We Were Badly Misled” about Covid as it was happening.
The op-ed matter of factly concluded what we’ve all known for years — that despite being the overwhelmingly most “common sense” place to look, the Covid-19 lab leak theory was dismissed by scientists and public health officials, who suppressed discussions and misled the public to maintain the appearance of consensus.
Influential studies downplayed the lab leak theory, while private communications among scientists revealed they actually considered it likely, with key figures, including a senior adviser to Fauci, attempting to erase records.
It admits EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, withheld critical information about its research, and only after persistent investigations was it finally banned from receiving federal funding.
It also stipulates that after Covid-19, controversial virus research, including experiments on bat coronaviruses, continues under inadequate biosafety conditions, raising concerns about future accidental outbreaks.
Yes, we were badly misled. Serious shit, right? Now if only we could find all of the culprits who badly misled us, while parroting the government’s narrative on Covid, for the last 5 years.
People on social media seem to think they’ve found one of these culprits, and have been doing God’s work correcting the New York Times’ headline all day Sunday.
My first reaction is one of indignation. I want to scream at these people: “How dare you sit in league with the powers who cut me, and many others I read and respect, off of social media for simply stating what was nothing more than the obvious five years ago?”
I want to paint murals on the sides of their corporate offices, reminding them in big letters that like many others, I was forced into a position of being stuck between required travel and getting vaccinated at one point. Even worse, I was accosted by power hungry hipsters who demanded a vaccination card just for ordering a beer. And I got off easy. Others lost bank accounts, jobs and sadly, family members.
In large letters on that wall, I think it would be best summed up as: “How dare you?”
But the fury and outrage quickly wash away as the patient tides of populism and common sense slowly erode what can only be described as the recent fever pitch of authoritarianism and government overreach—one that seemed to hit a zenith during the back half of Joe Biden‘s term over the last four years.
“Fifty-one former intelligence agents say the laptop is Russian disinformation!”
“There’s no way this novel coronavirus could have originated from a bio lab experimenting with coronaviruses—located just 100 feet from the source of where the virus was found!”
“Joe Biden is a dynamo! He’s mentally razor-sharp!”
Our outrage can’t last forever. The healing has to begin at some point, and right now seems ideal.
Our victory has been resounding. The approval rating for the Democratic Party is at a record low.
Also a record number of people believe the country is heading in the right direction.
And instead of “getting it” and changing course, expert panderers on the Democratic side of the aisle, like Gavin Newsom, are trying even harder to fake their way to favorability and put a PR polish on their far less popular and effective policy ideas. Newsom has even started a podcast and, like some weird masochistic lab experiment of his own, seems hell bent on inviting one conservative after another on to demolish his arguments and humiliate his intellect while he sits there enjoying it, smiling like the head of an Empire Beauty School academy mannequin.
Even Michelle Obama has started a podcast. And Democrat favorability is so low that the first run of her podcast got less views than this article will get.
These mea culpas and futile crisis PR projects appear to be accelerating. We saw Jeff Bezos come out and quickly realign the Washington Post toward free markets and liberty, prompting the resignation of some of its bespectacled, blue-haired staff (I’m assuming). Several of the staff from CNN have been fired. MSNBC is also rearranging its lineup. Jim Acosta even moved to Substack.
Ana Kasparian from The Young Turks has started to abandon today’s Democratic Party. Other journalists are taking leaves of absence for what they’re calling “mental health purposes.”
We’ve heard little from people like David Muir and George Stephanopoulos, who consistently talked over Republican candidates as they tried to get their points across during election season.
J.D. Vance has hit left-leaning reporters like Dana Bash and Martha Raddatz with the spoken-word response equivalent of a baseball bat every time they tried to challenge him.
Put simply, as I noted to Matt Taibbi months ago—and just talked about on Palisades Gold Radio days ago—the mainstream media behemoth has finally run out of gas. It is sputtering, in a dead stall, and in the process of a tailspin downward to its final demise.
On the hill, meanwhile, Democratic politicians are fighting with each other—Jasmine Crockett recently bad-mouthed John Fetterman on CNN, and they’re stabbing each other in the back—Chuck Schumer voted for the latest bill to keep the government open while many in his party voted against it. And in general, the Democratic Party has done little to nothing to indicate they have learned anything from the federal ass-whooping they endured on Election Day.
And so that brings us to this weekend, with even the New York Times trying to offer up its own limp-dick apology for a decade of far-left-leaning reporting. Of course, the gesture itself is all but useless in the year 2025. To me, it doesn’t even ingratiate the publication with goodwill—I would almost respect them more if they just stood by their bullshit takes from five years ago. But that’s beside the point.
The point is to trade the anger for acceptance. The positive takeaway from these events since Trump’s election is confirmation that, as difficult as it had to get—and as slow as the progress is taking now—the country is once again bending to the will of its people. And that is exactly how things are supposed to work.
The election gave U.S. citizens a forum to express their disdain not just for the Biden administration, but for the mainstream media machine that carried him on its back for the last six years.
Lots of people aren’t comfortable with President Trump—how he speaks or the way he does business. But make no mistake: he is the man for the time and place; otherwise, he would not have won reelection.
Emerging from deep within the miasma of overreach, outright bizarre behavior, and counterintuitive policies of the last four years, he is the equivalent of someone driving a stake through the side of a fresh oxygen tank—releasing pressurized revitalizing fresh air into the political landscape.
Trump taking office has set off a cascade of recalibrations—not only across the media but across the political spectrum. Those events have set off chain reactions, which will set off other chain reactions, which will set off a third generation of chain reactions, and so on and so forth—until the air in this country starts to feel fresh again, and the very same change that the people voted for—begins to manifest in our everyday lives.
The New York Times apology from this weekend is devoid of any genuineness or authenticity. I don’t believe for a second that the people on the left truly regret how they reported on the response to COVID, nor do I believe they would alter how they covered a similar event in the future.
But the one positive I can find in this pathetically timed piece from the weekend is that it is one of what will be a million small indicators that the will of the majority of the American people is finally beginning to be reflected in our day-to-day.
And no matter which way the political landscape shifts going forward, that power—the people’s power to affect change—remains something to be overwhelmingly optimistic about.
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I appreciate the tones of magnanimity in your article but personally I am never going to let this go. Any optimism of the changes taking place is tempered by the fact no one has been criminally punished for the mental and physical toll both covid and the covidians had on me or anyone else. I naively thought growing up that history was something you only read about, but now having lived through 9/11, global financial crisis, and covid among others... my resolve has hardened. May God forgive them because I never will.
Thank you as always for your columns and providing a public forum.
Yes. Absolutely FUCK these people. Half my family and friends hate me to this day for trying to warn them these people and many others weren't just wrong, but actively lying to them. Merely telling the truth was such a sin in the NYT's world.