Regular New York Times readers have long suspected that the paper’s oppressive bias comes not from actual reporters, but from doctrinaire editors, who assign the pieces, then insert those ridiculous second or third paragraphs that interrupt the flow of the piece, but hammer home the party line.
The paper recently put one of these editors on display on our 250th birthday, by interviewing its former national editor, Jia Lynn Yang, about the country’s founding. She’s not as bad as we expected. She’s worse.
The gist of Yang’s conception of our country is that everything swell about it is a “myth” and the only history worth talking about is that we had slavery. (I’m glad someone has finally pointed that out.)
Yang says conservatives are “obsessed with mythmaking,” whereas liberals—especially journalists like herself—are “obsessed with the knowing of facts.” Continuing to tout the left’s devotion to facts, she adds: “We are not interested in myths. We are kind of in the business of anti-myths.” Laying her cards on the table, she admits, not the least bit pretentiously: “I am fully in favor of the truth as a journalist.”
What integrity!
I won’t mention that the Times exclusively refers to biological men with big swinging penises as “women,” provided they put on a dress and call themselves “Brittney.” Also, with amazing restraint, I will not cite Walter Duranty, Jayson Blair, the Duke lacrosse case, Sarah Palin’s “direct link” to the shooting of Gabby Giffords, the 1619 Project, Russian collusion, and on and on.
So what are the myths believed by conservatives? Do not say George Washington and the cherry tree! Don’t do it. Everyone knows that was just a little parable used as moral instruction. DO. NOT. MENTION. THE. CHERRY. TREE.
Guess what Yang uses as her one and only example of the miasma of myths around our founding. Yes—the cherry tree! I.e., a tale thoroughly debunked for more than a century and barely believed at the time, except by those with a simple, trusting nature, like small children and Times senior editors. (Maybe for Christmas, Yang could explode the myth of Santa Claus.)
She specifically assails the “mythology” that our country is “really special… unlike anything anyone has ever seen before… something totally unprecedented.” Unable to get to all the precedents, she only cited none. But I’m sure there were lots of countries back then that had broken away from monarchies based on their bold assertion of God-given rights.
No, I’m sorry, that’s incorrect. None had. With a few minuscule exceptions, in 1776, every other country in the world—in Europe, Asia, and Africa—was ruled by one sovereign, whose authority was said to come from God. No other nation required the consent of the governed.
Yang’s yawning ignorance extends far beyond U.S. history to encompass all of world history. She claims the reason Americans had to build myths around our founding (well, at least one myth, that utterly despicable one about the cherry tree!) is that we didn’t have the things “that usually bind together a people.”
Number one, we had no official language, and number two, we had no official religion. Others might look at those very characteristics and say they are things that make America “really special… unlike anything anyone has ever seen before .. something totally unprecedented.”
But that can’t be. America is not special.
True, there was no “official” religion or “official” language, but America was hardly a tower of Babel, which, ironically is one of Yang’s myths about our country, despite her being “in the business of anti-myths.” According to her, there was “no unique language” and “a bunch of different Christian groups jostling.”
There wasn’t all that much “jostling.” From 1607 until the early 1800s, America was 98 percent Protestant, 1.7 percent Catholic, 0.2 percent Jewish and zero percent Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, etc. Everyone spoke, or was learning to speak, English. The only other written languages in the colonies—Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and Swedish—were all Indo-European, and used the same Latin alphabet.
But I can see why someone of Chinese descent would say, “You call that a country?” Around the same time, China was home to hundreds of distinct, mutually unintelligible languages as well as hundreds of completely different folk religions.
The third way Yang says we weren’t really a country is that “the literal geographic borders of the country are just constantly in flux, to put it nicely.”
Well, I’m glad she put it nicely! Does Yang think other countries have permanently fixed borders? When our founders were signing the Declaration, Europe was dominated by four gigantic empires—British, French, Austrian and Russian. There was no Germany. There was no Italy. It’s changed quite a bit since then, “to put it nicely.”
China controlled Mongolia, Taiwan and large swaths of Central Asia. Over the next couple centuries, it has lost and regained Macau, Hong Kong, Tibet and currently has its eye on Taiwan. (Now that Trump has blown our entire military budget on Iran, it’s theirs for the taking if they have a few BB guns.)
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Yang only gets really excited about American history when talking about slavery. She mentions “slaves” or “slavery” a dozen times. She talks more about the slaves of Thomas Jefferson and Washington than about the men themselves. The first words out of her mouth about those monumental figures are: “Jefferson and Washington were slaveholders.”
She tells us “there’s so much to apologize for and to feel really bad about and guilty about”—including “the American Indians.” (Hey, Ms. Yang! Did you know that, on the Trail of Tears, those poor victimized Indians brought their black slaves with them?)
Thanks to this interview, we finally got a glimpse of one of the little known editors making the Times as ridiculously biased as it is, and it turns out, she’s not some seasoned Machiavellian manipulator, she’s an idiot.
