There is no way the New York Times would ever have printed an op-ed by Dr. Stella Immanuel. That’s because she holds indisputably insane ideas. Instead, the Times published a news article when her latest bumper crop of crazy notions about the coronavirus were irresponsibly re-tweeted by the (I just can’t fucking believe it) the president of the United States and his idiot son.
That is exactly the right way to handle extremist nonsense that rises to the legitimate attention of the public.
The problem is that the Times thinks Tom Cotton, who holds views just as nuts and as extreme as Dr. Immanuel, is someone the Times thinks does in fact deserve a Times opinion column. (The link is to a later version of the original op-ed that was sanitized by the addition of a disclaiming introduction.) Instead the Times (as an institution) strongly believes that publishing Cotton’s op-ed advocating violence against American citizens demonstrated their commitment to a wide and diverse range of opinion worthy of discussion.
The Times is oblivious to the obvious fact that Cotton is as disordered and dangerous in his thinking as Dr. Immanuel. I wonder why? It couldn’t be simply that Cotton is white, could it?
PS Trust me, despite Bennet’s resignation, nothing’s changed, culturally, at the Times’s top management. And it’s only a matter of time before more extreme right insanity appears in the op-ed pages.