Posted on September 2, 2020

Does the New York Times Care About the Facts?

Chris Roberts, American Renaissance, September 2, 2020

New York Times headquarters. (Credit Image: © Erik Mcgregor / Pacific Press via ZUMA Wire)

The New York Times recently published an opinion column by Jean Guerrero, “Stephen Miller’s Dystopian America.” In it, the author calls Mr. Miller and President Donald Trump “traffickers in hate, pushing a white nationalist agenda through narratives about national identity, prosperity and security.” The Times should be embarrassed that it ran this essay.

It opens with a brief description of the recent Republican National Convention (RNC), noting that Donald Trump Jr. called Joe Biden “the Loch Ness monster,” President Trump denounced “mob rule,” and that Charlie Kirk called the President “the bodyguard of Western civilization.” Miss Guerrero then asserts that “the language at the convention comes from the ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theory.” No speaker at the RNC spoke about demographics or fertility, and there was hardly any mention of immigration.

Miss Guerrero also writes, “The term ‘cancel culture,’ used throughout the Republican convention, lumps together and demonizes critics of white male supremacy, in an attempt to silence them.” Though “cancel culture” was repeatedly attacked throughout the RNC, her definition of it is wrong. Wikipedia, defines it this way:

Cancel culture or call-out culture describes a form of boycott in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles – either online on social media, in the real world, or both. They are said to be ‘canceled’. Merriam-Webster defines cancel as ‘to stop giving support to that person’, and dictionary.com defines it as ‘calling out the bad behavior, boycotting their work (such as by not watching their movies or listening to their music), and trying to take away their public platform and power’.

Cancel culture has been widely discussed this summer in part because of an open letter in the liberal Harper’s magazine denouncing it. The letter was explicitly anti-Trump and was signed by many prominent liberals and leftists, including many women and non-whites.

Miss Gurrerro mentions AmRen in the column, and again she’s wrong:

[T]he website American Renaissance, which Mr. Miller also promoted through Breitbart, pumps out misleading statistics characterizing people of color as more prone to violence. [link in the original]

Stephen Miller never “promoted” AR via Breitbart. The link to the claim that he did leads to an article from the Southern Poverty Law Center that quotes private emails showing that Mr. Miller read American Renaissance. Breitbart has never linked to AmRen and has mentioned the website only in neutral and factual ways in news stories, usually about social media censorship or the alt-right — many of which come from news wires and are not original to Breitbart (see the full list at the end of this article). Breitbart has never “promoted” AmRen; it has done the opposite: Ann Coulter’s June 21, 2017 column, “The Left Has One More Argument: Kill Them!” had a link to AR, but Breitbart published it without the link.

The claim that American Renaissance “pumps out misleading statistics characterizing people of color as more prone to violence” is silly. Blacks commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime in America. AmRen published a comprehensive study about race and crime in the US called “The Color of Crime.” Miss Guerrero is welcome to read it and tell us why it is “misleading.”

The column repeatedly tries to claim that violence committed by right-wingers is underestimated while violence committed by left-wingers and non-whites is overestimated. She writes that Kyle Rittenhouse “opened fire on people during a protest in Kenosha” without mentioning any of the details that show he probably acted in self-defense — details the New York Times itself published. She puts rioters in quotation marks, suggesting it is the wrong word.

Miss Guerrero also says that “Right-wing extremists have committed the most terrorist attacks in the United States since the 1990s.” As proof, she links to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ report, “The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States.” This biased report doesn’t even publish the list of terrorist attacks from which it draws its conclusions. However, even if you accepted this study’s claim that right-wing terrorists have killed 335 people in the US since 1994, then the average annual death toll is 12.4. Since May, the riots that have swept the nation have killed at least 30 people, and both numbers are dwarfed by homicides.

In the most recent year for which we have national data for single-offender/single-victim murders, blacks killed 2,677 other blacks. Blacks also killed 514 whites (including Hispanics, who are counted as white) while whites (including Hispanics) killed only 254 blacks. These numbers are not “misleading.” Suggesting that right-wing terrorism is a dangerous and rising threat is misleading.

Articles at Breitbart that mention American Renaissance: