By conservative, I do not mean MAGA or White Christian evangelical (nationalist), but they are conservative.

In case you missed it, there seems to be a real disconnect between what The Harvard Crimson and the New York Times are reporting regarding Trump’s fascist campaign against Harvard University, with the NYT appearing to believe that Harvard will capitulate and the Crimson suggesting that there are no plans to do so. In this whole affair, the NYT has been very biased against Harvard (and other universities), and that bias is representative of the institution (note that I wrote institution, not individuals).

When it comes to the fascist assault on academia, a significant fraction of the NYT, including its leadership, does not view what Trump is doing as any different than the Notorious WOKE!! D.E.I.–and they like the outcome of Trump’s policies. Remember, Bari Weiss was just the conservative operative who was too stupid to stay hidden.

In other words, as an institution, the NYT thinks ‘woke’ (lol) is as bad as the fascists. The NYT leadership likes the crackdown on the left and thinks it’s good (the juice is worth the squeeze for them). They like genetic ‘realism’, which is to say, eugenics. They aren’t ‘just asking questions’ about trans people, they think trans people are freaks (in a bad way). They believe that society should be hierarchical, with people who attended the ‘right’ schools like they did in charge. They are conservatives, just not MAGA, QAn*n, or Christian nationalist conservatives.

That doesn’t mean that everyone there is a conservative. Obviously, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Jamelle Bouie, and Michele Goldberg aren’t conservatives. I would genuinely be shocked if science reporter Carl Zimmer were a eugenicist. Some of their investigative reporting is top-notch. And there’s a probably a closet leftist somewhere. But institutionally, it’s a conservative paper, and the left construed broadly must recognize this.

That said, the editorial staff (news and op-ed) does realize that their readership is liberal/left-liberal*, so they often are subtle about all of this, and this is reflected in their wishy-washiness when they get pushback from their readers.

By the way, when I cancelled my NYT subscription after 33 years, I promise you they did not make me turn in my college degree or my Ph.D. You’ll still be the same smart (or not so smart in my case) person after you stop subscribing.

*There’s an entire post to be written about this, but the tl;dr version is that, for decades now, they have made a conscious effort to target students at ‘selective’ schools and convince them reading the NYT is what an educated person does.