All the targets that are fit to slime

Our daily newsletter to subscribers today plucks from ther archives a 2022 column by Anthony Daniels on the hazards of holding opinions at odds with those of the Left, that selection prompted by The New York Times‘ latest editorial effort to blacken the name of Donald Trump’s newly announced running-mate J.D. Vance. This was to be expected of the Times, which has spurned any thought over recent years of reviving its reputation as an unbiased and even-handed journal of record. Remember, this is the newspaper that devoted four years to beating up the Russia! Russia! Russia! hoax, collected a Pulitzer for the sheer volume of its now-we-can-reveal faux ‘scoops’ and outright fabrications and has never summoned the decency to hand back that entirely unwarranted award.

According to the Times, Vance was once the sort of conservative Manhattan liberals can live with — acceptable at Upper West Side dinner parties and, the key element that endears those sorts to lefties, a perennial and gracious loser. Hence the Times‘ scoop that Vance had a transsexual friend at Yale with whom he remained in regular and affectionate contact after graduation. Those emails from long ago have now been shared with Times, which has excerpted and analysed them for evidence of opinions that simply cannot be tolerated.

As the Times sees things, “Vance has changed” and, need it be said, for the worse. If readers surmise he is now a poofter-bashing tranny-stomper, well reporter Stephanie Saul probably wouldn’t be too distressed.

But read the former friends’ messages and it becomes immediately clear it wasn’t Vance who did the rejecting but his gender-confused ex-classmate, and the catalyst for their rift was a respectful observation, expressed in a series of txt messages the Times reproduces, that pumping puberty blockers into little kids “is so unstudied that it amounts to a form of experimentation”. At Quadrant, John Whitehall has written extensively on this topic. His essays can be found here.

The tweeted response, also reproduced, was a recitation of the trans movement’s now thoroughly discredited talking points — that psychiatrists are of one mind about the need for “gender-affirming care”, that the blockers are “completely reversible” and administered only after “extensive therapy”. None of which is true.

Determined to advance the agenda, facts and its own reporting be damned, the Times devotes not a word to correcting these claims. Why, it’s as if the newspaper has no memory of having published this 2022 story on, amongst other things, the forced closure of the UK’s infamous Tavistock Clinic.

With a little more than three months to go before the US elections, the Times will have plenty more opportunities to smear a further measure of filthy partisanship on its self-soiled escutcheon. As it can no longer be regarded as a reliable source of facts, the only reason to read the paper or visit its website is seeing how low it can go. The indications are very low indeed.

— roger franklin