The Liberal Elites’ Columbia Meltdown

For the last three weeks, the New York Times has run a series of live feeds covering current events. Subjects such as congressional intrigue, the U.S. presidential campaign, and even the conflict in the Middle East have drifted in and out daily, with the Russia-Ukraine war increasingly failing to sustain enough interest to maintain a regular presence at the top of the online edition.

Two stories, however, appear to be considered important enough by the Times’ editors to warrant 24-hour coverage. The first is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the continued judicial pursuit of Donald Trump, which apparently justifies updates every 90 seconds.

The other, which is more of a surprise, is an entire section dedicated to live coverage of the pro-Hamas protests sweeping America’s college campuses. The Times editors apparently feel that their audience is too engaged on the topic to wait until morning to read about the latest on clashes on UCLA’s campus. They need updates at 2 a.m..

The liberal elite obsession with the campus protests, initially focused on Columbia, but now having spread across the country, may seem beside the point to conservatives and moderates who have been warning for years of the rise of anti-American extremism in the education system and the collapse of law and order on our streets. These are phenomena that liberals denied or outright encouraged for years.

However, regardless of whether the earlier stories should have broken through earlier, or whether the current breakthrough represents a genuine turn now that it is things wealthy liberals care about that are being ruined, the fact is that the story is breaking through. Just as the arrival of migrants in Martha’s Vinyard and other northern cities broke liberal enthusiasm for open borders, current events are now forcing liberals to reckon with DEI and woke ideology as a real problem – even if they are still trying to blame everyone else but themselves for what brought us here.

We can witness this reckoning develop in real-time through the Times. Even if it is lousy as a news source, it is excellent as an insight into the collective mind of America’s liberal elite.

Since the Times transitioned to a subscription model, its coverage has increasingly shifted from its traditional model of informing everyone in America what liberal elites would like them to believe, to a new model of telling its subscriber base precisely what they wish to hear. These are not always the same thing.

At times, these two have coincided, such as when it comes to Donald Trump. Liberal elites would both like everyone to believe Donald Trump is on the verge of being carted off to prison, and to hear it themselves.

Yet it has been possible to detect shifts on other issues, such as the Times’s pivot from unquestioning championing of childhood gender transition to near-weekly articles expressing unease with the lack of science and political capture of institutions. This is not the paper’s reporters undergoing a moral awakening, but rather choosing to reinforce a truth their readers already suspected, and thereby providing them a vindication of their own intelligence.

When it comes to campus protests, the Times’s coverage reveals two things about the paper’s readership. One, their panic over the consequences of the protests for things liberals care about—for example, the desecration of landmarks sacred to their class, and the anxieties of parents who have spent hundreds of thousands now missing out on ceremonial events. And two, it reflects a desperate search for answers.

The paper has printed multiple articles detailing the role of outside agitators at Columbia, a striking contrast to the riots of the summer of 2020, when the same paper dismissed the “long history of the outside agitator” claim going back to the civil rights era as a reactionary myth. A reactionary myth the paper itself now carries.

Much of this reflects the difficulty of retreating from a position in the face of people liberal elites view as both their social and intellectual inferiors—conservatives.

For conservatives, the origin of the problem is obvious. Left-wing indoctrination that has now spread to the elementary school level has raised a generation of young Americans to hate their nation. Dissenters—not just conservatives but even centrist and old-style liberal faculty—have been driven out of universities, as they have pursued an ideological agenda above all else. The solution, too, is simple in this conservative view. Because the social crisis of Generation Z is the result of indoctrination rather than any sort of organic economic or societal forces, merely removing the sources of indoctrination will resolve the problem.

Liberals, however, have long rejected conservative charges of ideological indoctrination, even as many grew steadily uneasy in the face of overwhelming evidence that conservatives had a point. This was partially because they did not want to concede anything their critics said might be correct. A core aspect of liberal identity in modern America is the conviction, coined by Jon Stewart during the second Bush administration, that they represent the “reality-based community.” If they are the representatives of logic, science, and common sense against the forces of prejudice, religion, and resentment, then how do they reconcile the possibility they may be wrong?

For years, their response was to dig in. On child gender transition, rising crime rates, the drawbacks of free trade, and school closures during COVID-19, liberal America withdrew into an intellectual fortress, only for the force of reality to eventually break in.

The new line on the left is not that liberalism was wrong, but that it has been betrayed by its high priests. Anti-racism was a noble cause, but sadly, its leading advocates were grifters who betrayed it and liberalism. Liberals would have more easily been able to express their concerns about 12-year olds seeking to change their sex if conservatives had not so rudely associated those valid concerns with right-wing crudeness and bigotry. Mass illegal immigration is a real issue, and it could be solved if conservatives had not made doing so appear racist. In short, to the modern left, conservatives prevented them from dealing with their own extremists by being inconveniently correct in a style the left did not like.