Over the last seven days, The New York Times published a sequence of pieces whose only common thread was the normalization of ideas that, a decade ago, would not have been welcomed into the mainstream. The week ended with another man trying to kill the president. It’s all connected.
The Times is worth examining in particular because it is known as the "paper of record", but it is written largely by progressives with a discernible worldview. Its readers, by and large, believe they are simply reading the news — an unmediated account of what is happening in the world.
So when the ideological winds shift inside the Times' newsroom, those winds become reality for a significant slice of the country. That new reality is then reflected back in the paper, and the cycle begins again, changing the country with it.
The paper opened the week with a long, admiring interview with Hasan Piker. Piker is a Twitch streamer with millions of young followers, a self-described socialist who has built one of the largest political audiences on the American Left. He has said, on camera, that America deserved 9/11. He has defended Hamas after Oct 7.
He advocates for violence (”Kill those motherf****** … Let the streets soak in their f****** red capitalist blood”). He is, in other words, exactly the sort of figure the Times would once have covered at arm's length, if at all — a fringe voice whose ideas were tracked because they were spreading, not because they were endorsed.
The Times interviewed him because his ideas are now popular inside the Democratic coalition; Democrats are embracing him, and the paper wanted to introduce him to its readers as a serious political voice. The interviewer smiled through it. You could tell from her smile that she found him charming. She did not press him on 9/11, or on Hamas, or his other radical views.
Instead, she gave an uncritical, warm tour of Piker's moral framework. They began with theft. "Can shoplifting by the 99 percent be a form of political protest?" "Would you steal from Whole Foods?" "Would you pirate a car?" Piker said yes, he would. The journalist with him agreed, slowly cutting away at the idea that our society has any moral boundaries — not just regarding theft, but in general.
Then the conversation turned to murder. Luigi Mangione, the man accused of assassinating UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk, came up. Thompson, Piker explained, had committed "a tremendous amount of social murder" because of his role in setting high health care costs, and therefore, the killing was not murder, but a settling of accounts.
“Social murder” was a phrase coined by Friedrich Engels, one of the founders of Marxism. The interviewer did not push back with his logic. But once finished, the interview challenged our understanding of how, as a society, we should think about the role that murder should play in achieving justice.
The same week came an editorial titled "Older Americans Are Hoarding America's Potential," arguing that the elderly should be subject to mandatory retirement, a progressive tax on their homes to force them to downsize, and policies to "transfer jobs, houses, and wealth down the generational chain."
The author insisted this was "not ageist." But it is not hard to see the deeply concerning thought process the essay introduces: it identifies a demographic group as a common enemy, blames it for the country's ills, and calls for policy designed to dispossess it. Older Americans, as noted in the piece, vote differently from the people writing about them. That, according to the Times, is a problem.
By the end of the week, the paper was profiling Graham Platner, the Democratic Socialist Senate candidate up in Maine. The Times said that all Democrats should have the courage to become like him.
Platner, though, has been in the headlines for weeks because of a Nazi tattoo on his chest. That is what he is known for. He has a Totenkopf tattoo — the insignia of the SS division that ran the Nazi concentration camps. His explanation — that he picked the image off a bar wall in Croatia as a drunk young Marine and only recently learned of its meaning — has fallen apart.
A former acquaintance told reporters that Platner had pointed at the tattoo years earlier and cheerfully called it "my Totenkopf." His own political director acknowledged she had known about it for months. His deleted Reddit history includes a 2019 thread titled "Battle-weary SS," in which he discussed the symbol with familiarity. None of this stopped the Times from calling on Democrats to emulate him.
This is the zeitgeist the paper built in seven days. Theft is protest, murder is justice, and those who disagree should be dispossessed. And if there is any doubt that the zeitgeist the Times is creating has had an effect on the public and its actions, the would-be assassin who tried to murder the president was not a fly on the wall consuming fringe conversations in the dark corners of the web.
He was a graduate of the prestigious California Institute of Technology. He was the sort of person who you would expect to read the Times. In the manifesto he left behind, he wrote: "I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes." Each of those three accusations is a claim a Times reader would recognize from the paper's own pages, repeated across a year of coverage until they ceased to feel like accusations and began to feel like facts.
The would-be assassin did not have to be mentally ill to conjure his reasons to kill the president. All he had to do was read them in the paper — and see them alongside other intelligent, radical, immoral journalists defending violence and questioning our shared moral fabric.
