The Parallel Universe of the New York Times

Do parallel universes exist? I have proof that one does. I confirmed the hypothesis in a manner very like that of the young Isaac Newton, who was sitting in a garden when an apple dropped on his head. I was standing in a convenience store when a Sunday New York Times dropped on my foot. Newton, in a stroke of brilliant insight, comprehended gravity. I, in a throb of bruised toe, opened the April 22, 2018, Sunday Review section.

It had long been my opinion that the writers and editors of the New York Times and, by extension, their readers live on a different planet—the planet where a martini costs $20. But, upon perusal of the Sunday Review section, I see that I was wrong. They do not live on another planet. They live in another cosmos—a universe with different physics, different mathematics, different scientific constants, and different laws of nature.

The lead essay in the Sunday Review is by Amy Chozick, adapted from her new book Chasing Hillary. The headline is a quotation from Hillary Clinton: “They Were Never Going To Let Me Be President.”

The Hillary Clinton of Universe New York Times (UNYT) is similar to the Hillary Clinton of the known universe (U1) except that in UNYT she was the rightful winner of the 2016 election.

Chozick’s subject is time travel—impossible in U1 but commonplace in UNYT . By means of technology unknown to the inhabitants of U1, Chozick transports her UNYT readers to an ancient period of fossilization that political paleontologists of U1 have named “Who Cares?” There, she and her audience experience phenomena hardly imaginable to us. In U1 we sometimes beat a dead horse, but in UNYT they feed it and groom it and ride it around.

The mainstream press (and New York Times), as they are called, along with Progressive politicians, may have passed the point described by Thomas Jefferson in the following words:

"Nothing is so mistaken as the supposition, that a person is to extricate himself from a difficulty, by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an injustice. This increases the difficulties ten fold; and those who pursue these methods, get themselves so involved at length, that they can turn no way but their infamy becomes more exposed. It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions." - See "Letter to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785," in Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1984), pp. 814-815.
". . . he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him." - Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson's views on the importance of a free press are well known. Nevertheless, Jefferson was well aware of the dark under belly of a segment of the press which might set itself up, as he called it, "to serve the ministers" of a "despotic government."

Note that in the last of the following quotations on the subject, Jefferson noted, "But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood," he declared, "I leave to others to restore it to its strength by recalling it within the pale of truth."

"[A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632
"[I have seen] repeated instances of the publication of what has not been intended for the public eye, and the malignity with which political enemies torture every sentence from me into meanings imagined by their own wickedness only... Not fearing these political bull-dogs, I yet avoid putting myself in the way of being baited by them, and do not wish to volunteer away that portion of tranquillity, which a firm execution of my duties will permit me to enjoy." --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:226
"Conscious that there was not a truth on earth which I feared should be known, I have lent myself willingly as the subject of a great experiment, which was to prove that an administration, conducting itself with integrity and common understanding, cannot be battered down even by the falsehoods of a licentious press, and consequently still less by the press as restrained within the legal and wholesome limits of truth. This experiment was wanting for the world to demonstrate the falsehood of the pretext that freedom of the press is incompatible with orderly government. I have never, therefore, even contradicted the thousands of calumnies so industriously propagated against myself. But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood, I leave to others to restore it to its strength by recalling it within the pale of truth. Within that, it is a noble institution, equally the friend of science and of civil liberty." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807. ME 11:155

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