The New York Times Versus David Mamet

Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell-You’re-Conservative

I have a piece up over at FrontPage Mag charting the way the New York Times turned its critical guns on playwright David Mamet after he came out as a conservative. Here’s the opening:

The New York Times is very good at what it does — which nowadays involves a lot of lying in service to a leftist agenda.  There are the outright lies (such as the paper’s recent distortion of a police bias trial to make the NYPD appear racist), the lies of omission (such as its lack of full reporting on the Obama administration’s fatal acts of malfeasance and dishonesty in, say, the Benghazi and Fast and Furious scandals), and the atmospheric lies (such as its rose-colored reporting on the disastrous economy in bluer-than-blue California).  Altogether, these lies combine to make the paper something like the Matrix: a plausible imitation of reality intended to deceive people so that their substance may be milked to feed an overweening state.

As in the 1999 sci-fi film that begat that metaphor, rebellion against the illusion results in swift retribution.  And nowhere does the Times rush to punish resistance so quickly as in the arts.  Times reviewers consistently give sympathetic treatment to leftist cultural works while attacking those of a conservative bent, often regardless of quality.

Which brings me to David Mamet

The rest is here.