HAVE YOU BEEN RADICALIZED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES? 

Now the New York Times has gone one better. Yesterday, they ran a prominent piece in the print and online editions headlined ‘The Making of a YouTube Radical’. The piece is about a single unheard of young man in America who claims that because he watched ‘radical’ videos on YouTube he became ‘radicalized’. For instance:

‘“I just kept falling deeper and deeper into this, and it appealed to me because it made me feel a sense of belonging,” he said. “I was brainwashed.”’

The montage of scary YouTube personalities which the NYT illustrates the piece with, and likes to blame for such a horrific story of absorption of wrong opinions is – conveniently enough – a number of the paper’s hate figures. Jordan Peterson, of course. Then some people from Infowars. And Milton Friedman. That’s right. The late Nobel Prize winning economist is now – posthumously – a ‘radicalizing’ figure. In trying to elide all such boundaries the NYT itself provides a very good demonstration of why people might be turning away from the mainstream media. The paper doesn’t even attempt to give a fair summary of the problems it claims to be identifying.

So it would be interesting to try this exercise back on the NYT.

I’m told that removing the microchip from the brain that makes millions of New Yorkers believe every word in the paper is a difficult and painful procedure, but it can be done. An alternate procedure is to ask them to take a small dose of Instapundit each day and to slowly increase the dosage, until the painful side effects of socialism and smugness fade to manageable levels.