Luxury Crimes at ‘The New York Times.’ ‘I Was Targeted by the SPLC.’ Plus. . .

It’s Friday, April 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on being targeted by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Why Trump’s pressure on Iran is working. And much more.

But first: The moral inversion of The New York Times.

Strange though it may sound, you can trace the start of The Free Press back to the publication of a single article.

In June 2020, I was part of a team of editors at The New York Times Opinion page who published an essay from Senator Tom Cotton. It argued that the rioting, looting, and violence (he called it a “carnival for the thrill-seeking rich as well as other criminal elements”) was a move toward anarchy, and that the president had the authority to take action against it by sending in the National Guard.

I’ve already recounted how this all played out, but suffice it to say that many, if not most, Times staffers erupted against the premise of the piece—a call for restoring order in cities—and the paper’s decision to “platform” it. Running it, they said, put lives in danger. (Never mind that more than half of the polled American public agreed with Senator Cotton’s position.)

Disagreement over that article would ultimately lead to my defenestration from the paper. Bari Weiss left the Times that same summer, because of the same broken newsroom culture that led to the uproar over the Cotton essay.

“If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired.”

Another thing Bari said in that note was this: “The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.”

Six years on, the charge stands.

Consider, for example, the latest episode of the New York Times Opinions podcast, featuring the left-wing provocateur Hasan Piker, the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, and an editor named Nadja Spiegelman. The episode’s title: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” In the conversation, the panelists endorse and admit to theft (or “microlooting,” as Spiegelman calls it), celebrate looting, and excuse the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

There are more important things happening in the world than three out-of-touch media figures babbling in a podcast studio in New York. You can read about those here, here, and here, and in the other stories in our lineup today.

But a New York Times podcast about murder, theft, and looting is worth lingering over. Why? Because it is symptomatic of a deep moral crisis in America, where profoundly antisocial (and criminal!) behavior is put on a pedestal and valorized in our broken media.

The episode is what moral inversion looks like. The paper that saw it unfit to publish a United States senator on the rule of law now hosts a gleeful conversation about theft, looting, and the murder of a corporate executive and frames it as moral courage. And you can expect no internal revolt, no lengthy review or editor’s note. The point they are making is this: Stealing is laudable if you are stealing from the right people. Maybe even murder, too.

Today we have two must-read essays on this conversation, by Suzy Weiss and River Page. Read them to understand how some of the top voices in the media came to embrace criminality.

The Free Press was founded because there was an urgent need for an alternative. For an outlet that could still see the difference between right and wrong, and was committed to telling the truth—even if it is uncomfortable, even if it flies in the face of whatever ideas happen to be fashionable at that moment in time. That is as urgent and necessary today as it was on day one.

—Adam Rubenstein

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