It’s difficult to overstate the influence of the New York Times on America’s liberal elite.
For our overeducated overclass, the Gray Lady serves the same function Walter Cronkite once served for the country as a whole: defining the bounds of acceptable discourse.
If it’s in the Times, you’re allowed to think it.
That’s why even conservatives who detest the Times and everything it stands for should keep an eye on which articles it chooses to publish. When right-thinking liberals’ favorite newspaper gives them permission to make a tactical retreat from some wildly unpopular position, we can be sure that we’ve truly won the argument.
The most recent example came last week when the Times published a piece headlined “Pelosi Resisted Stock-Trading Ban as Wealth Grew, Fueling Suspicion.”
The idea that there was something suspicious about the former House speaker’s massive wealth is nothing new. It’s a matter of public record that, right before the Justice Department announced an antitrust lawsuit against Google, Pelosi’s husband, Paul, sold 30,000 shares in its parent company, Alphabet. He also unloaded half a million dollars in Visa stock just a few months before the DOJ filed a bogus lawsuit against the company over its alleged monopoly on debit transaction processing. As dozens of antitrust experts have since stated, there was no monopoly, of course — between many different debit card providers and services like ApplePay and Venmo, we are spoiled for choice when it comes to payment providers. But at least the suit allowed political insiders to make some money trading Visa stock in the stock market!
Anyone could see that transactions like these created — at the very least — an unacceptable appearance of impropriety. But because liberal hero Nancy Pelosi was the face of congressional stock trading, opposition to the practice became distinctly Republican-coded. Which meant Times-reading Democrats were stuck defending it.
After all, it was Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) who demanded that Pelosi be prosecuted. He even named his congressional stock trading ban the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments (PELOSI) Act. And what Times reader would be caught dead agreeing with Josh Hawley?
Eventually, though, Pelosi herself realized that this issue was a political loser. “If legislation is advanced to help restore trust in government and ensure that those in power are held to the highest ethical standards, then I am proud to support it — no matter what they decide to name it,” she said in a July statement.
Of course, it cost Pelosi nothing to reverse course. She already made her bag, and now she’s leaving Congress, so it’s no skin off her nose. What’s more surprising is that the Times would ding her on her way out the door. Multiple anonymous sources told the paper that insisting on her right to keep trading stocks was, as reporter Annie Karni put it, “among the only issues that reflected poorly on Ms. Pelosi during her tenure, placing an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise remarkable legacy.”
By placing an asterisk next to Pelosi’s name, the Times is effectively conceding that the new populist energy President Donald Trump brought to American politics is here to stay.
Other examples abound.
In 2022, the Times ran the headline “They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?” Before that article appeared, only Republicans (and the occasional non-elite Democrat) could get away with suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t be pumping confused children full of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
The piece included a graphic anecdote about a “transgender adolescent in Sweden who took the drugs from age 11 to 14,” then “developed osteoporosis and sustained a compression fracture in his spine.” Suddenly Times readers were allowed to notice how insane the whole “trans kids” thing had gotten.
In June 2024, Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof defended then-President Joe Biden’s eleventh-hour conversion to border hawk-ism.
“Many of us liberals now find ourselves in an awkward spot on immigration,” he wrote. “For years we have denounced draconian steps by Republicans to bar desperate migrants. But President Biden has now introduced his own tough steps to reduce asylum seekers, not so different from President Donald Trump’s approach.”
The subtext of this column was obvious: Please for the love of God stop with the open borders stuff or Trump is going to shellac us in November!
It was, of course, too little too late. But just to make sure Democrats don’t make the same mistake twice, the Times followed up just a few weeks ago with a heavily reported article headlined “How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration.”
The thing with Times readers is that they don’t actually have principles. They just want to maintain their membership in the right-thinking elite liberal club. Writer David Sedaris recently poked fun at this mindset in an essay recounting his experience of being bitten by some Portland degenerate’s dog and failing to find any sympathy from his Times-reading friends.
“Why is everyone so afraid of saying that drug addicts shouldn’t let their dogs bite people? Actually, I know why. We’re afraid we’ll be mistaken for Republicans, when, really, isn’t this something we should all be able to agree on?” he wrote. “How did allowing dogs to bite people become a Democratic point of principle?”
So two cheers for the New York Times. It prevents Democrats from doubling down on their most absurd positions and allows for minute corrections in the direction of sanity. And I’m sure the Times readers appreciate it too. Imagine checking your phone one morning and sighing with relief: “Thank God I won’t have to go to that cocktail party on Friday and pretend men have no advantage in sports.”
Tudor Dixon (@TudorDixon) is host of the Tudor Dixon podcast. Dixon was the GOP's nominee for governor of Michigan in 2022.