Just like in the old Soviet Union

in which he has believed for years.” The party was a lifeline, a mother, a god. Bukharin said, “For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why?” Bukharin explained that “an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness.” You have to give your death a meaning, and the only real meaning is to sacrifice yourself for the party in whose will you long ago drowned your own….

The role that public confessions play in demonstrating and validating the power of ideologies that refuse any criticism is worth revisiting for the obvious reason that such confessions are now part of our culture, too. Now, as then, the most baffling and disturbing aspect of these confessions is the enthusiasm with which the accused embrace their supposed guilt.

Can we really compare America now with the Soviet Union then? Well, no, obviously not….but then again….yes, perhaps we can:

If I were Donald G. McNeil Jr., I would want to tell The New York Times, and its publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, to go jump in a lake. Instead, McNeil chose to declare his love for the paper and proclaim his guilt for having “hurt” many hundreds of people. For McNeil’s professional death to have meaning, the party—or the paper—must be infallible. Death to me!

That this kind of groveling confession is not unique to the Times, but rather plays a key functional role in the politics of woke anti-racism, can be judged with the frequency with which such apologies are staged across institutional and corporate settings where wokeness holds sway.

The wretched McNeil had no intention to insult or offend, but the outraged feelings of pain so loudly proclaimed by the woke NYT staff meant he had to go. 

But, as Mikics notes, it's not as though the NYT is itself innocent. 

Astoundingly, the editors of The New York Times are now on the record saying that the mere appearance of a word in one’s mouth renders one guilty, “regardless of intent.”

OK, fine. If that utterly nonsensical standard indeed applies at The New York Times, then let’s consider the evidence of the paper’s own guilt: A quick search of the Times archives reveals a total of 135 uses of the N-word and 23 uses of a common slang variant over the past five years.

Though you might not want to type that word in the search bar, if you value your job, consider what this terrible number says about the paper’s own guilt, and what punishment would be appropriate. If the harm caused by McNeil’s repetition of the N-word before two high school students in Peru mandates his firing and public humiliation, the harm that the paper has done 158 times over, in public, before an audience of 4 million subscribers, as well as potentially every person on the planet with access to the internet, numbering perhaps 3 to 4 billion—is incalculable, even genocidal.

Shouldn’t every writer and editor at the Times—starting with Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn, and of course publisher A.G. Sulzberger—resign their jobs, right now? Resign! But first, confess—so that your departure can have meaning, and so that America’s once-greatest newspaper can continue leading us into a future free from hatred, bigotry, want, need, fear, and war, just like in the old Soviet Union.