Much has been written about the current transformation of CBS News from a “woke” liberal opinion posture to a more anti-woke center-right posture.
This transition has been entrusted to a former disgruntled New York Times opinion writer, Bari Weiss, who left the paper in a huff over the narrow-mindedness of the editorial department.
In June 2016, I experienced what she was talking about when I wrote a letter to the Times about Donald Trump, who was saying things about the press that sounded pretty scary to liberals. I wrote that earlier presidents had done things even worse to freedom of the press.
In 2023, I wrote an op-ed reminiscing about the tussle I had with the paper’s editorial department over that letter. An Idaho newspaper published this new article, titled “The day The New York Times almost lost its woke faith.” Here are the first two paragraphs of the op-ed:
“It was a watershed year in American history. It was like the year the Greek tyrant Pisistratus rode into Athens in a carriage with his goddesslike ‘first lady’ at his side, ready to drain the swamp of Greek politics.
In 2016, Donald Trump, the candidate, was promising to root out the bad apples in Washington, D.C., and reorient the woke liberal media regularly putting out fake news.”
My 2016 letter caused a furor in the Times editorial department. Some days after receiving it, an editor got back to me, saying their fact-checking team had corroborated the shocking details I had written about certain of our former presidents, except for one. They demanded that I provide documentation about what I had written concerning the holiest of all holy liberal presidents, Abraham Lincoln.
In the letter, I wrote that Lincoln had opened the mail of certain northern editors during the Civil War and jailed a number of them whose correspondence he disapproved of.
After providing them with an impeccable reference on Lincoln’s actions, an editor in the opinion department threw up her hands and said, “The things you learn about your favorite president.” The paper then published the letter.
What I didn’t put in the letter would have further rocked the liberal “woke” boat. Lincoln wanted to emancipate the slaves for two reasons: first, to recruit them into the depleted northern army; and second, to deport them out of the country.
Conservative movement folks also have their own woke faith, which puts out equally narrow and ahistorical hyperpartisan views and policies trumpeted by their own propaganda leaders.
Both varieties of “wokeism” are equally lost in view of their astonishingly poor understanding of democracy in general and the constitutional history of this country in particular.
For example, MAGA conservatives today consign the Constitution to the dustbin in their disregard for the powers of Congress. They believe “true democracy” is when the president takes over those powers because he is popularly elected by the people.
Evangelical conservatives also believe that the policies of the religious kingdom of God should reign supreme over those of the secular agencies of government. Here is the way I put it in my op-ed:
“Jesus saves and only Jesus saves, not Moses or Muhammad. We must prepare America for Jesus’ return. We must not lie or get abortions; we must go to a Protestant church; children must be born in holy wedlock; we must champion the Constitution; we must fight devilish influences in America; we must return Scripture reading to public schools; and … oh … religious freedom. And it’s OK to get very rich very quickly.”
Conservatives today believe that corporations should be unburdened by governmental regulation, and that income taxation should be as regressive as humanly possible. These are historically very un-American ideas.
Conservatives are confident that progressive ideas and policies, even if only implemented on the local level here and there, can never produce salutary results and will always lead to socialism. Historically, we need only look to the fact that, after the Revolution, states across the country quickly and forcefully instituted free public education while maintaining a free-enterprise economic system.
Shocked by the reality of history and wedded to the fantasy of a “woke” propaganda take on current events, The New York Times has never again published another letter from me. Its opinion department continues to hide under a rock, refusing to face the facts of history to this day.
Robert Kimball Shinkosky of Woods Cross, Utah, is the author of books about the ancient Hebrew democratic republic and the American presidency.
