THE NEW YORK TIMES PRONOUNCES “THE DEATH OF LIBERALISM,” HAS NO CLUE IT WAS ONE OF THE MURDERERS:

Liberalism is dead. Or at least it is on the ropes. Triumphant a quarter-century ago, when liberal democracy appeared to have prevailed definitively over the totalitarian utopias that exacted such a toll in blood, it is now under siege from without and within.

Nationalism and authoritarianism, reinforced by technology, have come together to exercise new forms of control and manipulation over human beings whose susceptibility to greed, prejudice, ignorance, domination, subservience and fear was not, after all, swept away by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

* * * * * * * * * *

In an age of declamation and shouting, of polarization and vilification, of politics-for-sale and the insidious submersion of politics in fact-lite entertainment, the emergence of Trump is as unsurprising as it is menacing….In Russia, and now in countries from Hungary to Poland, and in China, forms of authoritarianism are ascendant and liberalism (or even modest liberalization) are in retreat. In the Middle East, the Islamic State casts its long, digitized shadow. In Western societies beset by growing inequality (neo-liberal economics has also sapped the credentials of liberalism), political discourse, debate on college campuses and ranting on social media all reflect a new impatience with multiple truths, a new intolerance and unwillingness to make the compromises that permit liberal democracy to work.

— “The Death of Liberalism,” Roger Cohen, the New York Times, Thursday.

News industry leaders are forever proclaiming that diversity is an organizational priority. Such pronouncements usually come paired with apologies for having failed on this front in the past, along with vague plans to do better.

New York Times Chief Executive Mark Thompson defied this tradition yesterday in a presentation before a gathering of managers on the business and news sides of the newspaper. He identified three areas toward which diversity efforts must be channeled: recruitment, hiring and promotion. Supervisors who fail to meet upper management’s requirements in recruiting and hiring minority candidates or who fail to seek out minority candidates for promotions face some stern consequences: They’ll be either encouraged to leave or be fired.

—“At New York Times, managers receive a warning about diversity,” Erik Wemple, the Washington Post, Friday.

As Glenn quipped in his post earlier this morning regarding the second headline, “You mean they’re thinking about hiring a Republican?”

But then, making diversity of gender and skin color at gunpoint more important than caring about the finished product or hiring the best people for the job isn’t all that new a development at the Times. In a classic Freudian slip, perilously leftwing then-editor Howell Raines famously cited soon-to-be-disgraced fabulist Jayson Blair “before the National Association of Black Journalists in 2001 as the first fruits of a hiring campaign that ‘has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.’ (No need to italicize that ‘more importantly.’),” Christopher Caldwell noted with a deadpan coda in the Weekly Standard in 2003.

And as New York magazine reported in 1992:

Not long ago, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the 41-year old publisher of the New York Times, was greeting people at a party in the Metropolitan Museum when a dignified older man confronted him. He told Sulzberger that he was unhappy about the jazzy, irreverent new “Styles of the Times” Sunday section. “It’s very”—the man—paused—“un-Times-ian.”

“Thank you,” New York Magazine quoted Sulzberger as replying, adding that the Times’ publisher “later told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers means ‘we’re doing something right.'”

It’s no coincidence that the punitive worldview of Pinch and Raines took their toll on the paper’s quality. Four decades ago, the Times was once praised by no less than William F. Buckley’s National Review as being “so evenhanded that it must have been deeply dismaying to the liberal opposition…Were the news standards of the Times more broadly emulated the nation would be far better informed and more honorably served.”

Today, as Matthew Continetti accurately noted in 2014, the Gray Lady is staffed by overgrown versions of the high schoolers in the TV series Saved by the Bell. “Someone always has a crazy idea, everyone’s feelings are always hurt, apologies and reconciliations are made and quickly sundered, confrontations are the subject of intense planning and preparation, and authority figures are youth-oriented, well-intentioned, bumbling, and inept.” Continetti’s article is perhaps the best filter through which to read Wemple’s WaPo article on the Times’ future hiring practices, particularly as today’s campus SJWs begin to receive bylines at the paper. (What could go wrong?)

So yes, liberalism is dead, whether your definition of the word is classical liberalism, before the L-Word was stolen by “Progressives” in the 1920s who needed a new description for their ideology after Woodrow Wilson ran roughshod over civil rights, or the postwar midcentury version of liberalism. In both cases, the Times certainly did their share of putting the knife in to kill it, long before Donald Trump ever decided to enter the GOP presidential race.

Related: This is a long post already, but it’s worth noting that regarding Trump, in his latest Sunday column, Ross Douthat, the Gray Lady’s token conservative concludes:

I’ve written before that the Trump campaign is a kind of comic-opera version of a demagogue’s rise, a first-as-farce warning about how our political system could succumb to authoritarianism.

One of its many lessons is that if authoritarianism really comes to America, it won’t come slouching out of the dark heart of Middle America, wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.

A flag pin it will have, no doubt. But on the other lapel will be a button that says I Love New York.

Oh to be a fly on the wall if Douthat is ever asked by a Christian cake baker or pizza shop owner, a falsely accused college male, a member of the Little Sisters of the Poor, or even a massively over-regulated California businessman why he thinks authoritarianism hasn’t yet come to America.

DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE WITH BYLINE: Stephanopoulos Again Fails to Disclose His Donations During Clinton Interview.

WHO WILL BILL NYE THE FASCIST GUY DEMAND THE ARREST OF NEXT?

Shot: Bill Nye, “Science Guy,” Open to Jail Time for Climate Change Skeptics.

Chaser: ‘Staggering’ hypocrisy: Carbon footprint of Bernie’s private plane to Rome offset by awesome in-flight menu.

Hangover: Obama’s Carbon Admission: ‘I Have the World’s Largest Carbon Footprint.’

The DTs: Al Gore Declares Mission Accomplished on Global Warming.

(H/T for headline: Rand Simberg.)

#THECHALKENING: Trump Drawings Are Now The Great Campus Free Speech Battle.

But the most disturbing action in relation to campus Trump messages comes from Tulane University. The local Kappa Alpha Order fraternity erected a sandbag wall on their own private property emblazoned with The Donald’s famous slogan: “Make America Great Again.” It was built as part of a yearly fraternity tradition and the Trump message was added in the spirit of satire, according to the KA chapter.

That satire, however, didn’t go over well with some of their fellow students. A few of their Hispanic peers labelled the message as “xenophobic” and “racist.” A few African-American members of Tulane’s football team decided to show their disdain for the Trump wall through physical action Tuesday.

Namely, they invaded the fraternity’s private property and destroyed the wall themselves. Video surfaced of the altercation showing KA’s shouting at the Tulane footballers to stop tossing the sandbags because they were on private property — to no avail.

In spite of the evidence a possible crime occurred, Tulane’s Kappa Alpha chapter, through a representative from its national organization, nearly apologized for their ransacked property.

“The comment was written on a makeshift wall on our private property, normally used for a game of capture the flag, to mock the ideologies of a political candidate,” the chapter’s statement read. “This had a unintended negative effect and as such it has been dismantled.”

A major fact left out is that the wall was dismantled involuntarily.

Tulane administrators issued a statement that tried desperately to maintain a non-partial stance, but in the end expressed sympathy for the minority students who were “impacted by this incident.”

Black privilege.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Media Silent on the Clinton Mortgage Banking Scam.

Read the whole thing.

OUCH:

Actually, if the GOP were smart — yeah, I know, I know — they’d introduce a bill making it illegal to discriminate against anyone for political reasons, then make the lefties oppose it, or try to live under it.

ROGER KIMBALL: Why I Support Ted Cruz.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Kasich attacked for telling female coeds not to attend parties “where there’s a lot of alcohol” (A Rant).

Read the whole thing.

Related: Kasich apparently has rhetoric to offend everyone — “Kasich tells supporters of religious freedom laws: ‘Get over it.'”

ANALYSIS TRUE: Obama Hosts Vile Thugs To Discuss Criminal Justice Reform:

It’s not that Barack Obama hasn’t been a successful president. He has. He said he wanted to fundamentally transform us, as a nation. As a result, we’re weaker, militarily. Our debt has gone through the roof. He’s destroyed small businesses, ruined the healthcare system, strained relations with our allies, emboldened our enemies, set back race relations to pre-Civil Rights era levels, and has driven morality and decency over a cliff.

I’d say that’s change, though not much hope.

Now there is a report from the AP out that he has hosted a gaggle of “artists” in the White House, as part of a think tank on criminal justice reform, through the My Brother’s Keeper initiative.

Among those venerated guests were: Nicki Minaj, Common, Pusha T, DJ Khaled, Busta Rhymes, Ludacris, and J. Cole.

Not sure who these people are? I’ll give you a sample of some of the lyrical content put forth by Mr. Ludacris. It’s a charmer titled, “Stick ‘em Up.”

Read the whole thing, and then add to it, as Victor Davis Hanson spotted in his January column, before his final State of the Union address, Obama met in the White House with rapper Kendrick Lamar, whose cover artwork to his album To Pimp a Butterfly features a dead judge and his murders posing in front of the White House. And note that last month, The Onion, now under the ownership of Hillary-backing Univision ran a Photoshop of a blood-splattered Mitch McConnell holding aloft Merrick Garland’s severed head, while standing on the steps of the Senate.

If you’re still wondering what led to Trump, we have the worst political class – propped up by the worst pop culture — in the history of America. No wonder so much of the rest of America is an a “burn DC to the ground” mood this year.

THIS JUST IN AT AP. Poll: Vast majority of Americans don’t trust the news media.

As I wrote in 2007 for the Objectivist-themed New Individualist (ignore the 2011 date on its reprint), the Blogosphere was a bipartisan phenomenon. The right has been complaining about media bias ever since Spiro Agnew’s “Nattering Nabobs” speech of 1970 — but the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren/Al Sharpton left thinks those very same journalists are too conservative, and neither side feels well served by a mass media. Suddenly, at the dawn of the 21st century, both sides now had easily affordable — often free — tools to do something about it. As a result, the notion of a one-size-fits-all mass media became a relatively brief one in American history, originally made necessary by the economies of scale required to build the first nationwide radio networks in the 1920s, who then became the “Big Three” commercial TV networks in the 1950s.

As for America’s dramatic fracturing of opinion between left and right and coastal elites and the voters, well, that will happen to a nation on its way to becoming the next Yugoslavia.

YOU MEAN THEY’RE THINKING ABOUT HIRING A REPUBLICAN? New York Times Management Gets Serious About Diversity.

DAVID BOAZ: Let Taxpayers Decide How Their Money Is Spent.

In his 1992 Republican National Convention speech, President George H. W. Bush proposed letting taxpayers commit up to 10 percent of their payment to reducing the national debt. The proposal never went anywhere, but it points to a good idea: Taxpayers should be able to designate how their tax dollars are spent. Already, we allow for this in very limited ways. A check-off at the top of the 1040 form invites every taxpayer to direct $3 of their federal tax to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund (only 6 percent of taxpayers do). In Virginia, my VAC invites me to contribute additional funds to more than 100 organizations ranging from the Democratic and Republican parties to the U.S. Olympic Committee, the Virginia Arts Foundation, and many local school and library funds.

Why not take this one step further? Why shouldn’t taxpayers make direct decisions about how much money they want to spend on other government programs, like paying off the national debt, the war in Iraq or the National Endowment for the Arts? This would force the federal government to focus time and resources on projects citizens actually want, not just efforts that appeal to special interests.

To do this, we’d have to expand the concept of the campaign financing checkoff to all government programs. With this reform, the real expression of popular democracy would take place not every four years but every April 15. A new final page of the 1040 form would be created, called 1040-D (for democracy). At the top, the taxpayer would write in his total tax as determined by the 1040 form. Following would be a list of government programs, along with the percentage of the federal budget devoted to each (as proposed by Congress and the president). The taxpayer would then multiply that percentage by his total tax to determine the “amount requested” in order to meet the government’s total spending request. (Computerization of tax returns has made this step simple.) The taxpayer would then consider that request and enter the amount he was willing to pay for that program in the final column–the amount requested by the government, or more, or less, down to zero.

A taxpayer who thinks that $600 billion is too much to spend on military in the post-Cold War era could choose to allocate less to that function than the government requested. A taxpayer who thinks that Congress has been underfunding Head Start and the arts could allocate double the requested amount for those programs.

I love the idea, but it offers insufficient opportunities for graft.

I HAD BEEN TOLD THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: New Research Shows Vegetable Oils Are Not Good for Heart Diseases.

The belief that vegetable oils replacing saturated fats improve heart health dates back to the 1960s, when studies showed that these oils lowered blood cholesterol levels. Several studies have been conducted since then that suggests the same conclusion.

However, the conclusion that linoleic-acid dietary interventions can reduce the risk of heart attacks have never been shown in randomized controlled trials, which is considered the gold standard in medical research.

The Minnesota Coronary Experiment (MCE) has unpublished results with the conclusion that the intervention lowered cholesterol levels, but it made no difference in heart attack risks, deaths due to heart disease or overall deaths.

Chris Ramsden, a medical investigator, and colleagues came across the study and recovered the data, Medical Xpress reported. They performed analyses which confirmed the results of the experiment. The autopsy reports they also uncovered revealed that the corn oil group has nearly twice the number of heart attack occurrence than the control group.

Why did those reports go unpublished for 50 years?

MUSLIMS IN BELGIUM ‘DANCE IN THE STREET’ FOLLOWING TERRORIST ATTACKS, CLAIMS INTERIOR MINISTER.

No way – if there’s one thing I learned from the MSM last year, if a prominent political figure says that a group of Muslims openly celebrated after a major terrorist attack, he’s absolutely incorrect. Never happened – never even was reported.

Related: Soeren Kern on “What British Muslims Really Think.”

REPORT: FBI probing Mayor de Blasio’s fundraising activities.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Proof that ‘worthless diplomas’ are just what New York City government wants.

FRACK THIS: No Agreement on Oil Freeze at Doha Meeting.

The sticking point was Iran’s participation, or lack thereof:

Saudi Arabia’s position that Iran join the freeze or there would be no deal scuttled the discussions before they started, participants said, and the meeting descended into sniping and confusion.

On Saturday, the day before the meeting, Saudi Arabia’s powerful deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was quoted by Bloomberg News as ruling out any deal that didn’t include Iran.

Other Saudi officials in the delegation had signaled on Saturday evening that the kingdom would consider a freeze without Iran’s participation, and a draft agreement was circulated, according to participants.

Maybe this is one of those non-Kissingerian formulations where both sides can lose.