New York Times concludes it's ok to be racist again, heaves audible sigh of relief

The New York Times is up with an "analysis" piece by the execrable Jeremy Peters, and I clicked through so you hopefully don't have to. Seriously, don't. It is a piece designed to make you embrace the racism, sexism, and transphobia it assumes reside inside you, and more, to make you feel smug and justified in doing so.

"In Shift From 2020, Identity Politics Loses Its Grip on the Country," according to the headline, even as one of the presidential candidates runs a campaign dominated by right-wing identity politics. "There are signs that society is moving away from the progressive left’s often strict expectations about how to discuss culture and politics," the subhed adds, in a line that directly translates to "Boy, it sure sucks to be told that bigotry is bad, doesn't it? Aren't you glad the New York Times is giving you permission to ignore that?"

The basic story here is that in 2020, people saw the video of police murdering George Floyd and became upset about racism, but golly gee, they sure did overreact. In doing so, they empowered a near-totalitarian form of social control by progressives, who eagerly seized the moment. "Some progressives tried to enforce a strict set of cultural and political expectations almost everywhere," Peters writes. And "If some Americans thought the left’s code of conduct went too far, most were not willing to say so." And "people are now acknowledging that certain identity-focused progressive solutions to injustice were never broadly popular."

This article lands as the flagrant racism on display at Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden rally has helped shift momentum toward Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign. White identity politics has been a prominent campaign theme over the past week and it isn't playing well with the public, but the Times is here to police the backlash, prodding its readers to think that anti-racism is the real problem.

Chris Geidner points out that Jeremy Peters makes a specialty of spinning race and responses to racism as a problem for Democrats:

This is a subject that, in the view of Peters and, apparently, his editors at the Times, is not just a problem for Democrats, but a problem because of overreach on the left, not, you know, racism. There are legitimate conversations to be had about the continuing dominance of racism in US politics and the problems it can present for anti-racist politicians and movements. But when your take is somehow always that the anti-racism, not the racism, is the problem, it starts to seem like it might be saying something about you. And in this case, the "you" in question is the entire New York Times political desk.