The New York Times stated Monday, June 12 that it would continue as a sponsor of New York Public Theater’s production of Julius Caesar though the play was changed so that Julius Caesar is depicted as Donald Trump and is assassinated.
The Times defended its action in a statement: “We have sponsored Shakespeare in the Park for 20 years. As an institution that believes in free speech for the arts as well as the media, we support the right of the Public Theater to stage the production as they chose.”
Yet just six years ago, New York Times columnist Frank Rich harshly criticized Sarah Palin in an article entitled “No One Listened to Gabrielle Giffords” because, he claimed, Palin had added fuel to a political fire, causing Congressman Giffords to be shot by gunman Jared Loughner on January 8, 2011 when he went on a shooting spree during one of her public appearances.
Palin was guilty only of publishing a political map that had crosshairs on it — crosshairs that looked like gun crosshairs — on the districts of those Democrats Palin thought should be targeted during reelection campaigns. In 2011, that was considered a horrific act, with the Times saying that Palin’s map, which came out the day after vandalism was done to one of Gifford’s offices, “was at best tone-deaf and at worst nastily provocative.” (Emphasis added.) The article continued lambasting Palin because she supposedly fed anti-government sentiment.
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By typing the key words “Sarah Palin” and “Crosshairs” into a search engine, one can see that a cadre of left-wing websites repeated such accusations for months after the Giffords shooting.
That was then; this is now.
Now the New York Times gives full-throated backing to BlackLivesMatter despite the violence and racial divisiveness that its message spawns, despite police being targeted for assassination by its adherents, and despite the lies the movement is based upon. (When the number of violent criminals of each race is taken into account, whites are far more likely to be killed by police than blacks are — and most blacks who are killed by police are in the midst of actively attacking the police or someone else.) And according to the New York Times, it’s “free speech” when encouragement is given to kill a Republican president.
Backing was also given by the Times for the destructive and violent anti-Trump rallies.
And now as then, the New York Times is not alone in its sanctimony. Time Warner, the parent company of CNN, is backing the death-to-Trump play as well.
To see the play’s depiction of the Caesar/Trump assassination, see the YouTube video below.
Photo at top: screen-grab from the YouTube video
