A pig with lipstick is still a pig.

From NYT: Say, why didn't Elon Musk end apartheid as a teenager? Update: "The opposite of the thesis"; Update: NYT stealth-edits by Ed Morrissey.

Yesterday, the New York Times, in its capacity as Woke establishment defender, ran a poorly disguised hit-piece on Elon Musk that was ridiculous in its predicate assumptions, badly argued, and poorly edited.  The few facts advanced in the article contradicted the argument being made.  

This has been a pattern of New York Times reporting in recent years.  With no googling, I can call to mind similar public smear campaigns against the cartoonist and author Scott Adams, the rationalist psychiatrist Scott Alexander and the Twitter account owner of Libs of Tik Tok.  All private citizens who somehow drew the institutional ire of the New York Times which then published "news" articles intended solely to damage their reputations and with no apparent redeeming news value.  Pure partisan or ideological spite.

In each case, the New York Times disrupted the individual's life, caused them tactical harm, bolstered the intended victim's public profile, and drew public condemnation of the New York Times' own publishing behavior.  

In this case, they are again shooting themselves in the foot.  Morrissey reports.

Just how desperate has mainstream media grown over Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter? The New York Times’ deep dive on Musk’s childhood in South Africa demonstrates how far they will go to hype the dangers of, um … free speech in the public square, or something. Social media has dragged the Gray Lady all morning for this “profile,” which sets itself up as a look as to how Musk’s white privilege makes him problematic in some way.

Here’s the headline, which sets the tone:

Elon Musk Left a South Africa That Was Rife With Misinformation and White Privilege

And the lede:

Elon Musk’s impending takeover of Twitter has many people probing his public statements and his past for clues about how he will shape one of the world’s most influential public platforms.

But Mr. Musk, best known for owning the companies Tesla and SpaceX, has not talked much in public about a significant swath of his past: How growing up as a white person under the racist apartheid system in South Africa may have shaped him.

“It’s telling — white kids were insulated from the harsh reality of it,” said Terence Beney, who is white and graduated with Mr. Musk from Pretoria Boys High School in 1988.

Interviews with relatives and former classmates reveal an upbringing in elite, segregated white communities that were littered with anti-Black government propaganda, and detached from the atrocities that white political leaders inflicted on the Black majority.

Oooooh — sounds damning! Or at least it does until you read past the jump. As it turns out …

1. Musk left South Africa for Canada at 17.
2. In part, he chose to leave because he didn’t want to serve in the apartheid-enforcing South African military [paragraph 14]
3. His parents belonged to the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, and his father Errol ran and won office on that platform
4. His black schoolmates recall that Musk “spent time with Black friends” [paragraph 9].
5. Praetoria Boys High School had “a socially progressive undercurrent,” where the headmaster, teachers, and students “participated in freedom struggle activities” [paragraph 17].
6. Musk rebuked a fellow student for using an “anti-Black slur,” and got bullied for it [paragraph 27], and later was one of only a handful of white people at the funeral of a black student [paragraph 28].

He elaborates further but then gets to a point that seems obvious to me but little commented on.

It’s a classic smear effort that juxtaposes a target with a discredited political regime with zero evidence that the target either bought into the regime or its propaganda, helped shape or sustain it, or acted in accordance with it. It’s character assassination by proxy, when the facts are so obvious as to undermine the entire premise of the headline and the lede.

In fact, isn’t this the profile of someone who’d make a good steward of the public square, to the extent that a public square needs a steward at all?

Yes.  But he then points out something which I think the Woke establishment defenders miss.  

Actually, I’m still agnostic on that point. I really have no idea whether Musk will stick to his professed free-speech values as the owner of Twitter, and acknowledge that his track record on that is at best spotty. I suspect that the financial pressures of private ownership will force Musk to bend significantly on that point, as may some of Musk’s new private-equity partners joining his bid to secure the financing for the buyout. 

The Woke, always disposed towards authoritarian and totalitarian thinking, really do see the world through a different lens than do Classical Liberals (i.e. conservatives).  

For authoritarian and totalitarian thinkers, 

There are problems to be solved.

The problem is defined in terms of public opposition to the central power.

The solution is imposed.

The solution does not incorporate trade-off decisions.

The solution is always worse than the status quo.

This puts the Woke in a curious position, one which they do not themselves recognize.  For them, in ther simplistic and mechanistic weltanschauung, problems are always traceable to individuals.  You fix the problem by destroying the individual.

They are effectively, often, the most ardent advocates of great man history.  Intellectually and ideologically they are opposed to such a framing, but they keep falling into that way of viewing things.  

Classical Liberals tend to see history as a process and outcomes arising from the interaction of multiple complex and evolving systems.  While they acknowledge Great Man History, they are also skeptical in exactly the way that Morrissey describes.  They can admire someone like Musk and have high hopes for him, but they don't assume that Twitter's problems will automatically be solved because of the actions of a single man.

The New York Times, in its Woke mode, sees Twitter's problems arising solely because of a single man.  A man who must be destroyed.  Or at least incapacitated by their vile, childish and sophomoric reporting.  

And as usually happens in these instances of hit-piece journalistic slander, the propagator, the NYT, ends up being dumped on because their reporting is so bad, their ridiculous argument so weak, and their behavior so repellant.  The public pushback is so hard, they then start stealth-editing their Frankenstein article, hoping to shield themselves from further ridicule.

But a pig with lipstick is still a pig.