Leftists in the media don’t like to be called out for their liberal bias. But when that happens, their knee-jerk response is to lash out with petty ad hominem attacks. A perfect example of this reaction came in The New York Times’ Paul Krugman’s January 15 column, “Know-Nothings for the 21st Century.” The liberal columnist ran out of negative adjectives to describe Republicans, calling them “bigoted” “xenophobic” “anti-immigrant” “ignorant” “anti-education” and more, simply because they wanted stronger immigration policies, and a fair education system.
The Times columnist and economist centered his scathing diatribe against the right by calling conservatives “know-nothings,” or as he writes, “willfully ignorant” because they “reject facts that might conflict with his or her prejudices.”
How does he come to such a judgement? Well, apparently calling out institutionalized liberal bias means that the right has “embraced ignorance.”
“The range of issues on which conservatives insist that the facts have a well-known liberal bias just keeps widening,” Krugman huffed. “One result of this embrace of ignorance is a remarkable estrangement between modern conservatives and highly educated Americans, especially but not only college faculty,” he snarked.
The NYT columnist dismissed the idea that the scarcity of conservatives in academics meant there was an unfair bias against the right. No, he argued, it means that academia rejects conservatives because they don’t believe in facts:
“When the more or less official position of your party is that climate change is a hoax and evolution never happened, you won’t get much support from people who take evidence seriously,” he snarked.
Furthermore, conservatives just won’t see the error of their ways, Krugman wrote, so they’ve rejected the higher education institutions altogether by claiming they have a negative effect on America:
But conservatives don’t see the rejection of their orthodoxies by people who know what they’re talking about as a sign that they might need to rethink. Instead, they’ve soured on scholarship and education in general. Remarkably, a clear majority of Republicans now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on America.
Not only are conservatives “know-nothings” they’re also “Know Nothings,” Krugman wrote, comparing the right to a short-lived political party from over a century ago, which he characterized as “bigoted, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant.”
Krugman compared the anti-immigrant sentiments against the Irish, German and Jews in the late 19th century as similar to how President Trump and Republicans were treating immigrants today.
“After all, Ireland and Germany, the main sources of that era’s immigration wave, were the shithole countries of the day,” Krugman gushed. “But there are always new groups to hate,” he added.
Lamenting how terrible America would be if we hadn’t let in “those great waves of immigrants driven by the dream of a better life,” he gushed, “Surely we’d be a shrunken, stagnant, second-rate society,” he said, before warning: “And that’s what we’ll become if modern know-nothingism prevails.”
Krugman ends his screed by wailing that Republicans want to “undermine” “America’s goodness,” by “rejecting the very values that made America great,” which he seems to argue, are wholeheartedly embracing liberal policies on immigration and philosophies in education.
“[T]he party that currently controls all three branches of the federal government is increasingly for bigotry and against education,” he slammed again. “That should disturb you for multiple reasons, one of which is that the G.O.P. has rejected the very values that made America great,” he whined.
Krugman concludes by admitting he doesn’t know if Republicans will get their way. They certainly won’t “make America great again,” though, he argues, “[t]hey’ll kill the very things that made it great.”
