While the article itself is kind of an exercise in dumb self-pity, and I don't think it hits the mark at all when talking about the Times, I will say I am notic

While the article itself is kind of an exercise in dumb self-pity, and I don't think it hits the mark at all when talking about the Times, I will say I am noticing a pattern of "mind closing" in Leftist spaces over the past year. I think it really kicked into gear with the Democratic primary where a lot of the "New Left" media went into the tank for the Sanders campaign. Being too personally invested into a political campaign (especially a losing one) has a way of shorting out people's analytical brains. There's just a very strong ego-preservation incentive to shut naysayers up and to engage in obviously motivated reasoning to explain away failures, insist there is still hope even when there isn't, and to point fingers and deflect blame. These are all bad for keeping any sense of perspective, keeping an open mind about things, having a movement that can actually assimilate new facts as situations evolve, or be able to talk to people outside who aren't already bought in. It's kind of like a fractional distillation, eventually the heat starts boiling off different groups of people, who might have added vitality or useful intellectual perspective to the movement, until you're left with kind of a burnt-out sludge on the bottom. Of course, those outlets actually have really small readerships in the grand scheme of things. This dynamic mostly happens in smaller groups chats, forums, subreddits, discords, etc. But these groups do tend to punch above their weight in the minds of journalists because they're big on Twitter, and most journalists/media people spend way too much time on Twitter. I think what might be happening with the NYTimes debacle is people are reading their personal experiences in whatever smaller discussion groups they've been involved in into the Opinion section of the Times. What they're missing is the context that this is largely centrist journalists mad at a breach of standards rather than idealogues who can't just deal with people who disagree with them.