The Times has an interview with NYU professor and movie director Spike Lee. The paper describes him as "thoughtful, chatty and intense." From the interview:
Q. There seems to be no common ground right now. Every time Obama talks about guns, sales spike.
A. Or there's a mass shooting. After San Bernardino, they went up.
It's called scare tactics. I don't think anything good comes out of people using fear, whether it be Mussolini or Hitler.
Trump too. What's his motto? "Make America great again"? Those are code words. It's like, all right, let's put the blacks back in their place where they used to be. You know what, why not go all the way? Let's bomb churches, let's bring back Bull Connor, let's have water cannons, let's have German shepherds. You might as well. They want to rewind the clock. It's not just black folks; women too. Let's rewind when white men were in control.
Q. Let's talk about where white men are definitively in control, in Hollywood. You said your plan was to get in and to pull in as many black people as you could. I don't know if you saw the Directors Guild of America's list of minority directors hired each year, but it's so low it's almost shocking. What will it take?
It seems to me odd and not altogether fair for the Times, the morning of the Iowa caucuses, to run an article accusing Donald Trump and his supporters of "let's put the blacks back in their place where they used to be. ... Let's bomb churches, let's bring back Bull Connor, let's have water cannons, let's have German shepherds," without offering Mr. Trump or his campaign an opportunity to respond. At the least you might think such an outburst would warrant a skeptical follow-up question from the Times journalist conducting the interview, perhaps referencing that Times article quoting Mr. Trump's black friends such as Don King and Mike Tyson defending his bona fides.
Instead the Times reporter seems to buy into the racial paranoia, asking questions such as, "Let's talk about where white men are definitively in control, in Hollywood."
Here I was laboring under the apparently mistaken impression that the Jews controlled Hollywood, and thank goodness the Times is here to set the record "definitively" straight. With questions like that, why even bother having an interview? The reporter has already decided for herself what is happening.