The New York Times, following its pro-war tradition, put out an Op-Ed by the neo-con columnist Bret Stephens, openly pushing for a regime change war on Venezuela titled, “The Case for Overthrowing Maduro”.
Much of the pro-war propaganda article debunks itself.
Stephens himself admits that the central justification for the war - the false claim that Maduro runs a drug cartel- is false, writing, “there are questions about whether Maduro runs an actual cartel”.
Furthermore, despite the fact that he admits, “Economic sanctions against the regime in Trump’s first term have worked about as well as economic sanctions usually do — immiserating ordinary people while allowing the regime to entrench itself”, he then goes on to blame Maduro for problems brought on by the sanctions, such as starvation and the collapse of the medical system.
This is far from the first time the “paper of record” has pushed pro-war propaganda.
Since its inception, the paper has pushed for every U.S. war.
The New York Times helped launch the war in Vietnam by publishing the article “REDS DRIVEN OFF; Two Torpedo Vessels Believed Sunk in Gulf of Tonkin” in 1964 which claimed that “North Vietnamese PT boats made a ‘deliberate attack’ today on two United States destroyers patrolling international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam.”
It has since come out that this claim-used to sell the Vietnam War, never happened.
Infamously, the New York Times helped sell the 2003 war in Iraq with reporters Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon writing the article, “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” laundering the weapons of mass destruction hoax used to justify the war in Iraq.
In 2011, the New York Times laundered the claims that Muammar Qaddafi was about to commit a massacre against civilians in Benghazi, which was used to justify the 2011 NATO regime change bombing.
A UK Parliament Inquiry later admitted that, “the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence”.
The New York Times repeatedly claimed that Muammar Gaddafi was, “on the verge of slaughter” but the UK parliament report revealed that “the Gaddafi regime had retaken towns from the rebels without attacking civilians in early February 2011” and “did not indiscriminately attack civilians” adding that rebels groups, “exploited unrest in Libya by overstating the threat to civilians and encouraging Western powers to intervene” and “made false claims and manufactured evidence” of “allegations of mass human rights violations by Gaddafi regime troops”.
In 2019, the New York Times laundered fabricated claims from the Organization of American States (OAS), which claimed that the elected Bolivian president, Evo Morales, stole his election, which was then used to justify a U.S. backed military coup against him.
After the coup, the New York Times admitted that “the Organization of American States’ statistical analysis was itself flawed” and “relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques”.
The New York Times, during the Ukraine proxy war, covered up the U.S. history of NATO expansion and the 2014 coup in Ukraine that led to war, even labelling journalist Ben Norton as a “conspiracy theorist” for accurately reporting on U.S. involvement in the Maidan coup of 2014.
The New York Times Magazine also put out blatant misinformation about the Maidan massacre, the sniper massacre in 2014, done by far-right militants, which was falsely blamed on then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych to justify overthrowing him in a coup.
The article claimed that a “3-D model” shows that Yanukovych’s forces committed the massacre.
But as Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist Ivan Katchanovski has documented, all available evidence shows that the far-right militant group Right Sector was behind the massacre, and the “3-D Model” published in the New York Times was paid for by lawyers representing right-sector at the Maidan Massacre trail, and the model was so flawed they, “did not present the SITU 3D model during the trial, even after wasting court and jury time by introducing it” and instead, used it “to propagate disinformation in articles published in the New York Times and other Western and Ukrainian media.”
Ivan Katchanovski noted, “the model was unreliable, having been based on a primitive fraud in which the victims’ wound locations, which in fact accorded with the direction of gunfire from Maidan-controlled buildings, were altered to accord instead with Berkut (Yanukovych’s police force) positions on the ground”.
The New York Times also did propaganda to justify Western arming of neo-nazis in the Ukraine proxy war.
Before the war, the paper accurately described the Azov Battalion as “openly neo-Nazi” and a “Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization,” but then later referred to the group as “Ukraine’s celebrated Azov Battalion” after they began receiving Western arms.
The New York Times also laundered endless propaganda to justify the Israeli genocide in Gaza, most infamously through the article, ”Screams without Words,” which laundered the fabricated claim that Hamas committed “mass rape” on October 7th.
The Hoax was not only used to justify the genocide in Gaza, but was also used to justify actual mass, systemic rape against Palestinian civillian detainees in Israel’s torture dungeons.
While the New York Times’s laundering of the mass rape hoax is well known, there are other, lesser-known Israeli hoaxes that have been laundered by the New York Times.
The New York Times laundered the fabricated Israeli claim that the Al Shifa hospital was a “Hamas command centre,” which was not only used to justify the Israeli assault on the hospital, but also used as a precedent to destroy the entirety of Gaza’s healthcare system.
As the UN documented, the attack on Al Shifa hospital was followed by similar attacks on all of Gaza’s hospitals, which consisted of:
(a) airstrikes or shelling on the hospitals and/or in the hospital’s vicinity, often resulting in serious damage to the hospitals’ premises and equipment;
(b) besieging the hospitals with ground troops, preventing Palestinians from accessing the hospital and blocking medical supplies;
(c) raiding the hospital with the assistance of heavy machinery, including tanks and bulldozers;
(d) detaining medical staff, patients and their companions, as well as the IDPs sheltering inside the hospital;
(e) forcing remaining patients, IDPs and others to leave the hospital; and finally;
(f) withdrawing troops from the hospital, leaving in their wake severe damage to the structures, buildings and equipment inside, effectively rendering the hospital non-functional.
The New York Times also laundered the fabricated Israeli claim that Hamas looted humanitarian aid, but Israel and the United States later admitted they had no proof to back this up, and multiple investigations found that the looting was actually done by the Israeli proxy gang led by ISIS-linked drug smuggler, Yasser Abu Shabab, with backing from the IDF.
The New York Times also laundered crudely fabricated documents that falsely claimed that journalists reporting on the genocide in Gaza were Hamas members, which were later used to justify Israel’s targeted killing of journalists Hossam Shabat and Anas Al-Sharif.
Furthermore, the New York Times’ editorial board has cheered on every single American war.
As Fair Media’s Adam Johnson noted in 2017, “from Afghanistan (both the 2001 invasion and Obama’s 2009 surge) to Iraq (the 2003 invasion and Obama re-entering the country in August 2014 to fight ISIS) to Syria (both CIA-backed regime change and bombing ISIS) to Korea to our drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the New York Times has endorsed and often cheered every of these ‘forever wars.’”
Bret Stephens, the neo-con columnist who wrote the pro-war in Venezuela article, is an ardent Zionist who the writers against the war on Gaza have documented, “is employed by a Zionist advocacy group, the dark-money Maimonides Fund, where he works as the editor-in-chief of its journal, Sapir, in a blatant violation of the Times ethical guidelines. He has appeared at events across the country — including Indianapolis, Atlanta, Kansas City, Washington D.C., and New Jersey — with the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most influential Zionist lobby organization in the United States, and has praised their work. Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL has repeatedly referred to Stephens as his ‘good friend”- has spent the last two years doing pro genocide propaganda about Gaza and pro-war propaganda for all of Israel’s wars.
He endorsed the genocide in Gaza starting on October 7th of 2023, writing, “Hamas’s Control of Gaza Must End Now”.
In January of 2024, he published a denial of the genocide in Gaza, writing, “The Genocide Charge Against Israel Is a Moral Obscenity”.
Also in January, he published an op-ed calling to abolish UNRWA, the UN’s relief agency for Palestinians.
He smeared people who accuratley debunked the mass rape hoax as engaging in “Rape Denialism” in March of 2024.
Also in March of 2024, he called for the continuation of the genocide in Gaza, writing, “Israel Has No Choice but to Fight On”.
On October 8th of 2024, after Israel spent a year slaughtering civilians in Gaza, Stephens wrote an article saying, “We Should Want Israel to Win”.
In December of 2024, Stephens cheered on the Israeli/American regime change in Syria as an “Opportunity”.
And in June of this year, he cheered on Israel’s war in Iran, writing “Israel Had the Courage to Do What Needed to Be Done”.
Along with his pro-Genocide propaganda, Stephens has cheered on every war.
In March of 2023, he wrote “20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War” and has repeatedly cheered on the proxy war in Ukraine.
Despite the fact that Bret Stephens has cheered on the murder of millions of people throughout his career, he stays employed at the New York Times, continuing the cheer on more blood-soaked wars and continuing the New York Times’s legacy as America’s leading pro-war propaganda outlet.
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"Liberal" and "conservative": the left and right sides of the same coin of international Nazi-Fascist imperialism.
Well then all their employees can go and enlist