If you still have a small sliver of respect for The New York Times, it is all but guaranteed to disappear after you read some of the quotes out of a recent crisis town hall put together by the paper’s executive editor Dean Baquet.

Slate published a revealing transcript of some of the exchanges between Baquet and the paper’s staff on Thursday at the event. The town hall was put together after a social media uproar over the paper’s recent headline covering President Donald Trump’s official reaction to the El Paso, Texas, shooting.

Allowed to submit anonymous questions, staffers were free to let their Trump Derangement Syndrome and extreme leftism fly free. One question submitted by a staffer even suggested that “racism is in everything” and part of the “foundation of all the systems” in America. That staffer suggested that those extreme beliefs should guide all coverage at the paper.

“I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn’t racist. I just feel like racism is in everything,” the staffer ranted.

The staffer then went on to say that the idea of racism being everywhere should be injected into everything from the paper’s science reporting to their culture reporting.

“It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country,” the staffer said. “And I think particularly as we are launching a 1619 Project, I feel like that’s going to open us up to even more criticism from people who are like, ‘OK, well you’re saying this, and you’re producing this big project about this. But are you guys actually considering this in your daily reporting?'”

While suggesting such extremism should motivate absolutely all reporting would normally get someone canned or at least demoted, this is The New York Times and that’s just not how things work there. In fact, Baquet answered the question by actually bringing up an argument that “pretty much everything is racist.”

“You know, it’s interesting, the argument you just made, to go back to the use of the word racist. I didn’t agree with all of this from Keith Woods, who I know from New Orleans and who’s the ombudsman for NPR. He wrote a piece about why he wouldn’t have used the word racist, and his argument, which is pretty provocative, boils down to this: Pretty much everything is racist,” the executive editor said.

He continued, “His view is that a huge percentage of American conversation is racist, so why isolate this one comment from Donald Trump? His argument is that he could cite things that people say in their everyday lives that we don’t characterize that way, which is always interesting. You know, I don’t know how to answer that, other than I do think that race has always played a huge part in the American story.”

While that exchange was the most revealing, there was plenty of other meat to come out of the town hall, which mainly consisted of Baquet apologizing for the Times headline covering Trump’s response to the El Paso shooting.

The original headline read, “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism.” While there is nothing factually incorrect in that headline, it didn’t quite fit with the Times’ extreme leftism, so readers protested. The headline was eventually changed to, “Assailing Hate But Not Guns.”

“We were all—it was a f*cking mess—we were all over the headline. Me. Matt. The print hub. Probably [assistant managing editor] Alison [Mitchell]. We were all over it, and then in the middle of it, [deputy managing editor] Rebecca Blumenstein sent an email—but we were already messing with it —saying, “You should know, there’s a social media firestorm over the headline,” the editor said about the headline situation.

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Zachary Leeman

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Zachary Leeman is originally from Maine, he served in the United States Army Reserve for six years. He currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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