Last week, The New York Times ran the debut of columnist Bret Stephens, whose skepticism of Donald Trump was apparently enough for him to qualify as One of the Good Conservatives that the Times loves to showcase on their op-ed page. Anyway, Stephens is also a skeptic of global warming, and his opening salvo was filled with the kind of junk science and “No one can really predict the future!” claptrap that climate deniers love to deploy when smoothing out a worldview that is undeniably wrong. He even used Hillary Clinton’s election loss as an example of the fallacy of relying on science because… well, because no right-wing argument is complete without sticking a shiv into Hillary’s corpse.

This column was met with a great deal of negativity, and for good reason. Here we have the august New York Times, positing themselves as defenders of truth in a post-truth political era, but deciding to give prominent space to a fancy imbecile. The blowback was so strong that the Times’s public editor, Liz Spayd, weighed in today. Now, the obvious lesson that Spayd should have taken from this whole episode was DON’T HIRE A FUCKING CLIMATE DENIER. But no. Spayd’s takeaway was that perhaps liberals were too harsh on Stephens. Maybe we were all too harsh on each other, guys!

Readers, on the other hand, face the serious test of whether they can show tolerance for views they don’t like, even those they fear are dangerous.

Read that again and tell me it makes a lick of sense. I’m supposed to be tolerant of dangerous views? Is that really as big of a problem as the dangerous view itself? “Readers, on the other hand, face a SERIOUS TEST of whether or not they can be open to the idea of destroying the moon.” This whole episode is a perfect example of The New York Times’s steadfast dedication to the “Some people say X, while others say Y!” form of analysis, and it’s a grim reminder that the Times exists not to make readers smarter, but to make readers FEEL like they’re smarter, and that goes for liberal and conservative readers alike.

This is how they end up trotting out a prudish bozo like Ross Douthat to be like, “Hey, the French lady who wants to ban yarmulkes might have some good ideas, maybe?” And it’s how they trot out another bozo like Stephens presenting a “view” on climate change that isn’t a view at all, but rather a categorical untruth, and then allow him to buff and shine that view until it satisfies whatever niche audience wants their awful worldview to be legitimized by the paper of record. The Times wants to report the news, but they also want to be polite, and “fair,” which means indulging those who do not deserve to be indulged. This is especially true of Stephens.

Did all this negative criticism teach Stephens that he was, you know, wrong? Of course not. No, what Stephens learned was that liberals can be—gasp!—nasty!

And, true to any standard Professional Right Wing Yakker, he displays a perverse pride in upsetting readers who have ample reason to be upset. Every feather ruffled is a prize to be treasured:

The idea that liberals are intolerant of dissenting opinion has been a hobbyhorse of the right for decades. Every time conservatives are faced with rational blowback, they go, OH WOW, LOOK HOW HYSTERICAL THESE LIBERALS ARE! YOU GUYS ARE COMING OFF A LITTLE HOSTILE HERE! Rush Limbaugh brings up liberal anger on the hour every hour, and it’s a funny complaint coming from the kind of people who just won an election riding on the back of Nazi Frog Twitter, and who tend to react with outrage at, for example, the sight of two black people hosting SportsCenter together. I really don’t need their criticism of liberal manners validated by the Times when it’s so old and tired.