At this point the case against the New York Times’s decision to give Bret Stephens an op-ed column is well-known. His comments on race—he has warned of “the disease of the Arab mind” and believes Black Lives Matter contains “thuggish elements”—are atrocious. He doubts the validity of campus rape statistics, and is a climate change skeptic. In an interview with Vox’s Jeff Stein, he insisted that it’s “not true” that one in seven Americans experience hunger. (He’s wrong.) His presence at The Wall Street Journal made a perverse sense, in that the Journal is a bastion of an increasingly lonely school of conservative thought: tax cuts for the wealthy, unfettered market capitalism, more war. His move to the Times, however, has understandably incited outrage.

But Bret Stephens isn’t the only problem with the Times editorial page. He may not even be the biggest problem. At a time when smart opinion journalism has become a necessity to counteract the lies coming from the White House, as well as to offset the deficiencies of impartial journalism, the Times op-ed page is awash in out-of-touch, mediocre columnists who are badly out of sync with the era in which we live.

True to form, Stephens dedicated his first column to undermining the scientific consensus on climate change. “Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong,” he asserts. “Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.” Stephens’s concern here isn’t that people are rejecting scientific evidence of a phenomenon that will doom the planet; it’s that those of us who accept that scientific evidence are just too mean to those who have long used climate change skepticism to protect Big Business. In his conclusion, he boasts of having taken the work of Czeslaw Milosz for his epigraph. Milosz wrote to warn of authoritarianism, and it appears Stephens views the best conclusions of scientists in much the same lens.

The Times op-ed page, as judged by its regular columnists, imposes a fairly strict limits on which ideas are exchanged.

Editorial page editor James Bennet has vigorously defended Stephens’s hire, inadvertently revealing some of the flawed thinking that goes into the Times’s op-ed page. “If all of our columnists and all of our contributors and all of our editorials agreed all of the time we wouldn’t be promoting the free exchange of ideas, and we wouldn’t be serving our readers very well,” he said in a statement. “He’s capturing and contributing to a vitally important debate.”

But the Times op-ed page, as judged by its regular columnists, imposes fairly strict limits on which ideas are exchanged. It runs from the standard right-wing propaganda of Stephens, to the centrist bromides of David Brooks, to a moderate liberalism that cheers Trump’s bombs on Syria and boos student protesters at Middlebury, to the howling wasteland that is Thomas Friedman’s column, where he screams gibberish at a merciless sky. (His last contribution to public discourse was a blow-by-blow description of playing golf in Dubai with a yogi. Truly, we are blessed.) When she is not describing her intolerance for weed chocolate, Maureen Dowd is commending Donald Trump for being the true dove in the presidential race. Frank Bruni, meanwhile, does whatever it is that Frank Bruni does.