Rabbi Aryeh Spero explains in Human Events:

Why does the Times do whatever it can to demoralize our troops, cast them as blood-thirsty, bring about humiliation of President Bush and America, and even offer its pages for op-eds by a known al Qaeda terrorist, romanticizing the jihadist cause? Why is it helping our enemies and imperiling our safety and the safety of our children?

It is because the New York Times is not some inanimate object but the propaganda organ of a particular crowd, real people on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, who wish to run the country and control our domestic and foreign policy even though they have not been elected to do so. Because this crowd sees itself as superior to the rest of us and our institutions, and smugly scorns that which was once termed “the American Way,” they have placed themselves in a battle mode hostile and counter to all we hold dear. Our defeat is their victory.

If they can bring down the military, they can force the United States to go the negotiation route where they, not the generals, hold sway. If they can demonize the soldier, they assume we will look to them for “working things out” with the outside forces. If America can be defeated, then “the American Way” of strength against our enemies will be discredited, thereby opening the way for them, the cosmopolitans and transnationalists, to determine within their international fraternity the destiny of America. Bottom line: they wish to control America’s destiny…

What type of person possesses such arrogance? Elitists, like the New York Times crowd who know they are superior. A crowd that does not accept you as an intellectual, social and political equal. They “care” for you only as their ward, with they above and you below — all in the name of compassion and equality.

This crowd points to America as the source of all trouble in the world, as do the Europeans, because they think like Europeans, not Americans. They admire Paris, not Peoria. They live here, get rich here and gain power here, but respect the “sophistication” of Stockholm more than the “plainness” of Missouri. They want to reshape America into a Europeanism. Michael Wolff of New York Magazine bragged: “I’m not an American. I’m a New Yorker.” In other words, they are cosmopolitans of the world, above the plebians in Witchita.

The liberalism of the New York Times is different, for example, than that of the millions of individual liberals across the country or even that of, say, the Washington Post. The New York Times expresses the views of a specific crowd that congregates in a physical location primarily in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and, now, upper east side. It is a crowd that has never been comfortable with mainstream America and Americanism. Thus its anti-Americanism comes naturally, and easily. The anti-Americanism that horrifies us is part of their decades-old mindset. It comes with that neighborhood.

Unlike the liberalism of ideology seen in other parts of America, the anti-American leftism of the Upper West Side/New York Times crowd is akin to a heritage, passed down from generation to generation within the families living there. Additionally, contra-Americanism is their identity, a raison d’etre of this particular community. With all its wealth, power and privilege, it still feels alien to historic America and hopes and works for historic America to be replaced by a different America.

For them, it is not a hobby or pastime but a mission. They will never stop nor be satisfied. As the country becomes more permissive, this crowd keeps redefining what it means to be moral and tolerant so as to continually remain “above” the rest of America. It is a one-upmanship. This has led, for example, to their silly new definition of torture: playing loud music in front of Islamic terrorists.

More than mere liberalism, unique to the Upper West Side crowd is a haughty anti-Americanism reinforced by members living in a cocooned, chosen ghetto apart from and disdainful of the American people and “the American way.” This crowd routinely snickers at regular Americans and views the military as unrefined, as red-neck types.

Its university-educated youth redrink what they already imbibed from mother’s milk, namely, that America is racist and imperialistic. It finds, therefore, common cause and political identity with any group — be it domestic or foreign — that condemns American society or the American people. For them, groups that are anti-American are comrades.

I think the rabbi’s indictment is pretty accurate, but I wouldn’t restrict its applicability to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.