NYT apologizes for leaking info about its beliefs

The NY Times often publishes corrections to factual errors, such as getting a name wrong. But it does not correct errors in its opinion columns, whether factual or otherwise. So it was very unusual that the NY Times corrected an opinion column about Jewish intelligence.

Bret Stephens is a Jewish Trump-hater NY Times columnist. Don't be fooled by his name; his family changed it to disguise their Jewish origins. He used to be editor of the Jerusalem Post.

Here is the original essay, and revised version, unpaywalled. The original said:

* Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than everyone else, with what appears to be genes for higher IQ.
* Ashkenazi Jews also have intelligence with "bracing originality and high-minded purpose."
* Outside Israel, Jews are "intimately familiar with the customs of the country while maintaining a critical distance from them."
* Jews believe in knowledge, because everything else about America is perishable.
* The US and the West (but not Israel) should "honor the principle of racial, religious and ethnic pluralism".
* There are moral beliefs “incarnate in the Jewish people”.
* Complaints about anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and white nationalists.

Can you guess what offended the NY Times editors? It was the one claim that was actually backed up by a scientific publication, namely The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending. They also wrote a quite well respected book on human evolutionary trends of the last 10,000 years.

A comment says:

Saying Jews are successful due to genes and IQ is much more acceptable than saying they are a tight knit tribe that covertly cooperates to out compete less organized opponents.

I would agree, but the NY Times editors have other ideas. I am not sure what the reasoning is. Maybe saying the Ashkenazi Jews have high IQ offends the Sephardic Jews.

It is more likely that citing Jewish IQ conflicts with other Jewish narratives.

For one, the NYT is always trying to convince us that Jews are a persecuted minority. That is not plausible, if Jews are smarter, richer, more powerful, and more influential that everyone else.

For another, the NYT is always trying to replace American non-Jewish Whites with lower-IQ non-whites. Stephens does this in the above article by arguing for Zionism (keeping Israel Jewish) and ethnic pluralism in White countries (by importing low-IQ non-whites).

If the NYT were to openly say all these things, then there would be one inescapable conclusion: that Jews seek to maintain their genetic, economic, and cultural superiority by debasing the non-Jewish gene pool.

If these motives were to become apparent, then all the NYT and Jewish Left arguments about their morally superior egalitarianism would be seen to be completely phony. Jews are just promoting Jewish racial superiority by sabotaging their competing races.

Am I reading this wrong? If so, why did the NYT issue this correction? The explanation given is:

After publication Mr. Stephens and his editors learned that one of the paper’s authors, who died in 2016, promoted racist views.

Really? That is the excuse for removing the statement: “During the 20th century, they made up about 3 percent of the U.S. population but won 27 percent of the U.S. Nobel science prizes and 25 percent of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.”

The editors can easily fact-check that statement, and it doesn't matter that one of the co-authors once expressed a racist views. Everyone who writes on the subject of IQ and ethnic groups has expressed racist views.

I would have thought that the NYT would be more eager to remove the text about Jews not being loyal Americans, or believing that America is perishable, or having an Israeli double standard, or having superior morals.

No, the NYT obviously believes that they are smarter than everyone else, so they can bluff with claims of persecution and high-minded morals, and we non-Jews will be dumb enough to believe it.