Here are the words you never thought you would read in The New York Times, at least as we have known our newspaper of record since the beginning of the Trump era: “I was wrong.” And yet there they were this past July, not once but many times over, as eight of the Times’s star columnists participated in an interactive feature under that title, each of them professing to have seen the error of his or her ways in some significant—or, more often, insignificant—respect. It was almost enough to make me think that I had been wrong in supposing that the assiduous propagandists of the post-Rutenbergian Times had chosen to reject traditional news-and-comment for ideology at least partly as an insurance policy against ever having to admit to error—since the regnant ideology currently espoused by the international Left, of which the Times is America’s house organ, must always be presumed to be right by definition. “On the right side of history,” as its adepts are fond of putting it. In the same way, “science” in left-wing parlance has been subsumed by ideology and now commonly means never having to say that you are sorry. It’s the science “deniers” who are always and inevitably wrong, by definition (see “Real science” in The New Criterion of February 2022). And yet long experience of these usages made me skeptical that “I was wrong” in the pages of The New York Times could actually mean anything of the kind.