Why can’t the New York Times stand Brexit?

It seems that the editors of the New York Times will print any nonsense about Britain — the British live on mutton and oatmeal! — so long as it confirms their prejudices about Brexit.

‘With nothing meaningful to say about our future, we’ve retreated into the falsehoods of the past, painting over the absence of certainty at our core with a whitewash of poisonous nostalgia,’ Sam Byers wrote on Saturday. The British, who are in fact more tolerant of immigration than any other European people, are supposedly ‘poisoned’ by ‘colonial arrogance’ and ‘dreamy jingoism’. Britain, whose stock market carries more trades per day than Wall Street, is somehow a ‘backwater’. Brexit has drawn this nation of mutton-sucking racists into ‘a haunted dreamscape of collective dementia — a half-waking state in which the previous day or hour is swiftly erased and the fantasies of the previous century leap vividly to the fore’. This condition is shared by the editorial board of the New York Times, so of course it appeals to them.