With reports circulating of its imminent demise, The New York Times announced in January that it had found a white knight.

Sort of. For the knight in question, who already owns 6 percent of the sinking Times and was investing $250 million in notes carrying 14 percent interest, was Carlos Slim. Reputedly the richest man in the world, taking the title from Bill Gates in 2007, Carlos is not so highly regarded in his own country.

In Mexico, according to Forbes, “the media and the masses long have held a sneaking suspicion that there is something shady about Slim. He is described as a rapacious monopolist who built his empire on cozy ties to Mexican presidents … .”

For this column, however, the issue is not how Carlos bought up the Mexican telephone monopoly, but whether this Big Enchilada has bought up Andrew Rosenthal’s editorial page.

For, two weeks after Carlos’ bailout cash arrived, Rosenthal’s page launched a hysterical attack on the patriots’ movement that seeks to halt the invasion of the United States from Mexico.

Targets: my sister Bay; our American Cause foundation and its executive director, Marcus Epstein; Peter Brimelow, the author of a seminal work on U.S. immigration, Alien Nation; Jim Pinkerton of Fox News, a White House aide to Bush I; Fox’s Bill O’Reilly; and this writer.

In the Times‘s editorial, “Return of the Nativists,” Brimelow is said to run an “extremist Website” (VDARE.com) where he and I post “musings about racial dilution and the perils facing white people.” Pinkerton was behind the “racist Willie Horton ads.” Epstein holds “white-supremacist” views. And we all are into “racialist extremism” and “Latino-bashing,” which calls to mind “the days of the Know-Nothings and the Klan.”

Racism “is all around us,” wails the Times. And the nation has a “perpetual need for vigilance,” even in this new “age of Obama.”

What occasioned this wilding attack? A news conference at the National Press Club, where the Times reporter failed to show, and release of a dry report by Epstein that contends that GOP defeats in 2008 had nothing to do with the strong stand most Republicans took for border security.

The Times calls the report “nonsense.” But the case is open and shut. Of 26 House Republicans who lost, Epstein found only one who was a strong border-control candidate defeated by a pro-amnesty Democrat. In every other GOP defeat, either the Democrat was tough on amnesty and border security or the Republican was wimpish.

That John McCain, who led the effort to put illegal aliens on a path to citizenship, got less than a third of the Hispanic vote shows that being pro-amnesty does not necessarily win the Hispanic vote. And the 70 percent of New Yorkers who rejected Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to give driver’s licenses to illegals, forcing Hillary Clinton to abandon her own governor, should tell even the obtuse Times which way the wind is blowing.

But rather than argue with us, the Times chose to slime us as racists and white supremacists. This is of a piece with the Times‘s sliming of the Californian electorate that voted against state recognition of homosexual marriage. To the Times, that 52-48 vote meant “right-wing forces, led by the Mormon Church,” had “enshrined bigotry in the state’s Constitution.”

Both diatribes reveal much about the fall of a great newspaper and the degeneration of a political philosophy that was once hegemonic in America. Liberalism has hardened into an ideology, a rabid religion that anathematizes any and all heretics.

To the Times‘s editorial writers, dissent from orthodoxy on illegal aliens or gay rights can only be explained by bigotry, hatred, racism or xenophobia in the hearts of the dissidents. To oppose the Times’ agenda on social or moral issues is ascribed to mental illness or moral sickness.

Yet, as these negative views on homosexual marriage and illegal immigration remain mainstream views, the Times comes off, as it did in Sunday’s sophomoric editorial, as loathing Middle America.

In its own mind, the Times is battling heroically the forces of hatred. Can it not, by rereading its own words, see the hatred in its own heart?

As Christ Himself said, Andrew, “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

Let it be said. There is nothing wrong about Americans fighting to preserve the culture and country they grew up in. That is what patriotic conservatism is all about. And if the Times can understand and support the right of native tribes like the Navajo and Apache to preserve their unique character and culture, why this viral hatred of those of us who wish to preserve the Western and Christian character of America?

Why does the Times want to see our America destroyed? From what poisoned well comes this hatred of the America we love?