It has to be willful ignorance at this point, right?

The author is a right-wing turd contrarian. The NYT loves such people to death. He even wrote a book where he complained and ranted against the civil rights movement because of course he did.

Christopher Caldwell (journalist)

In 2020 he published The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, in which he argues that the civil rights movement has had significant unintended consequences: "Just half a decade into the civil rights revolution, America had something it had never had at the federal level, something the overwhelming majority of its citizens would never have approved: an explicit system of racial preference. Plainly the civil rights acts had wrought a change in the country's constitutional culture." Caldwell writes that the Civil Rights Act 1964 was "not just a major new element in the Constitution," but "a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible."