The anachronistic yoga mat.

Via Instapundit, I'm reading this X post by John Ziegler, who makes many good criticpoints, and I'm only extracting one:

The @nytimes is being lavished with praise by the virtue-signaling brigade, but there are very basic problems with their Cesar Chavez story… 

One of the VERY few details in the two claims of child sex abuse from the early 1970s includes the key use of a 'yoga mat,' but yoga mats were not even a thing until at least 10 years, and possibly 20 years, later

Is it true there weren't things called yoga mats in the 1970s in California? I asked Grok. Answer:

Yes, it is essentially true that things called "yoga mats" (especially the modern, purpose-designed, non-slip "sticky" mats commonly referred to today) did not exist in the 1970s in California—or anywhere else.
The modern yoga mat as we know it originated in the early 1980s:

• In 1982, yoga teacher Angela Farmer began using cut pieces of carpet underlay (a thin, grippy padding material from Germany) during classes to prevent slipping on floors. This is widely regarded as the origin of the "sticky mat."
• Her father, Richard Farmer, later commercialized it by sourcing and retailing these mats (branded as the "Original Molivos Mat") in the UK, with some distribution reaching the US by the late 1980s.
• The first purpose-made, mass-produced yoga mats (typically made of PVC for better durability and grip) appeared in the early to mid-1990s, with companies like Hugger Mugger in the US developing and selling improved versions.

In the 1970s: 

• Yoga was still quite niche in the West, including California, where it gained some popularity through figures like the United Farm Workers' connections or counterculture scenes.
• Practitioners used alternatives like towels, blankets, rugs, animal skins (traditional in some lineages), bare floors, or nothing at all—especially since many homes had carpeted floors that provided some natural grip (though shag carpets could cause slipping in standing poses).
• There are no credible historical records, news articles, books, or product mentions of anything marketed or commonly called a "yoga mat" before around 1982. Searches for references to "yoga mat" or "yoga mats" from before 1980 turn up nothing relevant.

While some people in the 1970s might have improvised with thin foam padding, carpet remnants, or similar materials for yoga, these were not branded, sold, or referred to as "yoga mats." The specific term and concept of a dedicated, portable, non-slip yoga mat emerged later.

This timeline supports criticisms (like the one in the X post you referenced) that mention a "yoga mat" in a 1971 context would be anachronistic—it's a detail that doesn't align with documented history. 

So let's say there couldn't have been a yoga mat in the scene the accuser described. How much would that undercut her credibility? Let's look at the NYT article and see how important the yoga mat is. It appears at the very beginning:

Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.

He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”

It appears again in the middle of the article:

Ms. Murguia said she was 13 when Mr. Chavez began inviting her into his office. He had an obsession with alternative healing therapies, and would sometimes put her on his desk and demonstrate the “pressure points” that could relieve stress and pain, she said. That eventually led to kissing, and then fondling. And then more.

“When I was on the yoga mat is when he would try to have sex,” Ms. Murguia said.

And it appears at the very end, which describes Murguia return to the place in 2013 The last 2 words of the article are "yoga mat":

That day, Ms. Murguia looked at his desk. His chair. His tall bookshelves. And there, in the right corner, she saw something that stopped her, bringing back a rush of memories. It was the yoga mat.

I'd say the yoga mat is presented as powerful evidence, to the point where it becomes powerful evidence against Murguia if we can conclude that there couldn't have been a "yoga mat" back in the early 70s. That doesn't necessarily mean that Murguia is fabricating. We might guess that Murguia saw a yoga mat in 2013 and that reminded her of yoga experiences in the early 70s, and those experiences did not involve a mat, but the mysterious process of memory integrated that mat into the earlier memories. The Times presents it as though seeing the mat opened the door of memory and perhaps even that the existence of the mat corroborated the memory. But it was well known that Chavez practiced yoga, even if he must, in the early 70s, have gone without the idiosyncratic sticky foam item known as a yoga mat. It did not take special access to associate Chavez with yoga, but Murguia claims very detailed and intimate connection to Chavez through yoga, and the mat is deployed to make us feel the reality of what she says happened.

Think deeply about the impeachment of witnesses: How serious is an anachronism?