Welcome to Byron York’s Daily Memo newsletter.
Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to receive the newsletter.
A DARK DAY FOR FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION: It’s been a terrible 48 hours for Americans who believe in freedom of speech. The latest on the Tom Cotton brouhaha below, but first a note about Alex Berenson. He is the former New York Times reporter who has been highly critical of the lockdown policy employed by most places to slow the spread of coronavirus.
Berenson’s lockdown critique was sober and data-based — and deeply unpopular among advocates of extending lockdowns far into the future. So Berenson put his work into book form. And then, on Thursday, he got a message from Amazon, telling him the online giant would not be selling his book. “Your book does not comply with our guidelines,” Amazon said. “As a result we are not offering your book for sale.” Amazon went on to refer customers to “official sources” for information about coronavirus. Amazon offered no further explanation.
Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!
It was censorship, pure and simple. And then some prominent voices, notable among them tech mogul Elon Musk, began to protest. “This is insane, @JeffBezos,” Musk tweeted, addressing the head of Amazon. “Time to break up Amazon. Monopolies are wrong!”
And then — Presto! — Berenson’s book was released from captivity, available from Amazon. The company said the whole thing had been an “error,” but Berenson was skeptical. “I do believe that I’m not the only person who has run into this,” Berenson told Fox News. “They need to be clear what their position is on publishing controversial material on political issues.”
AND THEN THERE WAS COTTON. It is fair to say that the Arkansas Republican senator’s op-ed advocating the use of the military to quell rioting in some places around the country drove the New York Times’ opinion section insane. Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote a piece headlined “Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-Ed,” in which she noted that the paper had previously published op-eds by the likes of Vladimir Putin and the leader of the Taliban. But Sen. Cotton? Outrageous!
“Putin and [Sirajuddin] Haqqani, after all, weren’t given space in this newspaper to advocate attacks on Americans during moments of national extremis,” Goldberg wrote. “Cotton, by contrast, is calling for what would almost certainly amount to massive violence against his fellow citizens: an ‘overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.'”
Times opinion editor James Bennet originally defended publishing the piece. Then the paper back down, explaining that a “rushed editorial process” led to the publication of Cotton’s piece, which “did not meet our standards.” It was a total surrender to the paper’s woke critics inside and out.
What’s going on? Yet another Times staffer, opinion writer Bari Weiss, had a plausible explanation. “The old guard [that would be editors like the 54 year-old Bennet] lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption.”
“The new guard has a different worldview,” Weiss continued, “one articulated by [authors] Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. They call it ‘safetyism,’ in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.”
If true — and it sounds persuasive — that does not bode well for the future. The new practitioners of “safetyism” will push out the old guard, and anachronistic values like freedom of expression will slowly, and then quickly, go out the window. Rights will be taken away, for our own good, in the name of helping us all to feel safe. It’s already happening.
