An astute conservative can predict with formulaic accuracy that broadly touted stories circulating on the Right will eventually emerge on the Left. Take the notion that the coronavirus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a result of highly risky (and American-funded) gain-of-function research. What began as serious hypothesis among conservatives, first popularized by Republican Tom Cotton in January 2020, began as an unspeakable conspiracy theory well outside the Overton window of acceptable discourse for liberals and the media. Soon enough, however, it morphed into a tough but worthy open question after the 2020 election. Now, finally, it is considered the most likely explanation for what happened, and even left-wing politicos must begrudgingly accept it.
What triggers each phase of this cycle? Usually it is the passing of a political inconvenience. In the above case, it was the passing of the pandemic in the collective consciousnesses of the country. And now, the full-fledged backlash to the violent rioting of the Black Lives Matter movement has instigated another truth to finally surface in the pages of the Washington Post.
Flash back to 2020, and again, recall another reason Cotton made major headlines that summer. Seeing entire cities burnt to the ground as the rest of the law-abiding citizenry respected coronavirus lockdowns, the Arkansan took to the New York Times opinion page to make a modest proposal: that in accordance with the Insurrection Act, military forces ought to be authorized to back up local law enforcement attempting to keep the peace in cities like New York City and St. Louis.
When Cotton’s op-ed, “Send in the Troops,” went live, all hell broke lose. New York Times employees took to Twitter to accuse their employers of putting “Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” The paper’s leadership quickly abandoned the piece to make public corrections such as claiming the tone was “needlessly harsh.” Publisher A.G. Sulzberger forced out editorial page editor James Bennet, reassigned deputy editor James Dao, and publicly threw editorial assistant Adam Rubenstein under the bus.
Note that the New York Times’s opinion page had previously published the musings of the Taliban, Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and Hamas. In fact, just a month after the Cotton fracas, it published coronavirus propaganda by an employee of the Chinese Communist Party-controlled Peking University
Now Erik Wemple, the Washington Post’s media critic, has finally conceded what seemed obvious to conservatives for two years now — Bennet was screwed by cowardly, bad bosses who obsequiously caved in to an irrational and angry mob.
Wemple writes:
Our criticism of the Twitter outburst comes 875 days too late. Although the hollowness of the internal uproar against Bennet was immediately apparent, we responded with an evenhanded critique of the Times’s flip-flop, not the unapologetic defense of journalism that the situation required. Our posture was one of cowardice and midcareer risk management. With that, we pile one more regret onto a controversy littered with them.
Wemple deserves plaudits for his mea culpa, but it is worth asking why only now he feels capable of admitting the ugly truth without too much fear of professional blowback.
Could it be that BLM cost the nation perhaps a once-in-a-generation opportunity to pass meaningful federal police reform legislation? Is it because the crime issue is about to cost Democrats the House, likely the Senate, and in two years time, possibly the White House? Is it because liberals finally found an insurrection they believe worthy of suppression?
I’m all for forgiving the silence of those finally no longer fearful of speaking the truth. But let’s not forget just why it can never be spoken when it still matters. The governing principle is always the political convenience of the liberals who bully the press into submission.
