To the Seven Wonders of the World — among them the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Colossus of Rhodes — can be added another: The Obliviousness of the New York Times. It’s got to be the gaudiest, most outsized, most breathtaking wonder of them all, comprising an almost total lack of self-awareness encapsulated in the thickest compost of self-righteousness. Gaaaaaw.What triggers this understatement is the editorial the Gray Lady issued this morning under the headline “America Has a Free Speech Problem.” Says the Times: “For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.”Are they kidding? This “social silencing, this depluralizing of America,” the Times reports, “has been evident for years.” Yet where was the Times? During these aforementioned years the Times hasn’t had a single courageous or useful thing to say about this blasted depluralizing. They haven’t defended a single Christian wedding-cake baker, nor a single Satmar shopkeeper — except maybe some fading communist.The first thing we did when this editorial heaved into view — it runs to 2,500 words — was assign the telegraph editor of the Sun to call the office of Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and invite him to write a reply column. He was the author of the piece in the Times suggesting we ought to be prepared to use the Army to suppress the violent riots that were breaking out in cities alongside ostensibly peaceful protests in respect of Black Lives Matter. Mr. Cotton contrasted looters with protesters, lamented the “orgy of violence,” and cited the “basic responsibility of government” to “maintain public order and safety.” He marked precedents where the military was used to protect school desegregation efforts. This turned out to be too much for the Gray Lady. Times staffers revolted, saying Mr. Cotton’s op-ed “puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” So instead of defending Mr. Cotton’s right to express a view shared by most Americans, the Times caved, appending to the op-ed an editor’s note saying Mr. Cotton’s “essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.” It was “needlessly harsh.” The “editing process was rushed and flawed.” The publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, called it “contemptuous.” The editorial page editor, James Bennet, was forced to resign.Mr. Cotton compared the Times’ self-flagellation to “a struggle session from the Cultural Revolution in the greatest traditions of Mao.” He called it a prime example of “cancel culture” and a threat to “principles of free inquiry and open debate.” Mr. Sulzberger, by contrast, hailed the “urgent and important conversations” sparked by the incident. He thanked his staff for their “dedication to helping us to live up to our highest ideals.”Yet now the Times presents cancel culture as a bipartisan concern. Both “the political left and the right” find themselves “caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture,” its new editorial says. “84 percent of adults,” — both Democrats and Republicans — the Times says, deem it a problem “that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation.” “Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all,” the Times admits, while conservatives have “embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness” including “laws that would ban books” and “stifle teachers.” Yet the Times’ own poll shows 55 percent of Republicans feel less free to “express your viewpoint in most situations” versus a decade ago, compared with only 34 percent of Democrats who feel similarly stifled. The Times’ editorial overlooks how the right is feeling the burden of cancel culture substantially more than the left. Worse, the Times ignores its own role in perpetuating cancel culture. Its editorial omits the fury that arose over Mr. Cotton’s op-ed, and the chilling effect it had on free expression. That’s water under the bridge for the Times, whose editorial now offers bromides like: “Free speech is predicated on mutual respect.”Which brings us back to the Wonders of the World. The Times’ absence of self-awareness reminds us of Shelley’s evocation of hubris in “Ozymandias.” That poem describes a ruined monument — a “colossal Wreck” — whose fragments depict the “sneer of cold command” of a long-passed greatness. “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” the pedestal still avers, even as “The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
