Is America a safe haven for exiled writers?
No. Nor is it particularly tolerant of conservative Senators who write.
Can America be a safe-haven for exiled writers when our own freedom to speak is under attack? Following the near-deadly assault on Salman Rushdie, Stanley Kurtz asks that very good question.
Stanley begins by noting that the topic on which Rushdie was speaking when he was attacked was, “The United States as safe haven for exiled writers.” The assault on Rushdie suggests that these days, we aren’t one.
It’s possible to view the assault as standing only for the propositions that (1) radical Islamists will commit terrorism in the U.S., as elsewhere and (2) those who offend them should take protecting their own security seriously. But that’s too narrow a reading.
Stanley argues, persuasively in my view, that “the attack on Rushdie cannot help but raise questions about the crisis of free speech in America — that is to say, about our own retreat from liberty.” “The connection,” he says, “is profound.”
I recommend reading Stanley’s entire article. Here are his concluding paragraphs:
Surveys now show that up to two-thirds of students approve of shouting down campus speakers, while almost a quarter believe that violence can be used to cancel a speech. These are the views of the generation that grew up without required courses in Western civilization, a course the core theme of which was the long, bloody, and difficult path by which our freedoms were conceived and established. Those courses nurtured a sense of reverence around our liberties, and a sense of shame in those violating the liberties of others. We have lost both the reverence and the shame.
The upshot is that globalization has made us more vulnerable to foreign threats, while our misguided response to globalization has damaged our greatest weapon against those very threats: our regard for our own tradition of liberty, and the principles that lay behind it. Our horror at the assault on Rushdie is a sign that there is life in our tradition still. The culturally alien nature of the attack reminds us that our tradition of freedom is real, distinctive, and worth preserving. Yet our continuing reluctance to affirm our own history and principles — especially in our schools — means that time is running short. Freedom, so to speak, is on a ventilator. We cannot remain a “safe haven for exiled writers” if we are not a safe haven for ourselves.
America remains safe for mainstream media outlets and their writers. That’s a very good thing. But whether anyone should trust what they say is another matter.
Few do. Trust in the American news media is reported to be at an all-time low. According to Gallup, 16 percent of U.S. adults now say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers. For television news, the number is 11 percent.
When it comes to the New York Times the percentage should be even lower. The Times is not “safe” for writers who don’t toe its leftist line. That’s why Bari Weiss, now wildly successful on Substack, resigned from the Times, citing the paper’s “illiberal environment.”
Last week, Weiss, who clearly still has good sources at the Times, reported that a senior editor at the Times told a more junior colleague to run an op-ed by Republican Senator Tim Scott by Chuck Schumer for approval. The junior colleague didn’t do it. The Times didn’t publish Scott’s op-ed.
Here, according to Weiss, is what happened:
There was a discussion about [Scott’s] piece and whether or not [the Times] should run it. And one colleague, a more senior colleague, said to a more junior colleague who was pushing for the piece, “Do you think the Republicans really care about minority rights?”
And the more junior colleague said, “I think Tim Scott cares about minority rights.” And then the more senior colleague said, “let’s check with Sen. Schumer before we run it.”
Tim Scott is African-American. The notion that he doesn’t care about minority rights is so stupid that only mainstream media members, and maybe some among the small percentage of people who still trust them, could entertain it.
The notion that Chuck Schumer needed to be consulted to make sure Scott really does care about minority rights, or for any other purpose related to Scott’s op-ed, is deeply offensive both to Scott and to principles of ethical journalism. The Times itself claims to have a policy that prohibits seeking outside approval or consultation before publishing opinion pieces.
This isn’t the first time the Times has had problems with op-eds by conservative Republican Senators. During the BLM rioting of 2020, Sen. Tom Cotton wrote a piece advocating use of the military, pursuant to the Insurrection Act, to put down out-of-control mob violence, but only as a backup if police are overwhelmed.
The Times, to its credit, published Cotton’s piece. However, the howls of protest, including from Times staffers, were so intense that the head of the paper’s opinion section resigned and the paper apologized for running the op-ed.
No wonder a senior Timesman in the opinion section wanted to cover his rear-end by running Scott’s op-ed by Schumer for approval. No wonder Scott’s piece was killed.
No wonder so many college students believe in shouting down opinions with which they disagree and even resorting to violence to prevent such expression. No wonder America is becoming less and less of a haven for writers — and not just writers — who express politically incorrect opinions.