NEW YORK TIMES: Publishers Banning Conservatives Isn’t Blacklisting Because They Can Self-Publish.

Hachette, you may remember, is the publisher that put out In Defense of Looting, which combined antisemitism, hostility toward Asians, with support for looting. No one seems to have been fired for that one so we can assume that some kinds of hate, incitement, and false narratives are still okay.

But the perfect New York Times paragraph comes most of the way down.

Thomas Spence, the president of the conservative publisher Regnery, said he regarded the shift by the Big Five (soon to be four, when Penguin Random House completes its acquisition of Simon & Schuster) as a “form of blacklisting.”

Ben Smith however offers this tremendous act of journalism.

“But when that word was used in 1950s Hollywood, the movie studios could silence a writer, director or actor because they exercised near total control over production and distribution. The New York publishers don’t have that power anymore. High-profile authors provide more marketing on social media than any publisher can dream of, and the largely values-neutral Amazon is the main distribution channel for most books. Donald Trump Jr. self-published his second book.”

Seriously. It’s not blacklisting because… you can self-publish.

Pathetic. Contemptible. Neither seem to do this justice. It’s the sort of thing that a Communist apparatchik would have offered up to an American journalist asking about the persecution of some blacklisted writer. Now it’s the sort of contemptible apologia for its blacklists that the New York Times offers up in the very same article in which it promotes and celebrates the blacklist.

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote yesterday, “The Left’s 1960s dream is America’s 2021 nightmare:”

To advocate burning or destroying a book is not some nightmare from Fahrenheit 451, but a woke way to “stop the hate.”

A new Orwellian phrase is “free speech is not free reach”—as leftists become the intellectual inheritors of the racists of the open-housing fights of the 1950s and 1960. The old racist boilerplate of apartment owners and realtors was “You can live anywhere you want, just not here.” The new hate mantra of Silicon Valley cartels is, “You can tweet or socially post anywhere you like—if you can manage to find a place.”

Surveillance and spying are now good. How else to ferret out “right-wingers,” “white supremacists,” and “insurrectionists”?

So the FBI and CIA have transmogrified into heroic agencies run by stalwart social activist fighters like John Brennan, the old Gus Hall supporter, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe. They cut to the quick to achieve social justice, without the messy give and take of Congress, or that albatross, the relic Constitution.

What a wonderful world they have created: Eavesdropping on the national security advisor, forging FISA documents, spying on American citizens, aiding one presidential candidate by surveilling another.

Finally, they can use their skills and surveillance to investigate and hound the “right” enemies, for the “right” causes.” The CIA and FBI always secretly wished to be beloved by the Left. Now they are deified.

Presumably, since their columnists can still self-publish, the New York Times has no problem with this development: New App Allows Twitter Users to Block All NY Times Reporters With One Click.

I’m not in the business of censorship, so I’m very uncomfortable with this app, but given the tenor of the times (okay, pun slightly intended), I can’t say I’m at all surprised at its development.