Mitch McConnell shames ‘far left’ for banning debate, ideas

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell shamed the far-left and the media on Wednesday for picking and choosing what speech it will allow during the national debate over racism and policing, saying censorship runs afoul of the nation’s core beliefs.

“We cannot let the First Amendment become another casualty of this troubled moment,” the Kentucky Republican said on the Senate floor.

Political leaders from both sides of the aisle have stressed that peaceful protests must be free from government interference and the hijacking of mobs ready to riot.

But Republicans have grown increasingly outraged by push back from social media and some liberal news outlets looking to ban political speech and the free exchange of ideas.

A key example, Mr. McConnell said, was an op-ed in The New York Times written last week by Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican who defended President Trump’s authority to use active military troops to stop the rioting and looting engulfing scores of U.S. cities.

An uprising of New York Times reporters, who were dismayed by the notion that the military would confront citizens, caused the publisher to pull the op-ed and the opinion editor to resign.

Mr. Trump threatened to deploy active-duty troops in addition to the National Guard in Washington in response to demonstrations against police brutality sparked by George Floyd’s death. Floyd, a black man, died in police custody in Minneapolis.

Protests across the country turned violent with looting and arson for more than two weeks.

Mr. McConnell said that a recent survey found 58% of people agreed with Mr. Cotton’s position but the far-left wanted to end the discussion.

“We’ve seen this movie before. The far-left then decides to silence the speaker,” he said. “All of the facts couldn’t hold a candle to the hurt feelings.”

Richard Vatz, a scholar of political rhetoric at Towson University, said The New York Times “eviscerated its implicit claim to entertain positions contrary to the paper’s consensus.”

The Times, Mr. Vatz noted, has also published a disclaimer, saying the staff “concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.”

The editors, though, had gone back and forth reviewing several drafts of the op-ed before it went to print, Mr. Cotton said.

The disclaimer is unheard of by serious publications, according to Mr. Vatz.

“The New York Times used to be revered, including by this observer, for its integrity, if not its fairness. I taught a media criticism course at Towson University for [two] decades and referenced the newspaper often for its high quality of journalism. I would no longer so positively characterize The Times,” he said.

In a similar case, Stan Wischnowski was forced to resign as the top editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer after a newsroom insurrection over a column about the riots that caused major damage to city property and buildings.

The Inquirer article that caused the uprising was headlined, “Buildings Matter, Too,” which some argued was too offensive given the Black Lives Matter movement.

Social media, too, has caused distress in the free speech space after Twitter decided to flag some of President Trump’s tweets as misleading and marking others for glorifying violence during the riots while the tech company left some tweets — like a university professor telling rioters how to pull down Confederate monuments — unmarked.

The president went as far as signing an executive order last month to weaken legal protections that shield social media companies in reaction to what he said was discrimination and targeting of conservative speakers and ideas.