Politically motivated efforts to ban books, we’ve been gravely informed for months, are yet another harbinger of the sweeping right-wing authoritarian threat to American democracy. Except, of course, when those efforts come from the Left — and are directed at books from the Right. Yesterday, The Wrap reported:
Hundreds of Penguin Random House staffers and other literary professionals are calling on the publishing company to cut ties with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and to cancel her upcoming book.
The publishing house came under fire Friday after an open letter bearing 520 signatures was made public. In it, the dissenters call for a better balance of freedom of speech and duty of care, citing Penguin’s $2 million book deal with Coney Barrett as “a case where a corporation has privately funded the destruction of human rights with obscene profits.”
The letter’s endorsers took particular issue with the justice’s vote earlier this year to overturn Roe v. Wade, a move that seems to come in direct conflict with what her book is reportedly about: “how judges are not supposed to bring their personal feelings into how they rule.”
The full open letter, titled WE DISSENT, is even more ridiculous than you’d expect. “As members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community of the United States, we care deeply about freedom of speech,” the first sentence of the letter opens, before proceeding to outline, in meticulous detail, why that deep belief in freedom of speech is really only limited to “freedom of speech for people who say things we like.” It’s a tour de force of philosophically incoherent, vaguely post-structuralist word salad — the kind of argument that isn’t really meant to convince, but rather to serve as a bare-minimum public justification for the raw exercise of power. “We the undersigned have made the decision to stand by our duty of care while upholding freedom of speech,” the letter concludes. “We cannot stand idly by while our industry misuses free speech to destroy our rights.”
As I noted last December, the furious left-wing backlash to conservative attempts to remove obscenity from school classrooms was always disingenuous:
The cultural ideology that sanctions and justifies books like Gender Queer has reached the highest echelons of American life. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg described the recent slate of book bans as “an aggressive new censoriousness tearing through America, as the campaign against critical race theory expands into a broader push to purge school libraries of books that affront conservative sensibilities regarding race and gender.” When a school-board member in northern Virginia quipped that he wanted to “throw” sexually explicit books “in a fire,” NPR noted — without a hint of irony — that “book burning was a practice perpetuated in Nazi Germany in order to oppress authors and ideas that were in opposition to Nazi ideology.”
Of course, elite progressive outrage on this issue is selective. When an English professor at UC–Berkeley urged her Twitter followers to “steal Abigail Shrier’s book” (Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which provoked outrage for its criticisms of transgender ideology) and “burn it on a pyre,” no Nazi Germany comparisons surfaced in NPR. Michelle Goldberg had nothing to say about the virtue of free speech when Chase Strangio, an attorney for the ACLU — yes, the same ACLU that once defended the First Amendment rights of neo-Nazis — said that “stopping the circulation of [Shrier’s] book and [her] ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” Nor was there a panicked media frenzy about “censorship” when Ethics and Public Policy Center president Ryan Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally was delisted from Amazon for its critiques of gender ideology.
For decades, the Left has operated on the implicit — and sometimes explicit — assumption that true authoritarianism can only ever come from the Right. So don’t expect any Nazi book burning analogies about the anti-ACB letter anytime soon.