Speech warriors, aux barricades!

Someone has criticized the Times, but not for being liberal!

We the undersigned Substack editors wish to express our displeasure with a letter recently circulated by radical leftists like Ed Yong, who become infamous for belittling the strongly-held beliefs of COVID skeptics, and the least sexy of the Sex & The City girls, and a number of New York Times contributors claiming to find “editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠-⁠binary, and gender nonconforming people.”

First of all, their letter is tantamount to an act of plagiarism, since we the undersigned wrote an earlier and much more famous group letter at Harper’s decrying cancel culture. These leftists are clearly stealing our idea and cheapening our intellectual property.

While our lawyers work that one over, we will address the content of the present letter.

First of all, how dare they complain that “15,000 words of front⁠-⁠page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children [have been] published in the last eight months alone”? Our publicists calculate that the Times has devoted at least ten times that number of words to cancel culture and wokeness — and to us the undersigned — in the same timeframe. Obviously as a news organization the Times is obliged to cover cancel culture, wokeness, and trans people, because these are important problems in modern life.

And some of the leftists’ complaints show a complete misunderstanding of what journalism is. For example, from the letter:

In a similar case, Katie Baker’s recent feature “When Students Change Gender Identity and Parents Don’t Know” misframed the battle over children’s right to safely transition. The piece fails to make clear that court cases brought by parents who want schools to out their trans children are part of a legal strategy pursued by anti-trans hate groups. These groups have identified trans people as an “existential threat to society” and seek to replace the American public education system with Christian homeschooling, key context Baker did not provide to Times readers.

This is an old leftist trick, tarring those who support a legitimate if controversial point of view with the fringe figures who coincidentally support that cause. We see it all the time in the woke cancel culture press. Just the other day, for example, Republican Nikki Haley — one of the good Republicans that we the undersigned would definitely consider voting for! — launched her presidential campaign, and the invocation at that event was delivered by John Hagee, who has said some unfortunate things about Jesus and Hitler in the past. For this Haley was attacked.

Now, we do not necessarily agree with Hagee, but we have to ask: Is it fair to criticize a politician just because a someone who happened to give the invocation at their presidential launch is “problematic”? This is the kind of cancel culture the leftist letter-writers are employing against the New York Times and the brave trans skeptics they profiled.  

We want to be clear: Such a coordinated attack on a major news gathering organization should be taken as a threat to free speech and liberty. (Unless we do it, obviously.) And whatever assaults and legislation against trans people follow this letter, it’s not our fault, it’s your fault, as we will demonstrate in a forthcoming edition of The Twitter Files as soon as Mr. Musk prepares the evidence.

Sincerely, etc.