Another Loss for Open Debate
The anti-police forces who seek to suppress every voice that disagrees with them have claimed another kill, and freedom of expression has suffered another loss.
In a notorious incident in 2020, Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by police serving a warrant. Unlike most of the high-profile use-of-force incidents of the last few years, there is no indication that Ms. Taylor brought the use of force on herself.
Even so, it does not follow that the police necessarily did anything wrong either. Hearing their side of the story would inform the public debate.
Louisville Police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly is one of the officers. He is not the one who fired the shot that killed Ms. Taylor. He was shot and seriously injured by Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, who opened fire on the police when they entered the apartment.
Sgt. Mattingly is writing a book on the incident. Simon & Schuster had agreed to distribute it, though they are not publishing it themselves. However, there has been a predictable online petition, and the cowardly publisher has cut and run.
Andrea Salcedo has this story in the WaPo.
The First Amendment, of course, only protects against abridgement of freedom of speech and the press by government. That does not mean, however, that censorship by nongovernment entities is not a serious concern. If one side of a debate has access to widely available media while the other is limited to small backwaters, the debate is distorted and the public is misinformed by misleading half-truths.
For an example of a misleading half-truth, one need look no further than the WaPo story linked above. As is typical with news stories of this incident, Ms. Salcedo reports that the officers had a “no-knock” warrant without mentioning that they did knock and announce anyway, a fact confirmed by neighbors who heard them.
Voices that run contrary to the prevailing narrative are precious. They inform us of inconvenient truths that journo-advocates conveniently omit. The cowardice of corporate publishers and distributors running scared from online petitions is a disgrace. More importantly, it is a serious danger to the full information that democracy needs to survive.
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Private censorship, by the media, academia, and publishers ranks right up there with exploding violent crime as one of the daggers aimed at the heart of American ideals. And, as this post suggests, the two are often linked. Increasingly, any pushback against proposals to return to the soft-on-crime policies of the Sixties and Seventies is labeled as racist, and the campaign is on to ban it from the public square. All-in-all, dissent from the reigning orthodoxy is in greater danger now that at any time in my life since McCarthy. That’s one of the reasons CJLF’s work, and this blog, are so important.