The Free Press Live: August 15, 2024
Co-hosts Michael Moynihan and Batya Ungar-Sargon sit down with Bridget Phetasy and Peter Savodnik.
The Free Press Live is our weekly show bringing you sharp commentary from friends of The FP, and helping you to make sense of a chaotic news cycle. Tonight, co-hosts Michael Moynihan and Batya Ungar-Sargon sit down with Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik and writer Bridget Phetasy.
I really enjoy the work of each of the four journalists doing this panel and am responding respectfully because I think this could be a good show. Unfortunately, the live seemed more of an opportunity for them to chuckle with each other than to share meaningful content. (Peter and Michael did offer some content.) It interests me that given the criticism of the Harris campaign, the only thing the commentators chose to talk about regarding RFK, who has discussed his platform, was his “narcissism” and “lack of humor.” What about his platforms? Why does The FP avoid discussing them? Even if RFK does not have a chance of winning, he is offering ideas worth discussing and potentially worth implementing. Why is The FP scared to discuss them?
The Free Press banned me from commenting on this platform for 30days on July 24. In their explanation for the ban, they highlighted a comment where I accused all Democrats of believing that they are better than others and I accused the Democratic Party of being a crude cult. I also inserted the letter “K” in place of all “hard-Cs” in the text because I have often referred to the Democratic Party as the party of the Ku Klux Klan. For this reason, the Free Press saw fit to suspend my commenting privileges for an entire month.
I have written to the Free Press multiple times to ask for more clarification and have received nothing but smug, dismissive, silence. Nothing in my remark constitutes an ad-hominem attack because Democrats are neither a race, nor a creed, nor an ethnic group – they are idealogues. I likewise did not use any profanity in that comment.
Bari Weiss and the editorial team at the Free Press do not promote freedom of speech. They disdain criticism, abhor anyone who questions their obvious and odious biases and make no effort to support their own readership with meaningful explanations for which content is permissible and which is not. There is NOTHING in my remark that violated their “community guidelines”. My remarks are innocuous rejections of their preening, liberal weltanschauung.
Furthermore, the readership of the Free Press is not a “community” at all. It is a large mass of people from many different lifestyles and beliefs who expect to be treated with a certain measure of fairness when they subscribe to the publication. Part of that fairness should include a proper explanation for why commenting privileges have been removed for a 30day period with the prospect of appeal. But there is NO avenue to appeal their censorious decision.
This publication is a thinly veiled effort at rehabilitating the Democratic Party by outing its worst, fringe actors and ideas, while gaslighting its readership into believing that the editors are a group of rationally minded truth seekers looking for some form of “common sense”. They are not. The Free Press is a clique of wealthy, overly credentialed wordsmiths who shadow-ban and silence their critics without recourse to any form of appeal or explanation. And their decisions to ban subscribers from commenting on their site reflects their own level of paranoia, bad-faith, caprice and malevolence.
I live and work in the People’s Republic of China. I have done so for nearly 30years. I know this culture and political system intimately and well. I know what banning innocuous commentary leads to, and I know what hard authoritarianism looks like. I do not have the credentials or capital resources of many who read the Free Press in exotic locales or from the decks of private boats or stunning vacation homes and I have never been invited to give a TED Talk like Bari Weiss. My attacks against the Democratic Party and its apologists promote nothing more than open hatred for their insidious beliefs and ideas. Hatred for an idea is allowable in a free society.
Through the arbitrary and politically motivated enforcement of their policies, The Free Press has silenced many voices on their site in the guise of enforcing civility. They are wrong. They are deliberately empowering the worst impulse imaginable in humanity – the power of the powerful to decide who can, and cannot be seen, or heard.
The Democratic Party Rehabilitation Project… DELENDA EST!