How we got to a place where free speech means whatever conservatives want to say
By Adam Serwer
On Sunday night Bari Weiss, the editor of The Free Press and the new head of CBS News, abruptly stopped a forthcoming 60 Minutes report on the torture endured by migrants in the brutal El Salvadoran prison CECOT, where the Trump administration has sent more than 280 men.
Trump supporters praised the decision from Weiss, who, notwithstanding her description of conditions at CECOT as “horrific,” had previously praised El Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele for making El Salvador safer. More broadly, the whole affair neatly encapsulates the bizarre anti-free-speech free-speech discourse of the past decade, the purpose of which has been to justify restricting any speech that conservatives disapprove of while framing liberal censoriousness as equivalent to state censorship.
According to Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent who reported the segment, the story had already been reviewed by CBS News’s legal and standards departments before it was pulled.
