The New York Times and the Ethics of Platforming Fascism

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas openly supports a full authoritarian military takeover of the streets of the United States. He accepts the reality that this will inevitably lead to a large number of severely wounded if not outright dead protestors, and because of the nature of what is being protested he is fully aware that this means that African-American U.S. citizens, more than any other ethnic group, will be disproportionately counted amongst the victims. 

Cotton’s position is cruel, disgusting, and downright un-American. It is not something we should ever accept hearing from a sitting U.S. senator. Before we can discuss the merits of his arguments, or the ethics behind platforming them, we must first contextualize the discussion by characterizing them for what they are, and we must be unequivocally clear in doing so. 

They are extremely dangerous and have no place in United States politics. 

In response to the massive protests that have erupted in the wake of the death of George Floyd, Senator Cotton has supported Donald Trump’s initiative to use the national guard in a show of “overwhelming force” to “dominate” the streets that have been thrumming with protests for over a week now. While there have been some instances of violence, including riots, fights, looting, and burnings, the vast majority of demonstrations have been peaceful, including one held just outside the White House on June 1, 2020. Shortly before Trump addressed the nation, stating that he would be using the national guard to stop the “rioting and looting” if state governors couldn’t get it under control, police decked out in full riot gear fired pepper balls and smoke flash bangs without provocation into a group of peaceful demonstrators. The intent was to clear a path from the White House to the nearby St. John’s Episcopal church, in front of which Trump stood, awkwardly holding a bible, as part of a photo op after declaring himself “the law and order president.” 

We have video evidence of how the police treat demonstrators peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights, and this is just how they behave on camera. Imagine, for a moment, how rapidly a situation could deteriorate when a few bad actors, whether they be demonstrators, police officers, or bad faith actors affiliated with a third party, commit actions of agitation. The presence of trained military personnel, complete with military-grade weapons, places the lives of everyone at risk, peaceful or otherwise. 

How do we know this is what Cotton wants? He was nice enough to tell us in writing. 

On June 3, 2020, The New York Times published an opinion piece written by Cotton himself entitled “Tom Cotton: Send in the Troops.” If that title wasn’t provocative enough, perhaps even more bone chilling was the subhead; “The nation must restore order. The military stands ready.” In his article, Cotton reaffirms his support for a drastic, overwhelming military presence to curb the “riots” across America, which he believes are primarily responsible for “destroying the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens” and taking “innocent lives.” Of course, Cotton makes no note of the potential death toll that would amount once you throw trained killers into a volatile chemical mixture, but we can’t dismiss the possibility that his failure to mention this is less a show of ignorance and more a display of callous indifference. Cotton’s argument instead leans heavily on what his interpretation of the role of the federal government should be, as well as referring to what he believes constitutes historical precedent, such as the LA “race riots” of 1992 and angry mobs that formed during the push to desegregate public schools in the 1950s and 1960s. The argument that what we’re seeing in the wake of George Floyd is anything remotely comparable to Cotton’s examples would be laughable if it weren’t so terrifying, but perhaps the true icing on the cake is that Cotton’s piece has exposed him as a hypocrite. Less than a full year earlier, when the citizens of Hong Kong took to the streets to protest against the ever-increasing authoritarian presence of the Chinese government, Cotton said the following; 

“Three decades after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Chinese Communist Party appears poised for a violent crack-down on civilian protestors in Hong Kong. I hope this does not happen. But should Beijing impose martial law in Hong Kong or otherwise violate the 1984 Joint Declaration, the United States will be compelled to reassess our relationship with China in fundamental ways.”

Humorously, this entire quote can still be found on Cotton’s official website as a senator for Arkansas. It would appear that Cotton’s stance on the legitimacy of organized protest is wholly dependent on whether or not those protests are happening in his home country. It is easy, after all, to express sympathies for an issue that is distant enough for it not to be your immediate problem. 

Obviously, Cotton is wrong in every sense of the word, and he was righteously eviscerated in the court of public opinion immediately after that article went live. But there was a second villain here as well; The New York Times itself was raked over the coals for even publishing the piece, with some journalists associated with the paper (and others who weren’t) expressing their disappointment and incredible discomfort that such an article was even allowed to exist on The New York Times’ platform. Many readers, both on social media outlets such asTwitter and elsewhere, expressed their outrage and intent to unsubscribe. James Bennet, the editorial page editor for the Times, attempted to explain the decision to run Cotton’s piece on Twitter, stating that “Times Opinion owes it to our readers to show them counter-arguments, particularly those made by people in a position to set policy. We understand that many readers find Senator Cotton’s argument painful, even dangerous. We believe that is one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate.” 

So, the crucial question; was it ethical for The New York Times to run Cotton’s piece? Admittedly, I must express a deep conflict here, because as much as I hate to admit it, I can definitely see the merits in both sides. Absolutely not in Cotton’s side, but certainly in the debate of whether or not it is the duty of journalists to display the position of someone like Cotton. 

On the one hand, not all opinions are created equal. The New York Times is not and never has been a platform like Twitter where users are able to post whatever they want with a minimum of oversight. Journalism, at least good journalism, is not social media, and any journalist worth his or her salt should be conscientious of the impact of every story that appears in print. As far as Cotton’s piece is concerned, the impact is unmistakable; supporters of Trump’s authoritarian perspective will see this as a call to arms against protestors. In fact, they likely already have as, in that very speech in which Trump proclaimed himself the “law and order president,” he began with a rather overt reference to one’s “second amendment rights.” Supporting or doubling down on Trump’s rhetorical movements will, invariably, cause more harm both to protestors and to the black community. 

It is for this reason why I would never expect a trusted and reputable publication like the Times to publish an op-ed written by Frank, a single man who lives down the street, expressing his hatred for the jews and why mass genocide would improve the country’s health overall. Not only is there no intellectual reason to engage with such a position, getting signal-boosted by one of the largest news publications in the country would undoubtedly result in both measurable and immeasurable harm to the jewish community. Everyone is allowed to have an opinion, but not everyone is entitled to have their opinion platformed. 

But here’s the problem; The New York Times did not publish a random op-ed they received from Frank, a racist nobody who lives on his own and has nothing better to do than act in a deeply racially or culturally insensitive manner. Instead, the Times posted an actual opinion from a current sitting member of the senate. 

I don’t think I can accurately convey just how serious that last point is. Both the president of the United States and a sitting member of the senate have advocated for the use of military personnel against U.S. citizens expressing a First Amendment right. 

These men are on the wrong side of history. Employing military strength against a nation’s own citizens isn’t the sign of a democracy; it’s a sign of an authoritarian regime, or a democracy in its death throes. And yet, as I mentioned before, the GOP has largely remained silent on what should be done in response to the nationwide protests. The only reason Cotton is perhaps feeling bold enough to say what he said is because, despite his seat being up for re-election this November, he is essentially running unopposed. His democratic opponent, Josh Mahony, dropped out in November of last year, and the Democratic Party of Arkansas is unable to field another candidate because Mahony exited the race after the filing deadline. Cotton’s only other opponents are Ricky Harrington Jr., running on the Libertarian party ticket, and Dan Whitfield, an independent, neither of which are seen as plausible contenders for the senate seat. It is essentially a golden opportunity for Cotton; he has the power to say whatever he wants to say without fear of political repercussion. Imagine what those who are currently silent in the GOP might say if they had a similar luxury. 

And that is why I think there is at least some value in engaging with the perspectives of people like Cotton in the public sphere. Not debate it, because there is nothing to truly debate, and I believe it is intellectually dishonest to hold that Cotton’s article is just another perspective to a complex issue. There is no “other” perspective, and the right answer shouldn’t be so hard to find that it takes days, weeks, or months of chin-stroking sophisticated discourse while protestors, black and otherwise, die in the streets. Again, Trump and Cotton may be on the wrong side of history here, but holding them accountable means having these perspectives out in public record from which they cannot hide. 

Part of the reason why George Floyd died is that racism is endemic in our systems of governance, and what makes this problem worse is the fact that many of our leaders display an incredibly disgusting level of apathy towards members they are supposed to be serving, blacks included. Cotton’s article is nothing less than an apathetic dismissal of the cost of human life, and Trump has displayed this behavior in instances too numerous to count. Another reason why situations like George Floyd’s and the ensuing response by the federal government shock us so fundamentally is because, for many of us, we grew up learning that things like “racism” and “authoritarianism” were so antithetical to the state of the U.S. at present that they no longer existed in measurable quantities. The Red Scare is in our past. The Civil Rights movement is in our past. Nixon is no longer president. We did it, guys. We beat racism, we beat fascism, we won. We’re better now. 

If you told 13 year old me that the “Unite the Right” rally was going to happen in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, I would have been dumbfounded. If you told me that at 20 I would have been equally stunned. Why? Because generally we’ve done a pretty good job of not platforming hateful ideas, but the result is that we’ve become unaware of just how viscerally they continue to exist. It’s 2020 now and we still have to educate those with privilege about the realities of the black experience in this country because we only ever talk about the “old” realities of this country in the past tense. In many ways Trump’s election in 2016 was a wake-up call, but in many others it was so unnervingly shocking. For the rest of my life I will perhaps always remember the day I read that David Duke, former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, attempted to run for a senate seat in Louisiana. An avowed white nationalist believed that the emergence of the Trump campaign, and the fiercely nationalistic sentiment it generated, meant that the environment was now ripe for an overt racist to play a role in local politics. 

And it’s not that I don’t understand the concern when it comes to “signal boosting” positions like these. We don’t want to platform these arguments because we don’t want to aid, in any way, in gathering support for them. However, I believe Tom Cotton deserves to be absolutely excoriated for what he has said. American voters deserve to keep his words in mind when it comes time to vote for him or anyone near him who refuses to condemn his truly indefensible position. Cotton deserves to be haunted by these words every time he even dares to talk about another situation like in Hong Kong and play the role of a savior on the side of the oppressed protestors, because now we know what he truly believes. 

So how do you fix this coverage? Well, don’t just signal boost; editorialize. While the Times’ online opinions section is replete with support for the Biden campaign and the George Floyd protestors, as well as plenty of criticism of Trump’s response, there isn’t anything from the editorial team on Cotton’s article itself. The position of The New York Times should not be that Cotton’s article can be dumped on their platform as-is. The article deserves to exist for all the reasons I have outlined above, but with a massive asterisk attached to it. By all means, keep everything Cotton has written intact, but fact-check it. Editorialize the living daylight out of it. Preface his article with a fierce condemnation from the editorial board of the New York Times and explain why he’s wrong. If even Twitter can fact-check a misleading Trump tweet about mail-in ballots and prevent any user interaction with a tweet that calls for violence against protestors, it should definitely be within the Times’ power to present similarly mitigating influences when it comes to Cotton. Allow us to chastise him for his perspective, but do not allow him to co-opt your entire platform. When any other major media outlet reports on the disgusting comments that come from Trump they don’t read as tacit endorsements of those comments; it’s just good news reporting. But in the context of an opinions section, when pushback against said perspective isn’t readily apparent, it at least takes on the appearance of a perfectly legitimate alternative perspective. 

To the Times’ credit, most of this has already come to pass. As of June 5, 2020, an editors’ note now precedes Cotton’s article, expressing regret over multiple errors in the review process, such as the needlessly inflammatory headline (which, it turns out, was not even written by Cotton), the fact that multiple editors who could have improved the piece’s presentation were not considered, that multiple assertions from Cotton were made without being fact checked, and, ultimately, that the piece was even published at all. The controversy ended with Bennet ultimately resigning from his position as the editor of the opinions section, with both Cotton and Trump admonishing the new editorialization of the article over Twitter. Despite the massive backlash against such an atrocious perspective, individuals at the top levels of our government have reaffirmed their support for the mobilization of the military against U.S. civilians. 

Still, the overarching lesson remains the same. The story here should not simply be “Tom Cotton delivers an alternative perspective for you to consider,” it should be “Senator Tom Cotton calls for military deployment against U.S. citizens.” In our rush to condemn the Times for platforming Cotton, this is the truly sickening aspect of the story that we are overlooking, and if we don’t engage with that position, drive it into the light and righteously eviscerate it for all to see, we will continue to get leaders in government that hold their constituents in the same level of contempt that Cotton does.