When Sensitivity Becomes Censorship

"How do I know what I think till I see what I say?” was a maxim of E.M. Forster’s—and a fine one. But the Simon & Schuster workers who petitioned to break their company’s contract with former vice president Mike Pence were sure they knew what he thought before he said it. To publish his memoir would be “legitimizing bigotry,” since Pence was the tool of Donald Trump, and Trump had “unequivocally advocated for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism, islamophobia, antisemitism, and violence.”

Anti-Semitism? Many Israelis, grateful for Trump’s go-ahead to change their capital to Jerusalem, might disagree. Trump’s son-in-law and worldwide minister without portfolio, Jared Kushner, is Jewish; so is the man who served as his main presidential speechwriter, Stephen Miller. But Pence was accused of something worse than complicity in all the vices associated with Trump. He abandoned “a nation in crisis as the coronavirus ran rampant and killed more than half a million Americans.”

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