Silence Of The Lambs

by Mark Smiley | Jan 24, 2020 | Editorials

The firing of Independence Institute’s Jon Caldera as a weekly columnist by The Denver Post is the latest of increasing number of voices stilled in Colorado and across the country for a real or imagined sin. Caldera’s crime was apparently talking about transgenderism without the sufficed sensitivity and in particular noted his belief that there are two human sexes. Caldera’s use of the word “transgender” rather than some other unspecified politically correct term which was, in and of itself, apparently a fire-able offense.

The firing made national news to which the principal Editor of the Post Lee Ann Colacioppo responded with an Editor’s Note. In it she denied the assertion of some that the Post did “not want to run conservative columns about issues surrounding sex and gender.” She declared conservatives could offer opinions on those subjects provided they used the correct “respectful language.” She noted that the Post reserved the right to edit any column and demanded that any columnist must work with them in a “collaborative and professional manner” to strive to the goal of “respective language,” implying that Caldera did none of the above. Caldera’s last column is online and contained only four short paragraphs on the sensitive subject. It is difficult to find exactly where in the column the disrespectful and insensitive words were located.

Even in its diminutive state we believe having a statewide paper like the Denver Post serves an important public service and we are generally hesitant to pile on the ever-increasing criticism of it, but this is too much even for this Editorial Board.

Caldera’s columns in the Post over the last four years have been at times humorously provocative, but never meanspirited or incendiary. Caldera heaped praise on the Post and Editorial Page Editor Megan Schrader who fired him. Anyone who has ever interacted with Caldera would find it difficult to take seriously the implication that he is not “collaborative” or “professional.”

The real reason for the firing in our minds is located elsewhere in the Editor’s Note where Colacioppo admits that some of the Post’s readers find “offensive” opinion columns that do not comport with the paper’s progressive bent. The Post works closely with the Washington Post reprinting their articles and even editorials. It is clear that the Post would like to emulate the Washington Post’s idea of a conservative in its “Turn Right” columnist Jennifer Rubin who is now more rabidly left wing than its “Turn Left” columnist. That apparently is the Post view these days of what Colacioppo described in her Note as exploring “a variety of subjects and feature[ing] a variety of voices.”

We understand the temptation. Every month we receive no small number of calls and emails demanding that we cancel Peter Boyles’ column. Boyles was once iconoclastic on the left and these days is more often iconoclastic on the right. Similarly, every time we run a guest editorial by Dr. Jack Van Ens, who is on the left side of the aisle and very much anti-Trump we get calls and emails demanding he be removed from our editorial page. Perhaps we are old fashioned, but why would anyone want to read just the same viewpoint over and over. Of course, one could refuse to read the columns one doesn’t agree with, but today’s cancel culture demands that voices one does not agree with must be silenced, permanently if possible. We think the Post greatly underestimates the intelligence of its readers and pays way too much attention to the twitter mob.

Our publisher certainly understands the new “cancel culture.” After 10 years being on radio, he was fired from 710 KNUS for making a one-line dark humor joke, which he genuinely regrets, about how boring the impeachment hearings were. The station was inundated with calls that he be fired, not by listeners who were very supportive of him generally, but professional “astro turfers” on the left. His firing by Salem Corporation was, of course, not sufficient for the professional astro turfers as he, his wife, and their 8-year-old son were then subjected to a barrage of the crudest, obscene death threats imaginable, almost all from people who never listened to the radio show or even previously knew it existed. They went after the associations he had long been part of, and many individuals he was friends with.

They, of course, also threatened this paper’s advertisers. Luckily, we at the Chronicle are used to it. On January 7, 2015, Islamic terrorists massacred 12 employees of Charlie Hedbo magazine in Paris, for cartoons they found “insensitive” and not sufficiently “respectful.” While many news publications including the Chronicle declared “Je suis Charlie,” the Chronicle took the extra step and printed on its editorial pages every offending cartoon. The employees of the Chronicle and our advertisers were threatened with every type of violence and death threat possible.

Most, but not all, of our advertisers refused to be intimidated and we were fortunate that many businesses rallied behind us and were repulsed by the tactics. The paper emerged stronger than ever. As far as most of us are concerned, as in 2015, it is once again “Je suis Charlie.”

 — Editorial Board