New York Times columnist Ezra Klein appears to have been angrily canceled by many of his fellow leftists and Democrats. His thought crime? He expressed sympathy for Charlie Kirk in the wake of his brutal assassination.
The very title of his Thursday opinion piece acted like red meat to the increasingly deranged left: “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” And if this did not inflame the haters enough, some of Klein’s words sent them over the intolerant edge:
The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk — and his family — just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too.
…You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.
American politics has sides. There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment. We can live with losing an election because we believe in the promise of the next election; we can live with losing an argument because we believe that there will be another argument. Political violence imperils that.
Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics. It is supposed to be an argument, not a war; it is supposed to be won with words, not ended with bullets. I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project.
Those words shouldn’t be controversial but, unfortunately, we live in an era of the intolerant left as Ezra was soon to find out via the fury directed at him from all over the Web. One source of the inability of the left to tolerate diverse opinions came from Bluesky as you can see in just a few of the very many angry reactions to his column on the Bluesky app:
“Copy that” account: “Ezra Klein, Nazi apologist.”
Amy Westervelt: “Truly hope South Park goes so hard at Ezra Klein”
Tom Scocca: “What Elon Musk bought for $44 billion was the ability to fill the brains of people like Ezra Klein with this kind of bulls–t”
Roy Edroso: “The @nytimes.com closed comments on that shitty Ezra Klein piece after 183 comments. Guess they weren’t getting the lovefest they were expecting.”
That Bluesky commenter above was correct. The comments from many of the New York Times readers were every bit as deranged as the ones you see above and all other places on the Web infested by the left. Welcome to being cancelled by your own fellow leftists, Ezra. Maybe this will be an opportunity to rethink your entire world view.
