Washington Post: “When Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri joined the Republican Sedition Caucus and supported overturning the presidential election a few weeks ago, Simon & Schuster decided it didn’t want to publish his book anymore. Likewise, Twitter decided to permanently suspend President Donald Trump after he used the platform to spread damaging lies about the election and to fire up those who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6. There’s been plenty of criticism about these decisions, not one of which had anything to do with the First Amendment, which forbids the government – not Twitter or any other private entity – from shutting down speech except in the most dangerous cases. But you’d never know it from all the bad-faith squealing, mostly from the right. Night after night, Fox News offers prime-time viewers its ‘leftist-assault-on-speech’ show. Hawley, who needed only a few days to find a new publisher for his book, subsequently blasted the ‘muzzling of America’ in an opinion piece in the widely read New York Post.”

“Have any of these people been silenced? Hardly. As Parker Molloy of Media Matters put it: ‘Despite getting a spot on the front page of the fourth-largest newspaper in the U.S., coverage across the entire Fox News lineup, a new book deal, an audience of more than half a million followers on Twitter, and a lengthy list of credits on IMDB, Hawley would like you to believe that he is a man without a voice.’ And then there’s Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, who ranted that the congressional efforts to hold Trump accountable for his role in the attempted insurrection at the Capitol are somehow sins against free expression: ‘Impeachment is the zenith of cancel culture,’ he tweeted, as if ‘cancel culture’ were to blame for a constitutional remedy that dates back to the country’s founding.”