George Packer
The Atlantic
This is a time of promiscuous boycotts, rampant deplatformings and depublishings—books removed from store shelves, canceled before publication, withdrawn from sale as if we had gone back to the age of medieval heresy-hunting. Except now, instead of being hoisted by the strappado or bound to the rack, heretics are disinvited from conferences and review-bombed on Goodreads.
So this is where we are: The leader of a free-speech writers’ group quit because it defended the free speech of writers. A number of confused friends called to ask me what the hell was happening. I did my best to explain, but honestly, by now I wasn’t surprised. This was no longer a man-bites-dog story. To PEN’s ex-president and others like him, literary freedom was never the real concern.
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