| When "Gone With the Wind" disappeared from HBO Max this week, I received a flurry of messages lamenting the fall of liberal democracy. The movie became a stand-in for a momentous week in the culture wars. Top editors at several publications lost their jobs for allegations of racist behavior, such as insensitive comments and pay discrimination. TV networks canceled "Cops" and "Live P.D." due to growing criticism of their sympathetic portrayal of police officers, while streaming services yanked shows and movies that that depicted blackface. The flurry of firings, resignations and cancellations was reminiscent of the height of the #MeToo moment when, one by one, men who had misbehaved were ostracized. That cleansing provoked an inevitable backlash from people who said the movement had gone too far, failing to distinguish between the sex crimes of Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K.'s masturbatory fetish and whatever Aziz Ansari did. This time, the backlash has taken a different form, best expressed by evangelists Andrew Sullivan and Matt Taibbi. In their formulation, free speech is under assault, which means liberal democracy is in crisis. Here's what Sullivan wrote Friday: There is an increasingly ferocious campaign to quell dissent, to chill debate, to purge those who ask questions, and to ruin people for their refusal to swallow this reductionist ideology whole. In Sullivan's telling, the woke left is tarring anyone or anything that disagrees with their beliefs as racist, and editors and media companies are overreacting by firing these people or canceling shows for fear of being seen as racist. Permanently removing "Gone With the Wind" from HBO Max is a bad idea. I agree with pretty much everything Mark Harris has to say on the subject; society benefits from seeing the way it has handled race, gender and sexual orientation, and then learning from it. This is the German school of thought, as opposed to the Chinese school of thought. If you remember the Holocaust, you are less likely to repeat it. If you erase history of state violence against civilians, you are more likely to repeat it. But firing editors that screw up is not a violation of the first amendment, nor is canceling "Cops" the start of a constitutional crisis. We would be on the verge of despotism if the government forced a network not to carry "Live P.D.," or told the New York Times to fire the editor of its editorial page. Netflix didn't drop "The Mighty Boosh" because a government asked it too. It took the show down because blackface is racist. Netflix has taken down shows at the request of governments in Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Germany and Vietnam, but not the United States. Similarly, editors didn't lose their jobs for expressing political beliefs, they did so for fostering toxic workplaces and getting into Twitter fights – neither of which is becoming of senior leadership. This story demonstrates that most of the people who lost their jobs did so after a long string of complaints. As for the more philosophical point… is there a chilling effect from canceling TV shows that glorify cops and pushing for diversity? Are news outlets replicating Facebook in feeding people more and more of the same perspective? Should we be worried that the producer of "Cops" and Tom Cotton, who wrote a controversial New York Times op-ed, can't express their points of view in public? The evidence suggests otherwise. The people lamenting the death of liberal democracy had no problem getting their views published, Sullivan in New York Magazine and Taibbi in his personal newsletter. Within 24 hours of HBO Max pulling "Gone With the Wind," it was one of the best-selling movies on Amazon. And while "Cops" is canceled, there are plenty of cop shows that remain on the air. Newspapers and Hollywood studios have censored women and people of color for decades. The biggest media companies have always been run by white men, which means they have told a disproportionate number of stories about white men. It's why "Saturday Night Live" took 40 years to hire a Latina cast member. And for all the hand-wringing about the assault on liberal views, a man who had sex with a 13-year-old girl has still won the Oscar for best director more times than all the black people in the world. So who is being silenced, again? – Lucas Shaw The best of Screentime (and other stuff) | 
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