Continuing the beneficial meltdown of the mainstream media, including bastions of the erstwhile counterculture (which long ago swallowed up the mainstream culture), Village Voice magazine has laid off three editors, including longtime columnist/editor Nat Hentoff.
Hentoff, who wrote about jazz and then civil liberties for the newspaper for the past fifty years, was a staunch leftist and counter-culturalist, but he showed some intellectual integrity on the subject of freedom of speech in recent years, exemplified by his book, Free Speech for Me–But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.
The premise of the book is rather skewed, given that the right has had virtually no power in either academia or the culture for several decades, especially the elite culture. Nevertheless, the fact that a well-known leftist and ACLU-style civil liberties advocate (meaning those who use the subject as a stalking horse for the left’s agenda) would acknowledge the left’s illiberalism was an important cultural event.
Another policy position that made Hentoff unusual–and particularly unwanted–among the left was his opposition to legalized abortion. It was indeed a very courageous stand for a Village Voice writer to take.
Showing impressive intellectual integrity, Hentoff argued that his dedication to protecting people from exploitation by government and big business meant also protecting unborn children from the abortion industry. That industry, after all, does constitute an alliance between business and state that exploits women’s desperation, especially through decades of destruction of the humane alternative, adoption.
The huge, extremely profitable, and unregulated abortion industry is one of those rare businesses that the left supports, in one of the great ironies of our time.
The loss of Hentoff’s voice is lamentable, but the decline and perhaps eventual fall of the Village Voice will be quite salubrious.