Why are Vox writers so keen on censorship?

The Vox writer Matthew Yglesias got it worst of all. He was rash enough to sign the letter and promptly faced a volley of angry replies from his junior colleagues on the very discrete and private medium of, yes, Twitter. The amusingly named Emily VanderDerWerff, a trans woman ‘critic’ at Vox, went furthest fastest. She penned a hilariously obnoxious letter to her editors, which she generously excerpted on social media.

‘I don’t want Matt to be reprimanded or fired or even asked to submit an apology,’ she wrote. ‘Doing any of the above would only solidify, in his own mind, the idea that he is being martyred for his beliefs.’

As someone who is sometimes a woman, Cockburn would like to take their hat off to VanderDerWerff for that absolute masterclass in passive aggression. She should be promoted, perhaps given Yglesias’s job, if only to solidfy, in her mind, what Vox stands for. VanderDerWerff continued to insist that she really didn’t want Matt to be punished. ‘Some acts require retribution; this is not one of them.’ Such compassion for the man she just threw under the social media outrage bus!