The liberals at the New York Times formed a reputational lynch mob, and lied about what happened so they could silence and then force several people to resign...all because their targets wrote about a viewpoint that had majority support in the United States.
Publish mainstream opinion piece by a sitting US Senator? Outrageous!! That's like publishing a piece supporting a serial killer (actual analogy they made). But...
"In the years preceding the Cotton op-ed, the Times had published op-eds by authoritarians including Qaddafi ... Erdoğan ... and Putin. The [same year], it also published [an oped from the Chinese Communist Party defending] China’s murderous crackdown on prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong, [a piece justifying anti-semitism], and an article by a leader of the Taliban....
None of those caused an uproar [by the liberals working at the New York Times].
Last year, the page published an essay by the Hamas mayor of Gaza, and few seemed to mind.
But whether the paper is willing to publish conservative views on divisive [domestic US] political issues...remains an open question."