If you’ve followed the news in recent weeks, you’ll have noticed that the Left’s social-justice brigades have not cooled in their passion for banishing speech with which they disagree. But these days have also revealed a more dangerous tactic: conscripting speech by means of social pressure. Instead of enforcing strict silence, progressives aim to craft a public square in which we are all obliged to echo their views.
Zombies themselves, they want to make the rest of us zombies too. Robots, parrots mouthing slogans.
It is abundantly clear that social-justice activists — and, increasingly, mainstream left-wing Americans — do not intend to relent in wielding the cultural power of rage mobs to erase all trace of contrary opinions.
In support of which the writer cites (1) NYT self-reversal in re: publishing Sen. Cotton op-ed favoring use of troops to quell insurrections in several cities, (2) ditto Saints’ future hall of fame qb in re: dissing the flag, and (3)
. . .the progressive writer at Vox . . . bullied by his peers on the Left into deleting tweets that acknowledged he had been wrong to think campus silencing tactics would stay confined to the campus. The irony was breathtaking to behold.
Campus silencing tactics? How can you say that. Delete those tweets, you fool, or be socially deleted. He did so, of course. So did another Vox writer, “shamed into apologizing for having uttered the heretical view that perhaps rushing to defund or abolish the police — as activists are now demanding — might not be the most prudent course of action.”
Blithe Spirit 