Quote:
Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower
If you think I am anything but horrified by this, you are wrong. And I agree that this is far more egregious. But the right has been engaging in attempts to censor viewpoints they disagree with, including censorship on this very issue, for a long time. It is wrong to suggest that this is primarily a reaction to woke-ist social media cancel culture mobs. It’s just more of the same.
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Right, except now it's far worse, and there's no side with the gravitas to challenge those who seek to preclude free expression.
For the past four years, the people who would typically criticize those who seek to shame voices they do not like and compel employers of such voices to fire them sat silently. In many cases the people who would in the past defend all speech, however unpopular, instead decided the following:
It's okay to ban/limit some speech because "disinformation" (which we get to define ourselves) is really bad. We should limit free speech because Trump has marginalized our ability to criticize him by lying incessantly and telling people the media is fake news.
Yes, that cynicism has not only persisted, but grown. The NYTimes ran an oped recently suggesting we need a govt "Reality Czar" to police media. Let me translate that:
We need a Reality Czar to police media to punish voices that we, the traditional gatekeepers, think should not be allowed into the debate.
So now, when a guy like DeSantis cagily decides to use full on state censorship to ban expression, no one has the political or moral gravitas to challenge him. Anyone decrying what he's done from the left will be hit with this:
Ohhhh, so it's okay for you hypocrites cancel what you don't like by Twitter mob, but it's not okay for the guy who represents the will of the voters of the State of Florida to do so?
Politically, that's gold. And it'll be copied.
We real liberals had done a great job of shutting down rogue school boards, Brent Bozells, and Tipper Gores (recall the PMRC cancel shitshow?) in the past under the noble banner All Speech Should Be Protected and the Only Way to Deal With Problematic Speech is to Ignore or Refute It.
That system worked brilliantly, and it protected everyone. But it relied on liberals observing the sanctity of free expression. The right wing thugs sought to squelch speech in the marketplace and via govt and lost, time after time. Increasing tolerance for more previously taboo speech became the rule. And that was a good thing. That led to enlightenment in every form of art and communication.
But then Trump came along, and the liberals were bulldozed by progressives, who like their right wing analogues don't really care much for free expression. What both groups care about is dominating the narrative, manufacturing consent to their ideals. These extreme progressives didn't counter or ignore speech they didn't like but instead sought to silence it. And in doing so, they woke up the right wing, which was more than happy to use the levers of govt to do it in their favor.
And now free expression is in peril. People are afraid to speak with candor. The media outlets are silos of idiots parroting boring narratives (Fox/Breitbart v. MSNBC/NYT). And who is to blame? I'd say those who looked at cancel culture, both right and left, and made the cynical calculation that messages with which they agreed, mob attacks on or boycotts of voices they didn't like, were more important than protecting free speech.
The worst are those who shrugged and said, "Oh, I know it's illiberal to say nothing of cancel culture, or pretend it isn't bad or doesn't exist, but free expression will survive... and I kinda like [Left: Seeing people like Andrew Sullivan suffer] [Right: Seeing critical race theory banned from classrooms]." Those people suck all the dicks.
