Everyone on the Left should have seen it coming. The Right has successfully exploited the fallout from “the Great Awokening” — the risky tendency among the liberal and “progressive” left to express unbridled enthusiasm for speech policing that has led to censorship, firings, and suppression of dissent.
A very short list of social liberalism’s censorious excesses includes David Shor’s firing from Civis Analytics for tweeting a study on violent protests; Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying resigning under pressure from Evergreen State College after questioning the race-based “Day of Absence,” which urged white students and faculty to stay off campus; and an Ontario school library removing all books, in a fit of confusion, published prior to 2008 as they sought to meet the objectives of a policy aiming for “inclusivity.”
Having primed the inevitable backlash, the liberal left now finds the Right playing the exact same games. For those of us on the Left who oppose undermining free speech, this twist is particularly galling — not only because the instance of turn-about-is-fair-play was predictable, but because the sanctimony alienated swaths of people from the center-left. Worse, by making deplatforming, shadowbanning, canceling, and speech policing central to the new progressivism, the liberal left has effectively handed the Right a license to do the same at the same moment that it seizes political momentum by railing against censorship.
But, of course, the Right — long comfortable with censorship when it serves its interests — will always relish the cudgel of speech repression, no matter how hypocritical that may seem after its years decrying similar behavior. Apart from the libertarian right, twentieth-century…
Auteur: David Moscrop
