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.
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. Consider three examples from the last week alone.
The New York Times published an op-ed by Republican senator Tom Cotton, arguing that the president should invoke the Insurrection Act, sending federal troops to help restore order across the country. In response, reporters and editors at the Times took to Twitter to insist that the paper must “retract” Cotton’s op-ed as it “puts Black New York Times staff in danger.”
Failing to offer an iota of evidence that the article contained substantial errors, they and other journalists asserted en masse that Cotton’s argument causes literal danger, leveraging their social power to insist that the Times is morally obligated to rectify the mistake of having published it. It worked.
By nightfall on Thursday, a spokesperson for the Times had faulted the paper for inadequately fact-checking the op-ed — without identifying a factual error — and promised, in essence, that nothing of the sort would happen again. Eventually, a lengthy editor’s note was appended to the piece, saying, among other things, that it shouldn’t have been published at all.
Earlier last week, New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees offered his opinion that he would never support kneeling during the National Anthem, suggesting that to do so is “disrespectful.” Within a day, Brees had knelt before the livid masses, offering not one but two obsequious apologies for having voiced this supposedly insensitive view.
[Interesting Read]
See Also:
(1) Trump rails against Biden, ‘Radical Left Democrats’ over movement to defund police
(3) Trump Does The Unthinkable (Facebook)
(4) UCLA removes lecturer for questioning proposal to give black students preferential grad
