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I'm well aware, and I'm against it. I'm a leftist at the object level while strongly disavowing cancel culture and persecution. This is an awkward position, awkward enough that I am not optimistic about the Left reforming itself from within. Hence, I view the anti-woke Right as potential allies in the shared project of bringing an end end cancel culture, with the aim of restoring a status quo that's better for everyone than a crab bucket where everybody is constantly persecuting everybody else.
And the thing is, this is an ideal that much right-wing rhetoric embraced; certainly much of the furore about Political Correctness/SJWs/cancel culture/Woke, over the last fifteen years, was pitched in terms of "these are dirty tactics, and our enemies are inherently rotten for using them, never mind whatever crazy stuff they're fighting for", not just of the more cynical "these value-neutral, highly effective memetic weapons happen to be in the hands of our enemies whose goals are crazy, and that's bad". Right-wingers who are dragging the anti-woke momentum in the direction of "we need right-wing cancel culture to even the odds" as opposed to "cancel culture delenda est" are defectors to the broader cause of principledness and civilization (within which the entire political Overton window should squarely sit, in a healthy body politic). I understand why they're doing it, at an emotional level, but they are, and I can't condone or excuse it, even as I sympathize.
In short: some very reproachable people on my side started using intellectual weapons whose use inherently degrades civilization; they're sure as hell not going to stop on their own, so the only hope was that the opposition would provide a credible alternative; for a while it seemed as though they might; but now they look like they're just content to stoop down to their enemies' level, abandoning all the high-minded principles they rightly criticized their enemies for flouting ten years ago. And thus we sink a little further towards total collapse. It is what it is, I'm not saying it's a surprising outcome, but there was hope of something better, and perhaps there still is, so I'm doing my bit.
Fair. And I do get where you're coming from, then, and I even agree with you to some extent that "these are dirty tactics, and our enemies are inherently rotten for using them, never mind whatever crazy stuff they're fighting for". Please bear in mind that 15 and even 10 years ago I was saying, with absolute sincerity, "I don't like what you're saying, but I'll fight to the death to defend your right to say it".
The point where I part ways (I think) is:
I don't think the result of seriously, fiercely enforcing neutrality will end up in a reasonably civilised, open academy. Partly because:
'neutrality' is in the eye of the beholder: confirmation bias is often enough to dismiss non-woke conclusions as wrong or to (subconsciously) judge them much more harshly than friendly arguments. It's an improvement to go from 'X should be fired' to 'nobody takes X seriously and he can't get funding for his silly ideas', but it's still not great.
I think we tried neutrality in the 90s and the result was to delay wokeness by 15 years max, maybe making it worse when it arrived. People bring up the metaphor of the tide coming into shore wave by wave and that is broadly how I see it. Putting a halt on overt politicking just means right-wingers being slowly frozen out anyway, without being able to point to any overtly bad behaviour and therefore without much recourse. The old theories are never actively repudiated (because that would be political), they become just something that ‘everyone knows’ and then the new generation arrives with no antibodies and apply them and we get woke. Contrast anti-socialism in the US (where there was a huge counterpressure and even in the 90s people would spit at the sound of the word), versus the UK where even in the post-Thatcher period you were broadly allowed to do it as long as you didn't say it. I know you're Left-wing and may consider that an objectively good thing, but I'm just comparing the results of the two backlashes.
That’s why I think that you with your stated goals should support some level of pushback past the point of, say, viewpoint neutrality as conceived of 10 years ago. Liberty in the traditional sense arose when all participants were tired of fighting the Wars of Religion, but you do have to have the wars first. Otherwise it’s just surrender and you will swiftly lose any power to enforce the conditions of peace.
On a purely personal note I have other reasons:
As a base principle, I believe in fairness, which I define as 'equal treatment'. I don't like the idea that if someone hits, the other guy shouldn't hit back. He might choose not to, and that's admirable or foolish depending, but he absolutely has the right to.
Personal disclosure: I was treated quite badly in academia by certain pre-woke academics, just before wokeness really kicked off and when I was much less right-wing than I am now. I'll be honest, I want payback. They made my life miserable when I stood up for just the principles you describe, and I want them to get the same back. Not more - I believe in fairness, as I said - but just the same. I don't claim that it's a noble impulse, but I'm adding it here as a disclosure.
I think the biggest problem for me is the difference in framing and tactics. The people here frame it as a war, but I don't think it was ever that. To me, I think that the real problem with cancel culture is not a sort of "factional left vs. right" conflict. I think that the left has adopted the framework of the internet. What I mean by that is, you can pick a forum and cultivate your own echo chamber. If you don't agree with someone block them. There's a range of disagreement between "I disagree with you but that's okay" to "It's disgusting that you believe that and I don't think we can share the same space." I think that the left has developed a neurotic personality leading to the range of acceptable disagreement being tiny. I don't think they "took over" institutions so much as many individuals gravitated to similar locations based on their personality, and pushed out the right due to that tendency and the fact that they gravitated there in greater numbers.
They don't even think they're waging the culture war. They think they're going about their day doing boring and uncontroversial things like protesting for trans rights and then some asshole came along and they kicked him out like any normal human being would do. That's why the left claims the right invented the culture war or that "cancel culture doesn't exist."
I think the real problem is the neurotic personality more so than their ideas. Bad ideas are fine. I don't have much hope for the current generation, because attitudes are hard to change. I see articles like this that start to get it, but of course even here she can't shake the "the message wasn't bad, only the delivery" trap. That said, the real barometer is the next generation. Younger folks are rejecting the Democratic party even though politically speaking they're arguably more left than right.
The right is in full "We're aiming to crush you" mode. The left might learn something from the independents turning away, but I guarantee you they won't "learn" anything from the right's current tactics. They'll simply see it that the right is completely okay with using the full force of government to try to control culture, and think they need to play dirtier. The independents are the real decider here, and they may reject the right for their tactics.
That does not compute. Protesting is by definition controversial - if it weren't, it's not a protest, it's at most solidarity march. The whole point though is that the left has been actively in search of culture war since the civil rights movement largely achieved its initial goals (legal equality and high legal barriers to deter any attempt to discriminate). Gay rights, trans rights, BLM, immigrants, vaccines, abortions, whatever it takes. And to crown that, in modern US culture you don't call your opponent a Nazi if you want to hash out policy differences. Everybody knows what you do with the Nazis - you destroy them. So there's no doubt what this framing means.
Gee, maybe that's because the Left has been calling them Nazis and promising to crush them for a couple of decades now? May that be where they got the suspicion? I'm seeing the "Nazi bar" metaphor repeated daily on virtually every corner in the left discourse, and they never even explain it - everybody in their audience already knows what it means, they are just confirming, yes, we can't tolerate even the slightest sign of anybody on the right being allowed in the spaces we control. And we can't tolerate any spaces we don't control because all those are "Nazi bars". The right is in this mode because they are aiming to crush the right. Only now, finally, the right starts to wake up and wonder "oh, they are trying to crush us, maybe we should push back?" And then we hear the complaints "how undignified, you are fighting back, people would think you are the same! They will reject you for stooping so low as to fight back! You should just roll over and take it, then you'd have all our sympathies - everybody loves losers!"
Oh, I know. I was deliberately stating it in a way to show the absurdity. My impression of progressives is that if you asked them what the median person believes on X, Y, and Z issues, they would describe a progressive. They think their belief system is so normal that they see themselves less as attempting to move the needle and more trying to keep the needle from moving away from them. Or at least they think that the culture is aligned with them and they only need to get the government to recognize it. That doesn't mean it's true. It's just an observation about many members of a group that I believe I'm seeing.
From there I am saying that there's a sort of discrepancy - the right frames the last 20 years as if the left sat in a war room and planned out a list of slow, coordinated encroachments meant to erode the status of any right-leaning beliefs. The left acts as if they were going about their normal daily routine, dealing with the occasional asshole as one does, and then the assholes came back with a mob.
My model is that the left is an uncoordinated mob that isn't even really paying attention to all those other encroachments because journalism, left or right, mostly focuses on whatever bad thing the other side did. Everyone has a point where they will try to completely shun someone else. Finding out that someone supports pedophilia is an easy example. The progressive left has calibrated their "cut all contact with someone" threshold to be extremely low.
That's one way to frame it.
The left and the right have fought for public support since the beginning of democracy. I might disagree with the rules of war the left plays by, but the right, collectively speaking, were not passive bystanders minding their own business either. "We didn't start the fire" after all. The problem is, in real life there are laws that allow anyone to use the public square. When it comes to both businesses and the internet, every part of it belongs to somebody, and with that comes the ability to remove someone for any reason. They're nowhere near as culturally dominant, but there are certainly places that ban left-leaning opinions. If you'd like to change that, well that's certainly an opinion but it's one at odds with the libertarian beliefs many on this forum claim to possess.
Let me ask you this - how can an outside observer tell the difference between someone "pushed to their limit" and someone who never had principles in the first place? Surely the left would tell a similar story about how they were all for free expression until the mean old right wouldn't leave them alone. I'm obviously biased, but many on the right seem positively giddy about all the things they want to accomplish. And they only clues I have on what they would consider "too far" are the things they've already done and now tell me are completely reasonable.
Oh no, "encroachments" stage was decades before. The last 20 years was "the walls are breached, time to burn and pillage!" stage. Unlike many preceding stages of the campaign, this one doesn't really require careful coordination - just letting your foot soldiers do their worst works fine. Does each foot soldier realize they what they are collectively doing? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it doesn't matter because it is happening anyway.
Like what? Let's take the inventory. The mass culture is about 90%, it's not that right-coded entertainment doesn't come out, but it comes out maybe once a year or less, and is always a huge controversy. Woke is the default and considered normal setting. The academia is thoroughly cleansed - lone celebrity professors that can't be cancelled are profoundly isolated and kept around to demonstrate "here, we have all kinds!" but on non-genius level, if you're not woke or at least pretend to be, you don't have a chance. Teaching the teachers? Thoroughly woke. Teaching the lawyers? Mostly woke too. I'm not talking about history, sociology and pol-sci - there's probably no right-wing professor left there in the nation, and the "moderates" there see Sanders as a dangerous right-winger. The press is absolutely woke on the "official" side of it - even the dreaded Fox News is at best "center-left company which tolerates some of the right hosts" (for a time). Of course, there are independent bloggers and radio, but as far as institutional press goes, it's very heavily left leaning. I'm not talking about such powerful institutions as government bureaucracy or the unions - their leftist sympathies are predictable and expected. Other cultural institutions? I can't go to a museum now without encountering at least several woke exhibit - and sometimes the whole exposition is subsumed by the woke and it's no longer about art but about social justice or climate change or some other woke cause like that.
What we have left - big business? More and more major companies come out as woke, and very rarely the reverse - that is mostly small to mid-size independent businesses. Banks are glad to debank right-wing figures - but did any of them debank prominent leftists? Not that I heard of. Billionaires tend to the woke side (understandably, they can buy power there) - for one Musk, there's three Cubans, Soroses, Simonses and so on. The army now has pride parades and features soldiers in furry costumes. I'm pretty sure the officers who authorized that are not inclined to listen to any contrary opinions.
Now, which prominent places ban leftist opinions? Internet forums? Local gun enthusiast meetups? Which cultural institute, comparable to what I described above, is excluding the left-leaning opinions to a measure comparable to exclusion and persecution of the right-wing ones? If we can't find any, or can't find a list as comprehensive and powerful, then demanding the right stops fighting back - without any history of prior consistent and prolonged demand to do the same from the left, at least - can not be read as anything but telling the right "why can't you just lose quietly so we all can stop this unpleasantness?". It is not hard to see why the right wouldn't look favorably on such approach.
And that's true. They were, when the right had institutional power and tried to shut down all kinds of leftist speech. And lost (mostly). The famous "fire in crowded theater" maxim was pronounced specifically against the leftist anti-war speech, and was overturned as a grave mistake later (99% of leftists aren't aware of either of these facts). Now, when the leftists have the power, they have no need in free speech anymore, and it's the right's turn to fight for it. But that turnaround wasn't caused by the right going "too far" - on the contrary, it was caused by the left seizing the institutional power and no longer needing the feeble "free speech" soapbox when they can use the powerful platforms provided by the institutions they captured.
Must everything be so over-dramatic? Berlin is not burning. Hirohoto has not announced surrender. Trump is not the last hurrah of the right. Trump is one of the least popular presidents in history, but the Democrats are even less popular. Gen Z is shifting right. The pendulum swung too far, and is now swinging back. It will swing again and again, as it has the entirety of history.
Mass culture is 90% left? Sure, agreed. Right-coded entertainment causes controversy? Eh. Your usual leftists on Reddit and some websites, mostly many small ones, complain about it, but does that really amount to anything?
I work for a woke company you've heard of. What's it like day-to-day? The once a year HR training has some eye-rolling sections. I get some emails about whatever group's day or month it is that I delete. I don't talk politics at work, which is good advice always. That's about it. Completely anecdotal, but I've heard one guy say he reviews applications at a university, and the only attention he pays to the mandatory "what have you done to promote diversity?" question is judging their writing ability. Whether he was lying or all professors do, I can't tell you. I'm making the argument that life is often pretty banal. Supposedly the students are more woke than many of the professors.
With regards to big business, to some degree yes. A decent number of them are scaling it back. Disney is realizing that young men have stopped watching and that's a massive amount of money being left on the table. Billionaires tend towards the woke when it doesn't notably affect their bottom line. They aren't rushing to implement socialism or raise the minimum wage.
I'm not asking the right to lose, or to stop fighting. I'm saying the left lost themselves to BLM and became a parody of themselves because everything was so awful they had to do this and that. I think the right is becoming the party of nothing but political grievances and emotional overreactions in much the same way. Political parties always fight. The fight over slavery would probably make today's fight over "wokeness" a joke even aside from the literal civil war era.
What I am saying is maybe get off the internet and step back a bit. Things aren't great but America isn't collapsing either. "Burn the institutions and salt the Earth!" is cringe and could possibly cost you the normie vote in future elections. A lot of wokeness is nothing more than people being sanctimonious on the internet and then individual actors being blown up on the national stage. In a country of 350 million, you can find no shortage of idiots even if they don't matter at the end of the day. You should fight it, but that doesn't mean you need to shape your personality to "REACT" to it.
Not everything is national. "Fire in a crowded theater" was a government decision and we're mostly talking about private organizations. As for private organizations, welcome to At-Will hiring. It's always been the case that you have no real job safety in America. You can be fired or refused a job because your boss woke up one morning and decided he didn't like you. And there are plenty of times this happens to left leaning people and you don't hear about it. Lots of America is red-coded rural areas.
Free Speech can mean both the willingness to tolerate opposing ideas and the freedom to choose not to deal with other people. The left was cheering for banks cutting off the right from oil pipeline funding, now they're complaining about Valve removing LGBT games because Visa went on a porn crusade. It's the same power in both cases, both sides just cheer when it gets the outcome they want and jeer when it cuts them. But unless you want government czars deciding how individuals relate to each other, what are you going to do about it?
If by Berlin you mean the culture and the fabric of the society ("first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"!), then it's definitely burning at the full blaze. At least for me - a regular middle class guy who wants nothing more than being left alone to grill on my backyard - it certainly feels that way. And I am not alone in this.
No, but Trump is there because of that feeling. He's not even "the right", for Heaven's sake - he's pretty much bog standard moderate Democrat, by the standards of times before Democrats went bonkers. Just watch what people like Biden, Obama, Clinton (either of them), etc. said before the Great Awokening. The difference between them and Trump, if you filter out all the bombastic rhetoric, is minimal. But the right had no choice. It was either Trump, or total destruction.
Nope, nope. Remember the case of Gina Carano? She was booted from highly acclaimed role in a successful franchise because she said something right-coded. Reddit didn't cancel her. Reddit wanted to, but Reddit wants to cancel everybody to the right of AOC. No, people with much more power - people who contol billions of dollars - decided that. And now they are settling with her and talking about "looking forward to future cooperation". Did I vote for that? Hell yeah! One small example, of course, but it's everywhere.
I work for "maybe a tiny bit woke" company you probably never heard of (unless you're kind of professional that has to, then you did) but probably indirectly using something it did, maybe every day. It has DEI department, and some of the HR training had a little cringey tones but overall is pretty bog standard "these are ways in which you're not allowed to be an asshole" which didn't change much since The Great Awokening. No mandatory diversity kowtowing or pressure. Some people are explicitly woke but most keep it in their pants and don't bring it to the workplace. I am happy to be at this level because it's probably the best one possible in the US outside of tiny startup where everybody are buddies and HR does not exist. But I know that's not the situation in all companies.
I've lived in Soviet Union (a long time ago). I know how people in evil empires work, and that not all of the storm troopers even want to shoot the rebels. Most of them don't care, they just want to get the salary and the pension. Some of them would purposedly miss or forget to lock the prison cells if they can get away with it. But that does not cancel the existance of the evil empire, and it always has enough troopers to maintain the required level of terror.
88% of students lie about their politics to get better grades: https://x.com/bumbadum14/status/1957743796357329334 Take one guess to which side the lying goes. I clandestinely suspect that non-zero number of the professors aren't even woke, but they are so terrified to be cancelled they are pretending to, and thus their studends have to pretend in turn. A nice academic freedom the left built for itself, eh?
Are you sure? New York's Mamdani is financed by a billionaire heiress. Maybe she doesn't expect him to take all of her billions (and he, alone, now, probably can't) but she certainly contributes to the cause. And it's not unique - for example, a lot of rich Russian magnates supported Russian revolutionaires. We all know what happened next.
That's not true. The right has a lot of the positive agenda. Just to advance this agenda, the right needs the ability to rule, and that requires taking control back from the left. If the right wins an election, but the Left continues to control everything in the country - as it happened in the first Trump term - nothing is getting done. Destroying the death grip of the left in virtually every institution of the country is a prerequisite to restoring the equal footing, this is the minimal necessary condition. Note I am not saying destroying the left - the left wants 0% right-wing people in every space. I am fine with certain percent - maybe even 50%, though I personally would prefer less, but I do not prescribe any specific number - of the left in any space they want to be, provided the right is also allowed the same. And yes, for this certain amount of power that the left has now must be destroyed, but while to them it may look as "revenge" and "overreaction", it's just returning to normal.
The right doesn't want to burn the institutions and salt the Earth. The right wants the institutions that do what they are supposed to do. They want the politics be normal again, and so do a lot of normies. I remember the time where politics were about shoudl taxes be 25% or 28% and should minimum wage be $7 or $10. Now it's about whether it's ok to introduce port to kids in kindergarten, whether we need to let somebody to talk them into cutting of their genitals without even notifying their partent, we hear arguments that putting criminals in jail is racist and that deporting a violent gang member with dozen-page rap sheet including murders is fascism, we hear that mass rape and kidnapping is legitimate political tool, and that this kind of politics must be brought to the US, we see cities burned down and any semblance of rule of law eliminated, and we are told that if you are against any of that, you are nobody but a literal Nazi. Yes, we need some pushback to get back from this to what used to be normal, and if Trump can do at least part of it, then I am happy to let Trump do it. So far I haven't seen any better option, and I don't see how not doing it is an option anymore.
This is very different for the right and for the left. For the right, not dealing with other people means ignoring them. For the left, at least institutional left, it means destroying them, grinding them into the fine dust and throwing it to the winds. The left has this power - at least had it before 2025 - and they weren't shy to use it. It didn't always work, but they always wanted to. Yes, the right has its history too, with porn in particular, a battle that they lost and will keep losing, and probably in other aspects too. But the left has been much more efficient in this game. Compare what happens if somebody in academia dares to say one of the words proscribed by the left and what happens if they say America must be destroyed and white people must be put in camps.
The problem is those are not some lone idiots bloviating on a sopabox. There people are Congressmen, Senators, mayors, governors, prominent politicians, famous actors, academia managers, they control trillions of dollars and command vast power. And they are not shy to use their powers to achieve their goals. Which are diametrically opposed to mine. So I, as a voter, have no choice but to give my vote to somebody who can push back on them and at least slow down the descent to madness. Maybe, if we are extremely lucky, even reverse some of it. What other choice do I have?
I disagree with your assessment, much as I disagree with your assessment about Fox News. Democrats certainly wouldn't work to get Roe v. Wade overturned. Sure, the left has gotten way too "open borders" recently, but have been historically consistent about believing immigration is a net good. I don't think working with another government to imprison them without trial is a Democratic position. I don't think threatening colleges with cutting their foreign studies is a Democratic position. I don't think "piss away our international relations to strongarm trade deficits" is a Democratic position, even if Democrats are sometimes protectionist.
Yes, I covered this with my point that firing people for any reason was always available and not as uncommonly used historically as you might think.
In the Soviet Union, the terror originates from the government. They effectively set the background level of terror and the punishment for not complying. Here, the terror has no defined point of origin. There is no evil empire. There's a mob that forms whenever some story pops up and gets embellished enough. The dynamics are very different. One is a group with a goal. The other is a culture of social media frying everyone's brains. And how they must be cured is very different. The latter I think can be accomplished by getting everyone to chill the fuck out, which I think will happen when the left cries wolf too many times and people stop caring, and I think the Democrat's unpopularity and Gen Z shifting right is a sign that it may be happening.
My problem with this is the right is going about it almost exclusively via government, and in order to fulfill that goal it requires giving the government power it does not and should not have.
Multiple people in this thread are saying almost verbatim what I just said.
There's a mix of things I agree with and things I think are mischaracterizations.
I think the left is going too far with this, but I don't think all sex ed is porn.
Agree with you on this, even though you did frame it in a way to sound more malicious than a warped idea of helping
"That alleging someone is a violent gang member and knowingly sending them somewhere they will be imprisoned without trial is bad"
Missing context on this one.
"cities burned down" is more like "some property destroyed during a mass protest." Which is bad but it's like calling the death of 5 people a genocide.
This is the classic "I sanewash my allies and nutpick my enemies" framing. Yes, there are absolutely people for whom this is true. There are people for whom this is not. For instance, the left plays it up but are you going to confidently tell me that people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok don't sometimes get harassed? I browse /r/legaladvice and you do get threads like "my landlord is trying to make me take down my pride flag" or a woman at a Christian school fired for being pregnant out of wedlock (with a man who works there and is not being punished).
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