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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I read something today which I have long thought deep down, but hadn’t really seen spelled out elsewhere.

Namely, the censoring done by the liberal left, while there, is rather mild in the scheme of things and is probably much less than the same left would be censored by the people it currently censors if that group was in power.

The quote that brought it to my mind was from here, on Richard Hannania’s substack. After a post discussing being banned by Twitter, he drops this at the end of the article.

The right-wing whining in particular gets to me, and another motivation here is I don’t want to end up like my friends… I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.

https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/saying-goodbye-to-twitter

The attitude of censoring opponents seemed to have crystallized for the left around 2016, where I distinctly remember the conversation centering around the limits of tolerating intolerant ideologies. (Which seems to have become fully settled by now, interesting to observe an ideological movement update in real time in that way).

Does Hannania have a point here? Is the issue that the right takes offense with censorship itself, or would the right if it actually gained back power censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way?

From the article:

After all the LGBT, black, and women stuff that I’ve posted, this is like Al Capone going away for tax evasion.

Can someone who follows his Twitter feed give some examples? This would help calibrate how much censoring Twitter is doing.

Here are some choice ones from last weeks

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1567548940610043906?cxt=HHwWhIDQ0ZndhsErAAAA

I suspect that the normal person goes along with LGBT propaganda in schools not because they're intimidated by radical activists, but because they see it as an acceptable way to make the weirdest and ugliest kids feel better about themselves.

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1567521638236946433?cxt=HHwWgoDQjf-n-sArAAAA

Taliban has an interest in establishing relations with Russia, extremists opposed to gov trying to sabotage. In a sane world we’d help Taliban deal with terrorism. It’s in everyone’s interest, but no, we’ll let everything burn for girls education, which you won’t get anyway. https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1566739026031194112?cxt=HHwWgMCl5fu1lr4rAAAA

This story. If you have faith that there is hope for reaching out to leftists, read it and see the kinds of people that make it in their institutions. Hard to be optimistic, a level of ugliness and evil that expands your concept of what is possible. https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1566390991380103168

There is probably more controversial things someone could dig up but this is fairly typical fair: https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1527689272119070720

Or this

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1567896817169494017

(I think he got away with it because he is actually pretty funny sometimes)