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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?

The obvious response is that this guy is voicing an unusual/contrarian view among people who vocally complain about left-wing internet censorship, most of whom believe that internet companies getting to control what political views/information people are allowed to express is bad in general.

The more complicated response is that there is a false-dichotomy between SJWs and a subset of right-wingers as the relevant comparison. Traditional mainstream right-wingers don't even tend to be particularly vocal about left-wing censorship except for when they're censored personally, and there's a bunch of Republican congressmen who were shadowbanned on Twitter but have still never mentioned the issue. Youtube censored a mainstream pharmaceutical company at the behest of a NYT journalist because it was being used as a counterargument to an attack on Trump, and I don't think Trump mentioned it once. This is of course a dichotomy that SJWs very aggressively foster themselves, and anyone sufficiently loudly opposing SJWs tends to be tarred as "far right" and kicked out of any left-wing institutions (and lots of neutral institutions, and plenty of right-wing institutions). But the fact that mainstream right-wing institutions seem more prone to believing SJW claims and caving to SJW demands than anti-SJWs (including anti-SJWs who may qualify as left-wing or moderate in their general political views) seems like an illustration of why this isn't the actual axis. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently called for the censorship of Kiwifarms, does that mean "both sides" are pro-censorship or that the line doesn't really run from SJWs to MTG? And once you're considering the SJW/anti-SJW axis, remember that anti-SJW communities like /r/tumblrinaction (now banned by Reddit) are the ones who popularized "horseshoe theory" to describe how they considered SJWs the other side of the coin from groups like the Moral Majority.

For example the Gamergate surveys showed GG to have strongly left-wing demographics - but who would you trust to not fire you if a media campaign was screaming about how you were a racist, a group of Republican activists or a group of Gamergators? And this combination of views is pretty common with anti-SJWs, including the most common views seen in surveys of TheMotte itself. SJWs would of course say that pro-GG people are right-wing regardless of their votes for Obama or views on gay-marriage/abortion/government-spending, but you can't have it both ways. Either the anti-SJW and pro-free-speech people are right-wing, in which case it seems like the contingent of right-wingers most vocal on the issue are pro-free-speech. Or they're left-wing/moderate/oldschool liberals/etc., in which case this isn't about "the liberal left" vs. authoritarian right-wingers.

Now, once you get into political alliances and self-identification this gets more complicated. Undoubtably there are an increasing number of people who consider themselves "right-wing" precicely because they oppose one or more SJW doctrines or behaviors. This is understandable, since SJWs have rapidly progressed from co-opting groups like the Something Awful forums to co-opting groups like mainstream political parties. Lots of those people are going to place more trust on right-wing sources and be sympathetic to whatever they consider the right-wing position on any issue they don't have another reason to care about. And of course few actual politicians care about free-speech, or many of the issues relevant to the SJW/anti-SJW axis, so when SJWs do something unpopular enough that it shifts votes to Republicans the politicians aren't going to be perfectly responsive to their new voters. There have been a couple attempts at some sort of bill modifying Section 230 to get sufficiently-large internet companies to not arbitarily censor their political opponents, but they haven't gone anywhere. Politicians seem not to regard it as very important, unlike those in the trenches of social media, though that might eventually shift after enough big incidents like the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Politics is chaotic and it's hard to guess how things will go. But it's not uncommon for relatively small groups of invested people to end up dictating policy, and in regards to internet censorship those most invested in the issue seem to be those sincere in their opposition.

This is an astute observation. I think there's a tendency amongst a lot of people from progressive backgrounds to equate opposition to the "woke agenda" with being right-wing, and are thus annoyed, and maybe feel a bit betrayed, when they find out that much of the wider "right" has their own priorities and isn't as concerned the controversy of the day as they are.

I joke about it but...

"I'm a gay polyamorist furry who works for apple and is very concerned about HBD and Demographic decline, please subscribe to my substack"

followed by...

"Conservatives need to do more to cater to the preferences of gay polyamorist furries"

really is becoming something of a cliche' at this point.