The self-silencing majority By Bari Weiss Mar 2, 2021 https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2021/3/2/22309605/the-silenced-majority-bari-weiss-new-york-times-cancel-culture-free-speech-democrat-republican
In red America and blue America, an epidemic of self-censorship is threatening democracy
According to the new illiberalism, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. Education, according to this ideology, is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about telling them what to think.
In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan or post the right motto and visual on Instagram, your whole life can be ruined.
Victimhood, in this ideology, confers morality. “I think therefore I am” is replaced with: “I am therefore I know,” and “I know therefore I am right.”
In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your father. In other words: you are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion. And racism is no longer about discrimination based on the color of someone’s skin. Racism is any system that allows for disparate outcomes between racial groups. That is why the cities of Seattle and San Francisco have recast algebra as racist. Or why a Smithsonian institution this summer declared that hard work, individualism and the nuclear family are “white” characteristics.
But what we call cancel culture is a departure from traditional taboos in two ways.
The first is technology. Sins once confined to the public square or the town hall are now available for the entire world for eternity. In our era of Big Tech there is no possibility of moving to a new town and starting fresh because the cloud of all of your posts and likes hangs over your head forever.
The second is that in the past, societal taboos were generally reached through a cultural consensus. Today’s taboos, on the other hand, are often fringe ideas pushed by a zealous cabal trying to redefine what is acceptable and what should be shunned. It is a group that has control of nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life: media, to be sure, but also higher education, museums, publishing houses, marketing and advertising outfits, Hollywood, K-12 education, technology companies and, increasingly, corporate human resource departments.
Bari Weiss quit the NYT, but hasn't drifted into obscurity https://edition.cnn.com/videos/media/2021/10/17/bari-weiss-substack-freedom-sot-rs-vpx.cnn