Slimebeast said:
It's scary that you seem to brush the whole thing off as just private companies having the freedom to act like they seem fit. It's already a classic response.
Cancel culture and censorship. There's two dimensions, a cultural element but also a political, judicial element. Public discourse can change the culture and attitudes in society, but there's also a legal battleground with the human right called freedom of speech that is regulated through The First Amendment and corresponding legislature in all Western liberal democracies.
Cancel culture refers to a cultural phenomenon, about a totalitarian mindset among a vocal minority. Mainly among the leftist intelligentia. We're now seeing the radical left pushing wokeness like a religion. An important tool of this is policing the language of other people in order to shame and control people. Often throughout history the left has had totalitarian tendencies to silence its opponents and impose restrictions on speech and on expression of free thought, but this has gone totally overboard in the last decade. Due to the explosive nature of internet, cancel mobs have a disproportionate amount of power against the individual.
I have no problem being criticised and I think I can speak for everyone on the right. That's not the problem. And I think you know this very well. The problem is that we have a culture of fear where dissenting opinions are disproportioanately punished by deplatforming, by losing your job, by people not wanting to associate with you because they in turn fear the consequences. By the opposition using it as an extremely powerful punishment. It's similar to how the religious power structures of the Middle ages, how people were ostraziced and silenced if they dared to speak up. It totally goes against our values of freedom and tolerance and it's unworthy of a modern democratic society.
If J.K. Rowling tweats about women who menstruate, it's wrong to demand her publisher to drop her. It's wrong to create such a hysterical atmosphere of hate that emotion-driven mobsters are able to pressure colleges to cancel invited speakers. It's wrong that people are being fired for making insensitive jokes, or getting fired for criticising BLM. Such behaviour is legal, we know that, but it's also totally immoral and evil. It's a culture that censors and supresses freedom of speech.
This is deeply inhuman. We cannot allow a culture of fear. We will soon be living in a democracy by name only.
It's scary that the country who once embraced freedom of speech and was famous all over the world for it, has suddenly become the strongest force in the West to suppress diversity of opinion. Just a few decades ago we as Swedes saw America, that you venerate freedom of speech. You even allowed nazis to march openly because freedom of speech was so holy. Now it's the other way around, cancel culture is rapidly spreading from the US universities, Big Tech and HR departments to Sweden and Europe. US college after college is being taken over by the woke mob with critical race theory and intersectionality being enforced in all areas, from school bureaucracy, to the curriculum, to recruitment and hiring practices.
But there is also a possibility to change laws. The big tech internet companies now control freedom of speech to such an extent that they effectively make up a monopoly and their bias against voices on the right is infringing on our democracy, it's infringing on freedom of speech. We can regulate big tech if we want to, by forbidding Google, Facebook and Twitter to arbitrarily suppress certain opinions, mainly conservative voices. We can accomplish this legally by many ways if we want to, perhaps by changing their legal status as platforms and instead make them accountable as publishers, or force them to disclose the bias of their algorithms and require that they're unbiased, demand more hearings with their CEOs, or simply break up the companies. There is a lot we can do politically.
There is an opposition on the left, a part of the left that embraces liberalism and classic Western values, who are also deeply concerned by this. Who realizes that they have to cooperate with conservatives on the right to oppose wokeness, to oppose cancel culture and defend Western democracy. Look up Bret Weinstein and Evergreen college. These people are increasingly realizing that right now, Trump is the only sensible choice to combat this dangerous movement on the legal front. Biden is a good man but far too weak and too blind and gullible to be able to stand up against this woke crazyness.
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