The House I Hide In

 From Tom Piatak at Intellectual Takeout:

How quaint, I thought, that Americans used to believe that. The list of topics that can be discussed in public, even in moderate and respectful ways, shrinks by the year. Americans, at least conservative ones, are increasingly reluctant to express their beliefs in public, even on the internet, a medium whose early proponents often championed unfettered freedom of expression.

Indeed, many on the right had seen the internet as the key to bypassing leftist domination of other media. In 2020, however, the internet became just another venue in which the left could assert its cultural dominance, as tech monopolists used algorithms, content warnings, suspensions, and bans to limit the spread of ideas they didn’t like, a process that came to include even the president of the United States. The impact of such open censorship is amplified by massive self-censorship, as people learn about careers sidetracked and even ended by the discovery of stray remarks made years before.

Consider the case of Donald G. McNeil, Jr., the widely respected science reporter for The New York Times. McNeil’s 25-year career at the paper came to an end after it was reported that McNeil had said the wrong word out loud when responding to a student’s question about racial slurs. The student had asked McNeil whether a classmate should have been suspended for a video containing a racial slur, the N-word, that the classmate made when she was 12 years old. McNeil asked whether the classmate had directed the slur at someone else or was merely quoting a book title or a song. A relevant question, you might think, but a career-ending one, too, since in asking his question McNeil said the slur itself, rather than the abbreviation.

Something similar happened to Chris Harrison, the host of the ABC dating game show The Bachelor, after he wondered aloud whether it was fair to bar a contestant for attending a party in 2018 in which the guests dressed like planters from the antebellum South. Harrison was forced to take a leave of absence and will be replaced in the show’s future seasons.

Even more absurdly, a member of a contemporary folk-rock band, Mumford & Sons, was forced to take a leave of absence after it became known that he had dared praise Andy Ngo’s book, which is critical of Antifa. (Read more.)

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