By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, December 03, 2020
A half-century ago, progressives used to push limitless
free expression, blasting conservatives for their allegedly blinkered
traditionalism. They boasted of obliterating once-normal boundaries in art,
music, and literature to allow nudity, profanity, sexuality, and anti-American
boilerplate.
Now?
The Left is Victorian — increasingly puritanical,
regressive, and hypersensitive. Even totalitarian censorship and book-burning
have weirdly become part of their by-any-means-necessary methods.
University of California, Berkeley, professor Grace
Lavery was so outraged by author Abigail Shrier’s latest book, Irreversible
Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, that she went way
beyond the usual calls to ban the book. Lavery advocated burning Shrier’s book.
“I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book
and burn it on a pyre,” Lavery tweeted last month.
Did the self-appointed liberal watchdog the American
Civil Liberties Union step in to defend free expression?
No. Instead, one ACLU official poured gas on the
book-burning fire.
“Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is
100% a hill I will die on,” tweeted Chase Strangio, the ACLU’s deputy director
for transgender justice.
Note all of these melodramatic humanitarian verbs such as
“steal,” “burn,” and “die.”
Staffers at the Canadian branch of Penguin Random House
recently confronted management over the company’s publication of libertarian
Jordan Peterson’s new book Beyond Order, a sequel to his earlier
bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
What were their objections to the book? Peterson, who has
criticized the notion of white privilege and contends that masculinity is under
attack, was accused of “white supremacy,” “hate speech,” and “transphobia.”
These are simply our generation’s synonyms for their predecessors’ bogeyman
labels “heretic,” “witch,” and “Communist.”
Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are more refined in
suppressing books, films, communications, and ideas they don’t like — and don’t
want others to like, either.
Author Alex Berenson self-published a series of pamphlets
on Amazon that offer a dissenting view about the efficacy of forced coronavirus
lockdowns. Suddenly, Amazon blocked his most recent installment — at least
until public pressure forced the multibillion-dollar company to relent.
Amazon did something similar to Hoover Institution senior
fellow Shelby Steele, declining to stream his documentary “What Killed Michael
Brown?” about the fatal 2014 shooting of Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo., and
race relations in America. Once again, public outrage forced the company to
back down from what appears to be a systematic and ideologically driven effort
to stop the dissemination of books and films that don’t advance the
progressive/regressive cause.
Note the pattern here. Publishers and platforms are not
arguing that these books and films are mediocre. After all, they had initially
agreed to publish or disseminate all of them.
Their subsequent flips and flops arise from
fundamentalist progressive pressure of the sort used by social media to
de-platform and cancel unwelcome politics and ideology.
So the First Amendment of the once freest nation in the
world is comatose. This time its enemies are not hooded Klansmen seeking to
intimidate African Americans or right-wing conspiracy theorists rooting out
supposed Communists.
No, the culprits are progressives
and leftist elites in publishing, the media, Silicon Valley, academia,
entertainment and government. They so lack confidence in the logic and
persuasiveness of their own arguments that, in fear, they increasingly try to
ban whatever bothers them.
The classic To Kill a Mockingbird and other books
about racial issues were banned from the curriculum in the Burbank Unified
School District in California last month.
The Left did not just oppose the nomination of Supreme
Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; it sought to destroy his career and reputation
through smears.
Professors at Stanford University hounded Hoover
Institution fellow and public-health expert Dr. Scott Atlas. His apparent crime
was advising President Trump that lockdowns and quarantines might ultimately
cause more damage than COVID-19 itself. Atlas resigned from his role as Trump’s
coronavirus adviser earlier this week.
Efforts to censor, cancel, discredit, or destroy the work
of anyone with contrasting viewpoints are canonized by the wealthy, powerful
left-wing elites and their institutions.
In Orwellian fashion, they have redefined being illiberal
and vindictive as being woke, enlightened, and progressive — and for the public
good rather than their own interests.
How ironic that the kindred spirits of today’s
progressives are not Socrates, Galileo, and Harper Lee, but the Athenian mob,
Joseph McCarthy, and the Taliban.
Past and present, all of these zealots and character
assassins cloaked their intolerance in the pretense that they were advancing
truth — by destroying it.
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