The Unbearable Phoniness of the Free-Speech Wars

Last week, The New York Times published an editorial bemoaning the fact that Americans feel constrained in expressing their opinions. In a survey conducted by Siena College, 46 percent of respondents reported feeling less free to talk about politics than they did a decade ago. This Very Serious, data-driven, marquee article comes almost two decades after the emergence of “call-out culture”—an intra-left phenomenon in which organizers and activists granted themselves permission to publicly savage one another over race, gender, sexual relations, and all other third-rail political topics. By the 2010s, the social contagion had escaped the confines of the left-activist lab and mutated into the “cancel culture” that many of us either live in fear of, or deny exists. Read Full Article »