Hypothesis: Much of the intolerance on the intellectual Left comes as a backlash to the insane, neverending aggression of the online Right. The GamerGaters and Nazis and rape threats come from everywhere and nowhere. How else to end the madness but to clamp down hard everywhere?
Assholes always sent threats and harassment by email. But social media now allows them to brigade people on a scale unimaginable even in 2010. They rove across the internet, always looking for the next target. It doesn't even take that many to make people feel besieged.
So what do people want to do in response?
Clamp down hard. Everywhere. With maximum force.
The online rightist brigades have thus sowed the seeds of distrust and hate throughout our entire society.
Clamp down hard. Everywhere. With maximum force.
The online rightist brigades have thus sowed the seeds of distrust and hate throughout our entire society.
People who have been attacked anonymously online will naturally tend to become fearful offline, and fear makes them fall into stereotypes. They look at their white male colleague at work and think "Is this guy a Nazi when he's off work?". Etc.
This climate of fear has, for example, lent credence to the arguments of people like Ibram Kendi, that every white person who does not constantly bellow the tenets of Kendian "anti-racism" is a racist.
What people like @wesyang now (correctly) recognize as the cultural overreach of social justice ideology is a direct result of, and response to, the overreach of the online Right (and the refusal of non-Nazi conservatives to fight and repudiate the online Right).
And this dynamic isn't limited to Twitter brigades and Gamergaters either. On Facebook, or in "normie" spaces, racists and other hate-filled people are absolutely vicious. Sometimes not even anonymously.
That has contributed to the climate of fear, and to the Left's backlash.
That has contributed to the climate of fear, and to the Left's backlash.
And it's mirrored at the level of national politics. Conservatives' and Republicans' failure to repudiate Trump, the most openly racist (and sexist, etc.) president in living memory, has convinced many (most?) Democrats that all conservatives and Republicans share Trump's hate.
If you're worried about cultural and institutional overreach on the Left, there's only one thing to do. Ditch Trump and ban all the Nazis and Gamergaters from everywhere they can be banned from.
Naturally, many conservatives will be afraid of this solution. "First they came for the Nazis and Gamergaters...am I next?", they think.
And so they refrain from punching to the right. And then they get accused of being Nazi sympathizers, which seems to justify their fears.
And so they refrain from punching to the right. And then they get accused of being Nazi sympathizers, which seems to justify their fears.
But only if and when conservatives repudiate the Nazis, the Gamergaters, the Stephen Millers, and the Trumps can a healing process can begin and balance be restored. The Left will keep coming harder, clamping down more in all the spaces where it has the power to clamp down.
As long as conservatives cling ever more tightly to Nazis (or the alt-right, Trump, etc.) as their Desperate Last Bastion against the Left, it will keep getting worse and worse for them. And for moderates. And for our whole country, really.
Conservatives embraced something very dark and very horrible as a gambit to stop the trends in American society they didn't like.
That gambit failed, and backfired so spectacularly that I find it almost impossible to describe in words what a disaster it was.
That gambit failed, and backfired so spectacularly that I find it almost impossible to describe in words what a disaster it was.
Only once that era definitively ends -- once Trumpism and the alt-right are consigned to the flaming trash-heap of history -- can the journey back to some semblance of balance and reason BEGIN.
Note that word: "begin".
There is a long and difficult road ahead.
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Note that word: "begin".
There is a long and difficult road ahead.
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