Interesting Open Letter over on the Harper's Magazine site. An paragraph. The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement. A Letter on Justice and Open Debate | Harper's Magazine
Freedom of speech has been diminished by political correctness instead and an inability of the public at large to accept that others may have different ideas than theirs at times. The problem I see is that some think ideas are mortal fact... or some people choose purposely to construct fact out of fiction.... so the real victim is factual truth along with that creative thinking and expression of differing ideas..
Is it that some on the left think that all lives matter or that the police are necessary? They must feel threatened by the cancel culture. Oh, it was fine when conservatives were being kept from speaking or fired for expressing their views. Now if some on the left are in jeopardy, it's now time for them to recognize the First Amendment.
Let me tell you something. If you are the typical Democrat, blue collar hard working small town labor union Democrat. you are officially on the endangered list. You are about to be steamrolled into the pages of history where you will quickly be expunged from memory.
One person who signed was an editor at something called VOX, that person got backlash from one of his employees who is "trans" and who now says she feels unsafe at work because he signed it.