Utopia, you are standing in it!

Yes, Ross Douthat is a conservative columnist, but does that mean he can be totally ignored? I don’t think so, at least not this week, when he devotes his New York Times space to a discussion of “cancel culture” (CC), and provides as good a definition of the phenomenon as I’ve seen. He also admits, in his list of “ten theses” about CC, that the Right does it too, but also that “a liberal society should theoretically cancel less frequently than its rivals.” I agree with most of what he says but strongly disagree with his thesis that the Right barely engages in creating CC at all.

Read it by clicking on the screenshot:

I’ve put Douthat’s “theses” in bold, and indented a few excerpts from his article. My own take on his points is flush left:

1. Cancellation, properly understood, refers to an attack on someone’s employment and reputation by…

The original saying I paraphrase above, from Oliver Wendell Holmes, is “hard cases make bad law”, meaning you shouldn’t erect general principles based on extreme cases. But in this instance, regarding the defenestration of scholars who say things unpalatable to their peers, or odious things in general, these are the hard cases that should be the basis of a general rule: academic institutions should not punish scholars who exercise their right to free speech.

Sadly, as Benjamin Schwarz—former literary and national editor of The Atlantic—shows in the new Spiked, this rule, which used to hold in the UK, no longer holds, at least with respect to historian and television presenter David Starkey. Starkey, it has to be said, uttered a statement that is reprehensible, unworthy of a thinking person. But it’s still free speech. Read what happened to him by clicking on the screenshot below:

First, Schwarz…

This now seems to have been inevitable, but it’s very sad, especially for the NYT, which has lost a powerful voice and a counterweight to the paper’s fulminating wokeness—an ideological groupthink that has so degraded its quality. Click on the screenshot to read the CNN report:

Weiss did not go gentle, either. From CNN:

This series of tweets was just emitted by Andrew Sullivan. Since his venue, New York Magazine, didn’t (“wouldn’t” is probably a better word) publish one of his columns a few weeks ago—probably because they didn’t like the subject, which was presumably the demonstrations following the death of George Floyd—I am guessing he’s been at odds with them, and has been looking for a new home. According to the stuff below, he’s found one.

He implies the reasons is not “his editors,” but what else could it be?

All the unwoke are being purged, or resigning. What will journalism be like without contrarian voices?

VIET CONG’S SECRET SUBTERRANEAN BASE VIETNAM, 1 NOVEMBER 1955 – 30 APRIL 1975

During the Vietnam War, the USA had the most advanced military in the world. Boasting technology and resources other nations could only dream of, their entrance to the conflict on the side of South Vietnam against the communist North Vietnam looked certain to turn the tide of the war.

But the Viet Cong, a guerrilla force on the side of the communists who were stationed in the South, had other ideas. Beneath the Cu Chi district near Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), communist forces had been digging tunnels here and there since the 1940s during their war of independence with the French. By the Sixties, however, this tunnel network spanned 250 kilometres (155 miles).

The Americans had expected a war above ground, but what they found instead was a determined Viet Cong force that, despite the…