We once were a nation that tolerated “intolerable” people, that balanced inhumanity with contrition and restoration of the contrite. All fall short.
We abided Daniel Webster AND John C. Calhoun, Billy Graham and Larry Flynt, MLK and George Wallace, the Black Panthers and the KKK.
Did we particularly WANT TO?
Of course not.
Why, then? Because tolerance of ideas is the price of freedom.
I see that freedom ending soon. Emotion is truth. Outrage becomes mandate. Thoughts must not become a crime.
At the height of the Terror, a woman came to the journalist Marat in 1793 and enumerated a list of people that were secretly against the Jacobin regime. “Soon I shall have them all guillotined in Paris,” he replied confidently.
Marat’s pen had the power to stoke outrage that led to the scaffold. Is today’s “Cancel Culture” any different?
https://newrepublic.com/article/155141/cancel-culture-con-dave-chappelle-shane-gillis
I think when all this is over and we’re in some Khmer Rouge work-camp, we can all point to the day Richard M Stallman got canceled as a milestone on this journey. Thanks to the very systems he helped create via the Free Software Foundation, a wave of outrage forced his ouster.
I remember as a child, reading about the McCarthy Era, about people getting blacklisted and thinking, “Nah, that can’t happen again.”
Surprise.