Allowing protests makes you an “anarchist jurisdiction.”
 | | Protesters in Manhattan.Seth Wenig/Associated Press |
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A few months ago a certain segment of the commentariat — mainly on the center-right — became extremely agitated about the purported menace of “cancel culture,” the shaming and ostracizing of public figures over actions or opinions deemed unacceptable. Cancellation, the story went, represented political correctness gone wild, and endangered free and frank discourse. |
The whole thing was, of course, greatly overblown. Yes, political correctness sometimes goes too far, especially when linked with historical ignorance; it was definitely annoying when protesters pulled down a statue of U.S. Grant, an imperfect but great man who saved the Union. (Full disclosure: I’m a bit of a Grant groupie.) But left-leaning cancel culture doesn’t pose any real threat to free discourse, because in 21st-century America we barely have anything resembling a radical left, and whatever left-wing radicalism exists has very little political power. |
The radical right, by contrast, has a lot of power, and seems increasingly eager to use that power to punish anyone expressing views it doesn’t like, even — or maybe especially — when those views simply involve telling the truth. |
So we have Donald Trump demanding “patriotic education” and denouncing The Times’s 1619 Project, because it’s politically incorrect to admit the role slavery played in our nation’s history. You have the Justice Department announcing an investigation of racism at Princeton that is obviously intended to punish the school for admitting the obvious point that there was racism in its past. |
Acknowledging racism isn’t the only issue that stirs up right-wing cancel culture. As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, there has been sustained persecution of scientists who acknowledge the reality of climate change. The strange goings-on at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — first acknowledging what everyone else has known for months, that airborne droplets can transmit the coronavirus, then retracting that acknowledgment — strongly suggest that political appointees are trying to cancel epidemiology that conflicts with Trumpist opposition to face masks. |
But persecuting scholars and scientists who report inconvenient facts is small stuff. Now the right is going after whole cities. |
On Monday William Barr’s Justice Department designated three cities — Portland, Seattle and, yes, New York — “anarchist jurisdictions,” places that “have permitted violence and the destruction of property to persist.” |
The first reaction of New Yorkers and, I assume, residents of the other two cities, was to treat this as a joke. Walk around New York, where millions of people are living normal lives in relative safety, and “anarchy” is hardly the word that comes to mind. No, there aren’t mobs of looters roaming the streets, and despite an uptick in murders (offset by a decline in rape) crime remains very low by historical standards. |
But the anarchist designation isn’t an empty gesture; it comes with the threat of a cutoff of federal funds. So what is this nonsense about? |
The answer, basically, is that Trump and Barr are trying to punish cities that let people express opinions they don’t like, that allow mostly peaceful demonstrations against racism to proceed rather than finding excuses to beat people up. |
This is, in other words, right-wing cancel culture on a grand scale. And the fact that people with real power are thinking along these lines should terrify all of us. |
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