I respect John McWhorter and know he has to say "both sides do it" if it's going to be published in a place like the NYT, but people keep making this same case of cancel-culture equivalence that doesn't hold up.
One one side you have red-state legislatures like Oklahoma etc banning books, which is stupid and backwards, but at this point "Look at how dumb the rednecks are!" is a Dog Bites Man story that has a long, illustrious history stretching back to Mencken; the other side is made up of corporate media, academia, Big Tech, not to mention Hollywood and the publishing industry, which combined are the ideological enforcement arm of the Left/Team Blue.
There is no question as to who has vastly more power and reach, and there is no question as to who should know better about the downsides of censorship and ideological groupthink.
I respect John McWhorter and know he has to say "both sides do it" if it's going to be published in a place like the NYT, but people keep making this same case of cancel-culture equivalence that doesn't hold up.
One one side you have red-state legislatures like Oklahoma etc banning books, which is stupid and backwards, but at this point "Look at how dumb the rednecks are!" is a Dog Bites Man story that has a long, illustrious history stretching back to Mencken; the other side is made up of corporate media, academia, Big Tech, not to mention Hollywood and the publishing industry, which combined are the ideological enforcement arm of the Left/Team Blue.
There is no question as to who has vastly more power and reach, and there is no question as to who should know better about the downsides of censorship and ideological groupthink.