Prominent Leftists Sign Letter Deriding Cancel Culture, Now That It is Starting to Affect Them!

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Jul 11, 2020

A group of prominent leftist authors, academics, journalists, policy makers and lobbyists have signed onto a letter begging the left-wing mob to stop its relentless assault on freedom of expression.

The letter, which has been published by Harper’s Magazine, was signed by 150 people including Steven Pinker, Fareed Zakaria, Noam Chomsky, J.K. Rowling, David Frum, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie. It pleads with the mob to stop their common practice of destroying anyone with whom they disagree.

“Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts,” the letter reads, showing that the leftists continue to pay lip service to the overall aims of the marxist mob.

However, the authors complain about an “intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”

“The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides,” they wrote.

The authors claim that the Left is becoming like the Right in its hostility against the marketplace of ideas. They wrote that “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.”

“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 Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a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,” they wrote.

“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,” they added.

The authors concluded their letter with a call for the mob to respect liberal values and reject witch hunting meant to quell free speech.

“We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us,” they wrote.

However, these leftists are too little too late with their effort because the mob has grown too powerful. Most of these individuals were silent when their political opposition was being targeted by the mob. Because they lacked the courage to stand up for freedom when it could have mattered, they have the well-earned misfortune of being cannibalized by the mob as well.

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