I was in college (the mid-90s) and I wrote an oped for the student paper where I made the case that young people didn’t get a very good deal when it came to Social Security. It was a reasonably good little screed on historical returns in the stock market outperforming the government mandated program. I might have said that this was unfair and I might have said FDR was a jerk. But that was about it. I wrote it and thought nothing of it.
The next day I saw that I had a message in my voicemails. I listened to it. It was two young women who decided that my note was horrible and that I was horrible. They said that my article was no surprise coming from a guy who “drove a Saab”, which was funny because I drove a BMW, a very old BMW with a seat that was barely attached to a rusting floorboard. The insinuation was that I was clearly privileged and did not understand what it meant to be “wealth challenged”. This was also funny because I had grown up mostly “wealth challenged” and at times significantly so. Most people at my leafy liberal arts college were not challenged and I’ll bet that probably went for my voicemailers.
But that was that. I never heard from the pair again. I have no idea who they were. But there is a reasonable chance that these young women entered the workforce with this mindset intact. They were and are not alone.
There are those who really believe that “words are violence” while at the same time believing that “silence is violence”. (I mean c’mon pick one.) These people have filed into HR departments, college admission boards, and editorial boards en masse over the last two decades. Many of these people also found their way into government.
There and into tech. It is no surprise that Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) has become the monster that it has. A whole generation of busybodies has taken over important parts of society.
In the US the CIC is vast and it stretches from company boardrooms, to regulatory agencies, to Congress, pretty much all over. The founding principle of the United States, and indeed liberty itself is free speech. Yet there are many in power who abhor free speech and seek to restrict the expression of views they find unacceptable. This used to be the stuff of Soviet Russia. Now this sort of thinking is common in the once generally free Anglo-West. Canada for instance has strongly curtailed free expression under President Trudeau. True North is increasingly a no-go zone for free thinking people, which is of course the point of the new laws and regs coming out of Ottawa.
Trudeau is crushing free speech in Canada. Let it be a warning to the US
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