You know the Social Justice Warrior march through our institutions has finally been exposed when Noam Freaking Chomsky (among many others) says they’ve gone too far:
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right [Sure you have, sport. What was the last major pro-censorship movement on the right? The Moral Majority in the 1980s? -LP], 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. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. 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 Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a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. 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.
This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. 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.
Other actual notables signing the statement other than Chomsky include Martin Amis, Anne Applebaum, Margaret Atwood, Jeffrey Eugenides, Garry Kasparov, Greil Marcus, Wynton Marsalis, Steven Pinker, J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, Nadine Strossen and Matthew Yglesias. Hardly right-wingers, and the least liberal signers are probably David Brooks and David Frum.
Will this cause the liberal establishment to step back from the brink? Or will they just cancel Chomsky and company and/or force them to recant?