Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2023–2025years
67% recommend33% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > But something odd then happened in the US. The left, having been pushed too far by something or other (Trump being the usual cited example), began to reason that since the “right” had free speech as a value, the “left” were free to oppose it. This is where I believe the new trend of what has been called “cancel culture” comes from.
Left-wing intolerance in the United States became more publicly prominent after the 2016 elections, but its roots are far older. A full accounting can be found in the books "America's Cultural Revolution" (Christopher Rufo, 2023) and "The Origins of Woke" (Richard Hanania, 2023), but the TLDR is:
The most extreme, intolerant, and revolutionary fringes of the 60s civil rights movement (Angela Davis et al.) completely failed in the end to achieve their goals of violent overthrow of the government. So instead, they pivoted to taking control of institutions, like university and government bureaucracies. They were greatly aided in doing so by civil rights law; specifically, by activist judges and bureaucrats who twisted the laws that Congress passed, so that every major corporation, university, and government department lived in constant fear of being sued for "disparate impact" or "hostile workplace environment." It turns out, that instituting speech codes and hiring the radicals into your HR department is a great way to ward off the lawsuits (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-...). So free speech lost in the institutions, and only then came under threat in the town square.
- The the reason corporations care about DEI in the first place has to do with civil rights laws, they mostly don't really think that "diversity" is their strength. To learn more about that, you should read Richard Hanania's recent book The Origins of Woke.
Since there has been a backslash against the results of the civil rights laws, they probably have more leeway to act as "rational" economic agents, but at least the formalities still must be observed.
- Hanania's book is called "The Origins of Woke" and specifically calls for massive changes to Title 7 and jurisprudence surrounding it. Hanania has a record of contributing to explicitly white supremacist web sites. Though they claim to have softened their beliefs, they continue to cite other contributors to these sites.
It is possible that PG is not aware of Hanania's book. But I think the connection is worth interrogating.
