In questo articolo di Jacobin, si risponde a chi da “sinistra” ( come l’editor di Current Affairs Nathan Robinson) ha criticato la lettera dei 150 intellettuali contro la Cancel Culture pubblicata su Harper sostenendo che la paura della censura, oltre a essere esagerata e paranoica, sarebbe irrealistica, dato che solo l’autorità dello Stato avrebbe la capacità di imporre una vera censura.

“Because the Harper’s letter was fairly anodyne and declined to mention any specific incidents, Robinson cherry-picks a small sample of occurrences that he imagines must be what the signatories are talking about and tries to demonstrate that these incidents were really nothing-burgers of no consequence, distracting us from real issues.

What is true is that to limit this discussion to the acts of the extremely online mob, to, say, British author Jon Ronson’s concerns about Twitter public shaming, or to the ill-defined term “cancel culture,”  entirely misses the far wider atmosphere of an aggressive and accelerating threat to civil liberties.

It is understandable that a brief open letter would not offer a catalog of episodes, but this is nevertheless unfortunate, as it allows Robinson and others to maintain a “nothing to see here, please move along” stance.

When we do in fact consider such a catalog, we find that to deny that this is happening, or to diminish it as inconsequential is untenable. There are simply too many examples.”