David Solway writes:
Shaidle is writing specifically about society’s embrace of transgenderism and the legal crusade against dissenters, but the issue, implicit in her contestation, is larger than that. In subscribing, really or apparently, to the prudish and pharisaic mores of the time, have we secured an exemption from eventual persecution? More to the point, do we want to live in a society in which the government can arrest us at its discretion for our opinions, however neutral, moderate, abrasive or vehemently expressed?
If we do not speak our minds, or prefer to huddle under a canopy of pietistic complicity, as many do, we will awaken one day soon to find our freedom of expression even more severely compromised than it now is—or worse. Indeed, “microfascism” has a way of morphing into macrofascism. The upshot is that we will have reaped the bitter harvest of our cowardice, and an ironic form of justice will have been served.
