"while there's still clearly a market for controversial ideas (my own continued employment being proof)"

Katie - you're continued employment stems from being a quality writer and having more hustle than an entire room of Jezebel and Vox writers put together. No blindly regurgitating the mantra is just gravy.

@2 Indeed. Why can't all these whiners just capitulate and adopt my own views? I am so tired of people defending themselves in response to my correct, helpful criticism.

@4 What's with the thin skin there, Sausage? Can't you take a little criticism?

5 And he provided a real-life object lesson that demonstrates the author's leitmotiv.

Is this article about cancel culture or the invisible hand of the market? Because one is good and the other, not so much.

@7 Daum would never vote for Trump. Stop your insufferable whining and grow a pair, Sausage.

Um, the Christian right indoctrinates you with false guilt from the moment you are able to go up with the other kids to the creepy preacher with the other kids, as opposed to holding people accountable for going against the thought police. It's a poor false equivalency.

Man I need more coffee

@13 "Indoctrinates you with false guilt" sounds like just the sort of thing the far left is being accused of. I'm not sure what you're trying to get at with the pedophile angle, though.

@1 Well said! I’m a member of the Herzog fan club too.

So let’s reach all the way back into the wellsprings of American mythology, right back to the Mayflower. And those pilgrims on their way to Plymouth Rock were trying to escape the oppression that came with having an established church. Religious freedom thus was one of the very earliest foundations of America, right?

Well, not really. The Puritans were actually the crazy fundamentalists of the day and what they really wanted was to be the ones running things rather than the Anglicans who were a bunch of lax degenerates who were probably closeted papists anyways. They didn’t object to morality police, they wanted to BE the morality police. And they’d do it right.

This is exactly the situation we find ourselves in today. For the last 40 or 50 years, conservative Christians have established themselves as the moral arbiters of the nation. But, like the Anglicans of yore, they have feet of clay. They’re racist. They don’t care about morality beyond abortion and homosexuality. They’re hypocrites.

Enter our new, woke Twitterati, who embody anti-racism, LGBTQ rights, who, far from tolerating hypocrisy, demand the figurative death of any public figure who violates their laws to any degree (Al Franken). And note well that they overwhelmingly tend to be well educated, progressive whites.

They’re Puritans. Sure, they have a different set of things fas et nefas. But the spirit is exactly the same as the one that came over on the Mayflower. And it’s as WASP-American as apple pie.

"Why do these young kids blame me for wanting to talk and talk and talk and do nothing for decades, in pursuit of discourse, instead of actually doing something about all the things we've done to the world, that we actually know how to fix, but are going to blame on the young kids instead, and make them fix?"

Yeah, can't imagine why she's under attack. /s

@15 Wait, so now you're upset that someone NOTICED that you can dish it out but you can't take it? You're going to work yourself into a full-blown tantrum if you keep spiraling like that, little guy.

@20 Why don't you just man up and take the criticism?

"and the rage is more often directed at the author personally than the ideas he or she raises"

This is a quantifiable claim in need of quantification. Without some kind of data to support it, your entire claim collapses into "the internet makes it easier for people to express their views". Which is a pretty starkly banal

@22 If you had any capacity at all for self-reflection, you'd by now have realized why people don't change their minds or just shut up when you accuse them of Unacceptable Discourse.

'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off

@16

Sorry, I guess what I was attempting to say was that the left enforces a certain standard and holds those that transgress accountable. I think it's fair to say that that indoctrination may be similar to the way the religious right indoctrinates followers - except what I'm picking at is that the locus of control in many protestant and catholic schools of thought is that you are already guilty, that even as a child you share in the blame for the death of Jesus which instills kids with a powerful unconscious reflexive guilt for the sake of instilling irrational obedience to ensure salvation. This is opposed to being canceled for willfully going against an understood norm and being publicly shamed and facing consequences to one's reputation and career, so I take issue with one being a passive transgression and the other being an active one.

"the need for due process, an almost pathological defense of free speech—have been abandoned by the very people who once defended them and co-opted by the political right."

I'm not sure I agree with the premise, but the major difference here if we assume it to be true, is that the right only defends those ideals so long as the victim is also on the right. Otherwise, they couldn't care less.

"Except the Christian right at least has the concept of redemption. The left doesn't have that." You might be right there, except, again, the right only applies that to others on the right. One need look no further than the Franken/Moore comparison for stark proof of that.

There have always been authoritarians on the "left" stalinists, communists, whatever. Herzog is making a fool of herself again.