Leftists shouldn’t assume that they’ll never be victims of cancel culture, which is ultimately vicious and indiscriminate. From Glenn Greenwald at greeenwald.substack.com:
In the prevailing climate, the rational choice is to avoid social scorn and ostracization no matter how baseless the grievances one must appease.
Will Wilkinson is about as mainstream and conventional a thinker as one can find, and is unfailingly civil and restrained in his rhetoric. But yesterday, he was fired by the technocratic centrist think tank for which he worked, the Niskanen Center, and appears on the verge of being fired as well by The New York Times, where he is a contributing writer. This multi-pronged retribution is due to a single tweet that was obviously satirical and sarcastic and for which he abjectly apologized. But no matter: the tweet has been purposely distorted into something malevolent and the prevailing repressive climate weaponized it against him.
Neither Wilkinson nor his tweet are particularly interesting. What merits attention here is the now-pervasive climate that fostered this tawdry episode, and which has unjustly destroyed countless reputations and careers with no sign of slowing down.
During the Bush and Obama years, Wilkinson worked at the libertarian CATO Institute but, even then, he was not much of a libertarian. As he himself explained, he is far more of a standard-issue neoliberal that one finds everywhere throughout DC think tanks, the op-ed pages of large newspapers, and the green rooms of CNN, just with a bit wonkier style of expression and a few vague libertarian gestures on some isolated issues. That self-description was in 2012, and he since then has become even more of a standard liberal during the Trump era, which is why the Paper of Record made him a contributor opinion writer where he published articles under such bold and groundbreaking headlines as “Trump Has Disqualified Himself From Running in 2020.”
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
Two important points need to be made:
1. tyrannical governments, especially leftist ones, are entirely without humor.
2. these intellectuals jabbing at each other on twatter either don’t know, or have forgotten, that intellectuals are the enemy of tyrannical governments and will be disposed of first, right after the consolidation of power, even before the roundups of common citizens begins
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Those are important, and I believe, true points.
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