There's an alt right author called Vox Day (and I'm a little afraid to be referencing him here) who makes the following argument: if mainstream thought becomes increasingly constricted, and disagreeing with it becomes increasingly dangerous, people will do one of two things. Either they'll self-censor, or they'll "flip the switch" and just go totally anti-mainstream, because it's safer to associate and identify with people who won't get them fired for their opinions. The greater the censorship and fear, the more people will "flip" in a search for safety.
Now he is alt right and he has a vested interest in portraying the ascendancy of the alt right as inevitable, but the point is nonetheless logical, and quite disturbing. It may be that punishing moderately "wrong" speech will ultimately drive moderates into the waiting arms of the extreme right, where they won't be judged so harshly for their errors. Moreover if the purity spiral [1] theory is correct, this phenomenon may be hard to stop, because punishing people for their dissenting speech is an effective way to gain status in many communities!
[1] https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
I wouldn't call myself alt-right, far from it in fact. But I definitely see this happening in me over the past few years. Starting the night of the 2016 election.
It's one of those things that makes me wonder how much I've changed vs how much society has changed around me.
For instance, I learned first thing this morning that I have a corrupt faith and that I've fractured the nation [1]. There's only so much debasement one can listen to before you just tune out.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/23/881992622/book-jesus-and-john...
Given that we're less than 6 months out from an election -- the election -- it's not a surprise. Lots of propaganda, foreign and domestic, is going to go hard all summer.
I have observed that in the last 10-20 years the definition of "mainstream" has come to mean something very personal and subjective. Some media are referred to as "mainstream" only if they offer a supporting bias, and others are labelled "mainstream" only if they have demonstrated disagreement, depending on your ask. The epithet "mainstream media" has become a brush with which one may paint a canvas any colour one desires to forward one's peculiar viewpoint. It is a phrase that has become as meaningless as "political", "science", and even "unbiased". Just another empty adjective to lend pseudo-credence to your opinion.
My country right now is deeply divided between literal left (not USA left, I mean actual marxists) and "right" (almost noone support true rightwing, either in historical sense, being monarchists, or in the current sense, being capitalists, what they support instead is a populist authoritarian way of doing things, more in common with left than with any kind of right).
I now have to be very careful with who I talk to, often whatever I say spark trouble because where I live most people are marxists, and I am ex-marxist.
So I decided yesterday to talk with people in an whatsapp group that is anti-marxist... instead found myself having to be careful and self-censor because they went all the way to the other side, hard, people there were mad our former justice minister praised the army honor... because to them, that is evil, what he should be praising is the army might, as soon I touched on the subject it sparked hostile rants against anyone that believes that a violent army-backed coup is wrong, in a chillingly civil way, they explained to me that the army job is basically kill people in the government until it obeys the majority of the population, basically a literal dictatorship of the majority.
It became obvious then... I won't find a place to talk about my now somehow "moderate" views.
Went down a strange rabbit hole there for a while this morning after reading this. Ready to come back up for air now and put that behind me a while.
https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hddnml/the_...
Not even mistakes. Things that were considered progressive as little as 15-20 years ago have now been flipped into "microaggressions".
I've wondered a couple times recently how dangerous it is that I'm easily discoverable. I tell myself that since I live in the Midwest, the worst of it hasn't reached here yet. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.
It seems, too, that making jokes is very risky. With text online it's just far too easy to take something out of context and misrepresent or weaponize a person's words. I have had this happen to me personally and it's unbelievably frustrating.
People aren't allowed to make mistakes, it seems. It is just too fraught, and even sincerity and honesty are not safe.