If I criticise the left it's not because I'm right, it's because I want the left to be better.
I find term to be so broad as to be useless. And, like the linked article, and like the litany of generic complaints about free speech on HN in the last few years, I tend to see it as convenient stand-in for people who know their opinions cannot be uttered in polite company.
Nobody gets cancelled for proving p!=np, or finding a new antibiotic, or coming up with a melody that is impossible not to sing along. So the shtick about conflating the (sometimes apocryphal) hardships of innovators in the Middle Ages with the bland low-level hate today's young adults come up with to compensate for their mediocracy is getting tiring.
[0]: obligatory disclaimer that the Galileo incident was at least as much about him deliberately pissing off the Church as about his scientific beliefs, which if I understand correctly you were allowed to express if you tried to be at least a bit subtle about them.
But we as humans tend to see things from the prism of a late concept we just learned about and gauge it against various models in order to test its validity. The problem is that in this case it is not about being valid but about some sort of subjectivity.
"Identity politics" even has the benefit of being so generic, it allows everyone to replace it with the worst example they can come up with: you hate "identity politics" for the one time that <person> invoked <their identity> to get <something ridiculous> (see examples in this threat). But you use it to tarnish complaints about black people dying twice as often from COVID and five times as often from police bullets.
So, please, continue to be outraged by how unwilling others are to, for once, see it from the perspective of a white heterosexual man with a suburban middle-class background. And how unwilling people are to be "free thinkers" like you, boldly telling people on HN that you kinda think women and black people should shut up.
But please stop glorifying reactionary opinions as some sort of revolutionary insight! When people tell you you are wrong, you are extremely more likely to be wrong, and not Galileo Galilei. If in doubt, maybe try to think of something revolutionary in particle physics or plate tectonics, before going all-in on the biological origins of intelligence or whatever it is you're being criticised for.