Tipper Gore targeted music and Hilary Clinton targeted video games (remember - 1990s)

The PMRC. Megadeth even wrote a song about it.. in '88

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=7-XVbLmexU8

https://genius.com/Megadeth-hook-in-mouth-lyrics

Warrant’s “Ode to Tipper Gore” is something of a classic

If Tipper Gore weren't such a prude, there might have been enough votes to overcome that butterfly ballot issue.

The perception is that the left is in favor of censoring slurs and hate symbols. As a reaction, Trump/MAGA has brought back the R-word for instance.

Saying the Left are "pro-censorship" is not factually incorrect but definitely has a different connotation.

broadly speaking, it _is_ factually incorrect to say that. Censorship is the government controlling what information the public can access. No one on "the left" is trying to pass a law saying that people should get jail time for using the R-word.

Political correctness, woke/cancel culture, whatever you want to call it, is not censorship. And it's not splitting hairs to say this; words have meaning and though 'censorship' is particularly abused, it is still quite different from me looking down on someone who uses the R slur on X (as I do daily)

> Censorship is the government controlling what information the public can access

Wikipedia and the ACLU both use a more expansive definition, where your definition is only 1 type of censorship. The "Left" uses empathy to convince people to self-censor and less often uses "Cancel Culture" to pressure companies into private censorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-censorship

What's wrong with empathy?

Broken people consider it a weakness.

Political correctness, woke/cancel culture, whatever you want to call it, is not censorship

Cancel culture is literally censorship. Deplatforming is censorship. Debanked is censorship.

I don't know what the R word is but there is a group of people you can't even look down at because they have been deplatformed and cancelled.

The left has passed laws and people do get jail time for social media posts in the UK.

There are more subtle forms of censorship, continuously employed by the government to prop up or push down various things. Covid had many such examples of pressure tactics from the government come to light but I'm sure it happens constantly.

For a specific recent example democrat-leaning states had much stricter and longer-lasting covid lockdowns - preventing free association is a form of censorship.

> the R-word

??

The r-word is "retard".

Thanks.

Though surely to say a system or process is 'retarded' means something is holding it back?

To equate this to a derogatory term for a learning disability (worthy of self-censorship!) is, frankly, bizarre and rather smacks of virtue signalling.

The Christian right was trying to ban books in the 70s/80s. Fought heavy metal music in the 80s. Then you have 911 censorship. But after 2008 the left brought woke to power which saw banning people from twitter, social media, right speech. Then we reached covid which saw banning of facts. Deplatforming / banning / doxing became the norm until the return of Trump who then moved the needle and started pro Jewish censorship which has pushed the needle for the anti Jewish censorship crew which is taking over.

Harry Potter is the funniest example because it started out being a target of the evangelical "right" and has become a target of the culture-war "left"!

Indeed.

I remember taking a California statewide essay exam in middle school whose prompt was specifically to argue for or against banning Harry Potter from the school library. I wrote a stridently anti-censorship piece extolling the virtues of literary freedom and calling out the censorious right for attempting to use schools not to educate, but to transmit catechism.

The essays were graded by (obviously heavily left-leaning) teachers from all over the state, with two teachers independently assigning a score and if their scores differed by more than one grade, another teacher would be tiebreaker.

I got the top score from both teachers--one of only a handful in the (large) school district. I even got an award from the local newspaper.

Now I see the same demographic take the polar opposite view and it's disappointing to say the least. Especially after the "anti" racism struggle session era, it seems to me that their real issue with the book bans wasn't the censorship; they just wanted to transmit the "right" catechism.

How did the institutions dominated by the left react to dissent when it came to COVID 19 policy? Like the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Were they open with speculation about the virus, vaccine policy or the lockdowns? Or did they censor Disinformation and Misinformation on Campus, on social media,and at the work place?