When Everyone Is Right That Everyone Is Wrong - by David French - The French Press - 0 views
frenchpress.thedispatch.com/...veryone-is-right-that-everyone
equivalency both-sides cancel culture violence threats bipartisan
shared by Javier E on 03 Nov 21
- No Cached
-
Beginning back in 2016, just as I was beginning to be shocked and angry at Trump’s relentless rise, I made a very conscious change in my social media and reading habits. I intentionally tried to follow and read roughly equal numbers of thoughtful people on the left and the right.
-
Note I said “thoughtful.” I try to follow the best of both sides. And it was a transformative experience. Time and again, I’d see different people write compellingly about different outrages, and the stories and takes were all true. The injustices they described were all real.
-
Let’s take these two truths, for example. My good friends (and former colleagues) at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have compiled a sobering list of 471 scholars who’ve faced threats of termination since 2015.
- ...6 more annotations...
-
Here’s another partisan truth: “The right is responsible for 60 percent of the physical threats!”
-
Online, this observation is called “both sides-ism,” and people hate it. They demand that you declare which side is worse, and then dedicate the lion’s share of your efforts to defeating the true threat.
-
And those critics have a point. There are greater and lesser threats, and one of the hardest parts of my job is discerning the difference. Cancel culture is a long-term threat to America’s culture of free speech, but if Mike Pence had made a different choice on January 6, the entire republic could have faced an immediate, mortal threat.
-
My friend Jonathan Rauch calls this distinction the difference between a heart attack and cancer. When a person is facing a heart attack, you focus your efforts on making it through the next hours and days. But that doesn’t mean you don’t also keep treating the cancer.