By the way, I really do think that the vast majority of the people who are fully signed up to this are young cancel culture types; and one of the reasons is that I think unless you grew up in the long shadow of the postwar, knowing what went on in regimes that really did kill and exterminate people both for thoughtcrime and for their "identity", you haven't much sense of perspective on what that all means.
I'm only in my early forties, but I grew up in a culture that was still visibly permeated by the long aftermath of war and the still visible threat of both fascist and communist regimes. I've heard people say many bigoted things in my life, some of which I've found deeply distasteful, but I've never once thought they should be criminalised for saying them.
Seeing the totalitarian, repressive impulses return which we once thought were over and left in the past has been one of the most special and novel delights of the new millennium . There's a woeful ignorance of history in any case amongst most people, but the strange desire of the youth to return to an age of surveillance, repression and thought-conformity on both left and right depresses me no end.
When I was a kid we were celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thirty years later people are trying to impose a level of intellectual gaslighting that beggars belief. If the left (and I have always up until now been doggedly leftwing), can't stand up for freedom of thought in a democratic society, then wtf kind of future world do they envisage?