Peter Sean Bradley

Politics Matter — What to do when the mob comes for you.

No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage — Lessons for the Silenced Majority by Katherine Brodsky

So, this week, Americans learned something that should have ignited a political firestorm when Facebook CEO admitted — four years too late — that he was intimidated by the Democrat Party and its assets in the federal government to censor Americans and suppress news.

Also, this week, the CEO of Telegram was arrested by France for insufficiently silencing speech on his messaging network.[1]

This month, Britons learned that they could be arrested and jailed for speech that the government deems ‘incitement,” even if that speech incites nothing.

Last week, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. endorsed BadorangemannextcomingofHitler because he recognized that the Democrat Pary is the party assaulting civil liberties.

“How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate who has never done an interview or a debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answers. They did it by weaponizing government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy,” Kennedy said. “They did it by silencing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters. What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control and the weaponization of federal agencies.”

This is not a good time for free speech and the threats are largely coming from the Left.[2]

The most insidious thing about the new censorship is that it is a totalitarian suppression of speech aimed at not just the great, but the small as well. A person can get instant fame by saying something innocuous that is interpreted as outside the lines by someone with the result being a hate mob outside the digital doors of the scapegoat.

The great have the money to deal with their problems. The small are crushed, fired, lose their business, get excommunicated from their communities, and suffer similar losses that tear at their self-worth and self-identity.

Katherine Brodsky has written a self-help book for the small. She offers sixteen case studies of people who were canceled. From these case studies, she gleans insights into the cancellation phenomenon and devises some strategies for dealing with the mob.

One of the things I noticed is that all of the examples are former leftists/liberals who walked into a minefield. Many expected they would be given a pass because they served the movement. They have all come out wiser and more attuned to and understanding non-leftists' thinking.

Growth is good, but I find it interesting that in this book, as in so many other aspects of society, something is not real until it happens to a leftwinger. Brandon Eich, who was fired from Mozilla for giving a small amount of money against a gay marriage initiative in California, is not one of the persons featured in this book. Neither are the many conservative teachers who have been hunted down and fired by leftwing academic institutions. It seems that they don’t count, which is a sad commentary that underscores the hegemony of the left and why we are in the present situation. Monopoly is not a healthy condition.

The first case study is an example of the insane, high-strung society we live in. Maria Tusken set up an online knitting community. When one member said she was traveling to India and it felt like she was going to Mars, an SJW mob took over the site to vilify her. When Maria Tusken called for tolerance and calm, the mob turned its attention to her and managed to get her to resign from the knitting association she founded. Tusken suffered the nightmare of ostracism from her community. She received no public support from her friends, although some gave her private reassurances of support. Many of her friends had businesses dependent on staying in the good graces of the knitting community.

This cowardice is a constant in these stories and is also a historic feature of leftism. Old Bolsheviks who had withstood the Tsar’s secret police crumbled when they stood alone against Stalin. One feature of memoirs of people who left the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s is the fear of losing their community. Such people would twist their private opinions to accommodate the most recent party line.

Kat Rosenfeld is a writer. She opposed an effort to cancel a writer whose book was deemed racist with a simple tweet questioning creative professionals banning a book. The mob turned on her. Rosenfeld makes this comment about the personality type involved in cancel mobs:

Rosenfield believes that these sorts of pile-ons tend to attract a certain personality type — a personality disorder, even. Narcissists are particularly drawn toward using a form of gaslighting called DARVO, which stands for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. In essence, the actual perpetrator will accuse the person they’ve victimized of doing the bad thing to them — thereby turning themselves into the victim. “It was basically like that. Something bad has happened to you, and you speak out about it, and you become the offender by speaking out about it.”

In a grotesque inversion of reality, they continue to be “powerless,” and anything they might do to you is fully justified because you are the “powerful.”

No Apologies p. 54.

Rosenfeld explains the idea of powerless bullies as follows:

There’s an interesting phenomenon in play whereby a group of people can gain quite a bit of power, as well as social and cultural capital, by claiming not to have any, Rosenfield explains. As she was witnessing in real time, it can be a rather effective strategy. People were saying that others had to listen to them and do what they demanded because they were “powerless.” It’s a cynical move, but in many cases, they truly believe themselves to be powerless — to be victims.

No Apologies, p. 52.

Daryl Davis is an African-American man who has a record of converting racists to pluralism. He finds that free speech is better than allowing bigotry to fester in silence:

“So you know, if you’re driving down the street in your car, and your car starts making some kind of weird noise under the hood … you’re not a mechanic, what do you do? You drive to the auto repair place and say: ‘Hey, can you look at my car? It’s making some weird noise.’ So the mechanic comes out and says, ‘Start your car.’ You start the car, and the noise isn’t there, of course. So he says, ‘Well, let me drive it around the block.’ He gets in the driver’s seat and drives around, no noise. He tells you: ‘Well, listen, I can’t fix what I can’t hear.’ So with racism in this country, it’s hard to fix when it’s hidden under the carpet behind the door, locked in the closet.”

No Apologies, p. 70.

This raises the question: Why did the Left lose confidence in its ability to win arguments?

Steven Elliott’s career was destroyed by an anonymous claim on the “Shitty Media Men List” that he was a rapist. His friends abandoned him. He thought his support of the Left would protect him:

Elliott was deeply political then, especially concerned with prison reform and sex worker rights — having been a sex worker himself. He raised a lot of funds for progressive candidates. “I really did my part,” he states. But none of that meant anything once his name appeared on the Shitty Media Men list. “None of the things I had done for these people and for this side of the spectrum [mattered], you know? When people came after me, nobody cared.”

No Apologies, p. 78.

Elliott came out of his experience with a new-found respect for due process and the “Blackstone Ratio”:

He cites Blackstone’s ratio, which was famously echoed by Benjamin Franklin: “It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than one innocent Person should suffer.” It’s one of the foundational ideas of this country, notes Elliott. “And you either subscribe to that or you don’t.”

No Apologies, p. 81.

On and on, it goes through the sixteen.

The book teaches us things we always knew: free speech is vital, innocence should be presumed, we should not jump to conclusions, and narcissists are either heroes or victims but never villains.

Ultimately, Brodsky advises that you should never apologize when the mob comes for you. You don’t know these people in the mob. You have no reason to respect them. They aren’t entitled to your apology. Worse, your apology will give them the incentive to continue their cruel game:

The solution is clear: stay true to yourself in the face of unreasonable people and demands, but don’t do so in a way that ends the chance of any further discussion or reconciliation. We need more conversations and less closing the door on them. In our increasingly polarized world, dissenting voices need to be heard and listened to, so it is more important than ever that we act in a careful and thoughtful manner that unifies rather than in a righteous and radical manner that divides. Model the behavior and attitudes you’d like to see. This includes always considering whether you might be wrong — no matter the situation or debate. That’s not a sign of weakness; that’s a sign of strength. But when you’re not wrong, don’t let fear silence you into submission. Always bear this in mind: when you’ve committed no wrongdoing, no one holds the authority to demand an apology from you, nor should you feel obliged to offer one. Stay firm, stay true. When your conscience is clear, don’t be coerced or surrender your voice. Set it free.

And never apologize for this.

No Apologies, pp. 220–221.

Good advice

Footnotes:

[1] Let’s not forget that this is the same month an EU bureaucrat threatened Elon Musk with arrest if he allowed too much free speech on X. The free speech in question was an interview with Donald Trump, who is favored to win the presidency. Unelected bureaucrats are interfering with American elections in a way that Putin would never dream of, but since it is directed against Badorangeman the elites are not concerned.

[2] I have been distinguishing between “the Left” and “liberals” for a few years now. Liberals believe in free speech and due process; leftists don’t. I was heartened recently when Alan Dershowitz made the same distinction.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jVO48snhE6Y

Cowl by Neal Asher

Time travel has been a distinct subgenre of science fiction since H.G. Wells’ The Time Traveler. Wells’ book did not explore the fascinating paradoxes that can arise from time travel. It would take years for writers to begin to explore the possibilities of time travel for killing grandparents or stepping on a butterfly in the age of dinosaurs and changing the present. The best example of the subgenre of “time travel as a puzzle” is Robert Heinlein’s “All you Zombies” in which all the characters are the same person. [1]

A variant approach to time travel is to use time travel as a setting. H.G. Wells’ classic story falls into that category, being more of a morality play about class structure in 19th-century Britain. Another book of this kind is Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station, which features the exile of political prisoners to the pre-Cambrian.

Neal Asher’s Cowl is very much the latter kind of story. The story begins in the near future when a British prostitute named Polly gets involved in a dodgy deal gone wrong. The MacGuffin of the deal is high-tech equipment from the future. The deal is interrupted by an amoral government agent named Tack. It turns out that the tech is a time travel device that hijacks people to the past.

To the deep past.

The device attaches itself to Polly. Because Tack is in proximity at the time of activation, she and he are dragged back into the past. The pair make a couple of smaller time jumps, but Tack gets lost along the way. Polly’s jumps get longer and longer, eventually taking her through the age of dinosaurs to the barren world of the pre-Cambrian.

Tack gets hijacked by a living time traveler heading in the same direction as Polly. Through this hijacker, Tack learns about the future. He finds out that he has been hijacked into a time war involving unleashing vast power against a superhuman mutant named Cowl.

Neal Asher is not concerned with paradoxes. Nuclear bombs going off in the Jurassic do not affect the future. Asher gives some handwaving explanations about probability slopes, but it is mostly bafflegab. The time travel element is purely for the setting. It is cool to see our separated heroes make their way to the essentially lifeless pre-Cambrian by fighting their way through huge mammals and huge dinosaurs. Never mind that the oxygen levels were too low for humans to operate at various eons.

Cowl is an action-adventure with time travel providing different settings. The writing is crisp, the ideas are engaging, and I came to like the characters.[2] Initially, I could not decipher the structure of future society, but eventually, I did and came to enjoy the conflict between one group of posthumans and another.

This may be your book if you are interested in an action-adventure time travel story without paradox.

Footnote:

[1] “The Sound of Thunder” and “All You Zombies” got a movie treatment. Both treatments departed from their respective storylines, although the “All You Zombies” treatment — Predestination — had more of the feel of the novella.

[2] Polly starts as a drug-addicted slut, but she cleans up her act thanks to a bit of artificial intelligence implanted in her as part of her involvement in the deal gone wrong. Tack goes from an amoral, programmed machine to a human with free will and a sense of right and wrong.