1. As a shameless pragmatist who just wants to live in a world where people aren't treated like shit, we have to remove the shrines of racism in the South. I also get that there are excesses to addressing historic inequities & particularly mourn them bc of how they can

2. be manipulated by those who wish to harm or hold down others (in other words, exact great damage on the very cause the people who conduct the excesses claim they want to uplift). For ex, George Washington, who definitely enslaved people, but also won the Amer Rev & thus

3. established the whole f'in Republic should have his statues left alone & toppling them does more harm than good to the cause of actually addressing racial injustice although I'm sure it gives a great moral smugness high to the topplers. BC IT CAN BE EXPLOITED. So its stupid.

4. Lee, Jackson, Sherman, on top of being enslavers were traitors to their own country, which they tried to destroy. Jefferson & Madison literally created it. Its called nuance. But I digress. Illiberalism, whether it be from the Right (which is the type I have personally been

5. confronted by (lost my uni job over it, have been silenced in the classroom over it as I only ever taught at conservative schools) or the Left is BAD. But there is a difference between true illiberalism (trying to shut down debate, outlets, events for less popular or

6. controversial viewpoints) and state/public sponsorship of racism (public square monuments. No doubt about, the last few years, we have seen a rising tide of illiberalism on both sides of the spectrum at the extremes. But the issue then becomes the conflation of the extremes w

7. the mainstream issue/debates that frankly have merit and are long past deserving action. Unfortunately, the so-called cancel culture letter ends up adding even more to this framing causing a missed opp-i wish it could have been written strategically https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53330105

8. so as not to produce just one more "us vs them" "I'm right, you're wrong" moral smugness piece. What I care about is utility, particularly bc on the other side, the president is thinking of dragging Jackson & Lee monuments around him on the stump the rest of the cycle.

9. So as tempting as it is to spend one's days looking inward- whether that be from the moderate side or the left-side to the middle- once again, if you are reading this, I really, really urge you to instead focus on the big picture, bc that picture is illiberal as f.

10. One more thought on this topic- poor @davidshor who was ousted unceremoniously from his job at @Catalist_US for the cardinal sin of posting a research article on how race riots impacted vote patterns in the 1960s, will be on an ep of @ElectionWsphr on voter targeting. Prob. a

11. a good time to remind people that ultimately, people that don't deserve to be cancelled can't be canceled if the other people around them refuse to participate in it.