Absurd to get all panicked about this.

1) Social media didn't exist in 1950. "Speak your mind" meant something very different then. https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1289333770370203650

2) The article is clear that people don't necessarily fear government censorship, but social criticism. We're not talking about creeping totalitarianism here.

3) Yascha is using this as a cudgel to criticize people to his left, but this survey says there isn't a partisan valence to self-censorship.

People with strong views on climate change are just as likely to self-censor as those with strong views on, say, lower taxes

4) It's not clear to me that "self-censorship" is itself a problem. It depends entirely on which views are being withheld.

Did people who supported the Vietnam War refrain from voicing those views in 1970? Probably! I'm not sure why I should care about that as a principle.

5) This finding is honestly pretty interesting! It's worth taking seriously as a phenomenon. Does it have to do with falling trust generally? Changing social structures? There's actually a lot of fascinating threads to pull here.

6) But casting this as some sort of confirmation of "cancel culture" is deranged. This is an extremely broad phenomenon that has almost nothing to do with the specific claim — "the left" is becoming too censorious — advanced by Mounk and others.

7) Plus, it's always worth noting that random citizens being afraid to express their political views and public figures (like James Bennett and Andrew Sullivan) being subject to widespread criticism are in fact completely different phenomena.

8) LMAOOOO so it turns out the 1954 survey also found that huge percentages of Americans thought that atheists should lose their jobs for their religious views.

https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8464&context=ylj

9) This is the core of Mounk's argument and it's bullshit.

Center-left journalists reinforcing Trump's *exact messaging* on cancel culture benefits the far right a lot more than pushing back too harshly on right-wing ideas.

10) And here I was wondering why the Persuasion article doesn't include a link to the study! https://twitter.com/zach_fla/status/1289619763711184897