The title of the YouTube clip is from the little sign that this lone man held up during a protest in London. Behold Western Civilisation in 2017.

You absolutely need to watch this exercise in mob mentality: and it’s only a little longer than Two Minutes of Hate.

You can read the background to this event from an article the guy wrote himself on Medium.com. He’s an artist and the “Anti-Fascist” protests were around an art gallery, as described in this report from the Hackney Gazette.

UPDATE 2021: It appears that the YouTube video above is gone because it belongs to an account that is now terminated. I’ll bet it has. Fortunately there is Bitchute, for now.

UPDATE 2023: Another YouTube channel now has it – for the moment – and I’ve left the Bitchute one up as well even though it seems to stall.

And of course since then things have only got worse.

  • The recent firing of a New York Times editor, James Bennet, at the behest of his staff. They were angered by him allowing a Republican Senator, Tom Cotton, to write an OpEd advocating sending in Federal troops to deal with the riots.
  • The departure of Bari Weiss from the NYT. Her resignation letter made it clear that that she had been constantly bullied at the publication for her “centrist” political beliefs and that Twitter had become the paper’s “ultimate editor.”
  • David Shor was fired from Civis Analytics because he re-tweeted a study by a Princeton professor, Omar Wasow, showing that the 1968 riots had suppressed the Democrat vote in that election in key areas, allowing Nixon to win. This fact is unacceptable to BLM in the current environment so out went Shor to the cries of “racism” and in spite of a the now standard grovelling apology.
  • Journalist Lee Fang, quite Left on economic matters, interviewed some BLM protestors, one of whom, a young Black supporter, said that he wished BLM would also pay attention to Black-on-Black violence. As with Shor, a grovelling apology followed the mass attack of the Twitter mob, but Fang at least kept his job.

The fact that all of these people are Leftists formerly in good standing with the US Liberal community and even with most Progressives counted for nothing in the end. Sullivan was one of the most prominent advocates of gay marriage for years; Shor had worked for Obama’s reelection campaign. The author of that piece on Shor, Jonathan Chait, has himself landed in a spot of bother about free speech with the Woke crowd back in 2015, when it was still being referred to as Political Correctness.

That article was dismissed as describing nothing more than the usual university nonsense of past decades and Chait himself as an out-of-touch Old Liberal. He described similar incidents from the early 1990’s where feminist videographer Carol Jacobsen’s exhibition about sex workers ran head on into feminist law professor Catharine MacKinnon’s critique of the 1st Amendment as a tool of male privilege. But as he noted about the 2015 incident:

This was the same inversion of victim and victimizer at work last December. In both cases, the threat was deemed not the angry mobs out to crush opposing ideas, but the ideas themselves. The theory animating both attacks turns out to be a durable one, with deep roots in the political left.

Like Noonan, Chait probably did not expect this to get worse or escape the campus, but his latest article shows that’s the case, in that he hedges a lot. As Reason described it:

Chait, while standing up for traditional “marketplace of ideas” liberalism as essential to democracy, spends an extraordinary amount of effort trying to make the entirely unreasonable gross intolerance of budding Torquemadas sound reasonable, likely because he too fears “cancellation.”…

Chait, while appalled at the mobbing of Fang, feels the need to discuss in excruciating detail (including, ironically, some old-fashioned whitesplainin’ of the interviewee’s lack of wokeness) why it’s not unreasonable for people to so strongly object the rather anodyne sentiment expressed by the interview subject. One assumes this is insurance against being Twitter-mobbed like Fang.

Sullivan has effectively re-started his old blog, The Dish, with The Weekly Dish, which will allow him to write freely. Perhaps blogs will make a comeback. But before he did so he wrote one last article for New York Magazine, and its title echos that of the young London man of 2017, Is There Still Room for Debate? Sullivan thinks so but his own experience and that of others makes me doubtful that reason can win here against these thugs. He makes reference to an essay by Václav Havel “The Power of the Powerless” (Nuts! I thought I’d created that over a decade ago with “Power is Powerlessness“), yet while saying that we’re far freer than Havel was under Communism he goes on to realistically describe a situation that’s bad and getting worse even without the state behind it:

The orthodoxy goes further than suppressing contrary arguments and shaming any human being who makes them. It insists, in fact, that anything counter to this view is itself a form of violence against the oppressed…

In this manic, Manichean world you’re not even given the space to say nothing. “White Silence = Violence” is a slogan chanted and displayed in every one of these marches…

We have co-workers eager to weaponize their ideology to purge the workforce. We have employers demanding our attendance at seminars and workshops to teach this ideology. We have journalists (of all people) poring through other writers’ work or records to get them in trouble, demoted, or fired. We have faculty members at colleges signing petitions to rid their departments of those few left not fully onboard. We have human-resources departments that have adopted this ideology whole and are imposing it as a condition for employment. And, critically, we have a Twitter mob to hound people into submission.

And how far behind can the State be once the likes of these mobs gain power in that area as they have in academia, sport, mass media and corporate HR departments? As Sullivan noted in 2018, We All Live On Campus Now.

And those left on those campuses are finally starting to worry that the tumbrels are heading their way. Recently a group of Lefty Luvvies, including famous ones like Gloria Steinem, Gary Kasparov and Noam Chomsky, penned a letter to Harpers Magazine, A Letter on Justice and Open Debate. But even in this case a number backed out when they found that author J. K. Rowling was a signee; she’s been hit by the Woke mob over her siding with feminists against certain “trans-rights”.

And like Chait the letter just had to try and cover its butt by taking the now standard line that of course the Right represent the greater threat.

While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

Retired law professor and blogger Ann Althouse took issue with that bullshit:

I’m irritated by the gratuitous shot at right-wingers. The censorship and cancel culture they are talking about is very much a thing of the left. Take some damned responsibility for the attack on freedom of speech that has been nurtured among elite thinkers for the last 40 years. I experienced it in academia — first hand — through my entire career as a law professor…

This isn’t something that is just beginning to grow on the left. It’s been going on for decades, and why haven’t you opposed it sooner? Is it just because it looks particularly ugly now and your political goals are threatened? Sorry, I am not experiencing this letter as courageous.

Althouse is quite the Liberal herself, including for some aspects of Trans Rights. A classic Baby Boomer 60’s Vietnam protestor she voted for Obama twice, Hillary Clinton and will likely vote for Biden this year even as she acknowledges his awful defects. But her history means she has no time for the other claim that this is getting bad now:

Not just now. For the last 40 years. Since before some of the signatories to this letter were born. Go back to the 1960s if you want to find left-wing radicals who loved free speech, and then figure out whether they loved it as a means to an end or whether they loved it for its own sake. What happened after the 60s, after they’d gained ground in academia and government, suggests that they loved it as a means to an end…

Off course. And she notes this latest whinge is the same as they openly state that:

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time….

Well we can’t have that now can we? We need to have free speech until their causes have achieved their objectives. Then they’ll be happy to screw free speech and open debate. They’re just upset that some of their younger brethren in the Woke brigades are getting ahead of them.