One of my favorite lines from something I wrote a few years back is that to a Democrat, Diversity is a room full of people who look different but think the same. That it is acceptable to be colorblind if everyone agrees with you on everything, without exception.
A target that moves quickly and without any congruity.
Feminists are the foundation of women’s rights until they object to women with penises taking things away from women who weren’t born with one. People of color get special consideration unless they refuse to support every bullet point of Lefty Party dogma. And the media’s job is to translate that shifting “thing” into the approved words and phrases permitted in what passes for debate.
If you wanted to see this managed from the top down, you could revisit the Twitter files, but any day during the past few years in which the topic was COVID, masks, or “vaccines” will work (and yes, they are all related). Government force defining the information allowed for debate and how one was to respond if there were leaks in the bilge tank.
The Editors at Tablet Mag had some thoughts about it and how it has transformed them as a website.
As journalists, the increasingly strident calls for uniformity of opinion and perception struck us, from the very beginning, as dangerous and wrong. We believe in empirical investigation and analysis and in subjective personal observation and experience, not in party-line obedience to an instant consensus being formed and managed God knows how or where.
We’ve never been accused of Journalism, though that depends on your definition of what that is and whether we’ve committed some without trying. We are not reported, though we do report, so perhaps there’s a bridge not too far that connects them, and we’re standing on it with flashlights pointing out how important it is to let people who disagree work their ideas out with words.
Polite ones, if that can be managed. The foundation of which is this. We need to protect the forum, the agora, as Kensley reminded us not too long ago. To, with all our means, resist uniformity of opinion and perception on every side, not just theirs.
That’s not to say I don’t enjoy the affirmation of agreement from like-minded readers, but better still is the nut cracked to deliver nuance outside the stated premise. Yeah, that’s true, but! Or, sure, but what if this or that?
It is our mission, and I think we’ve succeeded, to provide something no one else in New Hampshire can. An information portal that embraces dissent for the sake of protecting free speech. A rare thing, in decline across the world and here at home. Something that the purveyors of Uniformity of Opinion and Perception are hell-bent on destroying, not so much because they disagree but because you can’t have a proper tyranny without that.
