Last One Today, I Promise

From Tyson Zahner 

 

"The most dangerous thing happening in our culture over the past decade is not any single political controversy.

It's the fact that millions of people are being coerced into staying quiet… not because they're wrong, but because the cost of asking an honest question has become too high.

For example, in just the past month alone, I've been told by people who disagree with me:

* ‘She should delete you as a friend’

* ‘Maybe you were raised by racists’

* ‘The ONLY acceptable response [to the video Trump shared] is total condemnation. Anything else means you’re a white nationalist.’

* ‘Tick tock. Say [that she was murdered by ICE]. Until you do, you're simply buying into morally pathetic ideology that [Renee Good] should have been killed for her actions.’

* ‘[Tyson is] okay with a human being killed by an ice agent for the offenses listed above.’

My crime? Adding factually accurate context to false narratives.

Not once did anyone identify a single thing I said that was false.

(and by the way, that last quote was said to me after I had explicitly written multiple times that I didn't know whether the shooting was justified. It didn't matter. The goal wasn't to understand my position. It was to assign me one)

At best, these are tactics used by people who simply cannot defend their position with facts and logic, so they resort to personal attacks, emotional manipulation, and character assassination instead.

At worst, they are the early stages of something far more dangerous…

These tactics have eerie parallels to the struggle sessions out of communist China.

In a Maoist struggle session, the point was never to arrive at truth. The point was to extract public confession and total submission.

The accused wasn't allowed to defend themselves, provide context, or ask questions. Any attempt to do so was treated as further evidence of guilt. The only acceptable response was full, unconditional agreement with the accusation.

The “Tick tock” comment, for example, was someone literally writing my confession for me and demanding that I sign it.

And by the way, if you want to see what a struggle session looks like, watch the opening scene of the Netflix show, “3 Body Problem”. A physics professor is publicly beaten to death by his own students for refusing to conform. His wife is forced to denounce him to survive. The crowd cheers.

Obviously I’m not saying this is exactly the same. The stakes are certainly different. But even the show's creator David Benioff acknowledged that while it wasn't intended as commentary on cancel culture, the similarities are "hard to ignore.”

And if your first instinct reading this is to say ‘oh please, you’re not being beaten to death in communist China’… you’re right.

I just said the stakes are different. But dismissing the comparison entirely is exactly how these tactics take root.

This is the logic and behavior of ideological conformity. The conclusion has already been reached. Your only role is to affirm it. Asking questions is evidence of guilt. Providing context is a ‘debate tactic.' Any deviation is treated as evidence that you need to be corrected, shamed, or excluded.

And the really insidious part is that it wraps itself in the language of justice and compassion, which makes it almost impossible to push back on without being framed as opposing justice and compassion themselves.

So beware of anyone who tells you there is only one acceptable response to any controversy, and that anything else makes you a bad person.

It’s a loyalty test.

And this should concern you regardless of your politics, because this is not how truth-seeking or justice works.

Remember, every society that has lost its freedom didn't lose it all at once. It started with something simple: people became afraid to speak out or ask questions. Not because the questions were wrong. But because asking them carried a social cost most people weren't willing to pay."