Victor Davis Hanson Nails Why the Leftist Thought Police Are Winning

He writes:

...The wish to silence, censor, and impede thought is just as strong a human emotion as the desire for free expression — especially when censorship is cloaked in rhetoric about fairness, equality, justice, and all the other euphemisms for not allowing the free promulgation of ideas. 

George Orwell devoted his later years to warning us that while the fascist method of destroying free expression was easily identified (albeit only with difficulty combatted), the leftwing totalitarian impulse to squelch unpopular speech was far harder to resist — couched as it was in sloganeering about the “people” and “social justice.” It is easy to object to the speech codes of a self-interested, corrupt dictator in sunglasses and epaulettes, but difficult to fight censorship that allegedly helps the poor, minorities, and the helpless.

Exactly. A reading of history as well as my own years of experience in the free speech trenches has taught me that totalitarianism that claims to be on the side of the angels and that dons the sheep's clothing of "human rights"/"social justice"/"tikkun olam" is easy to fight but exceedingly difficult to vanquish.

Add to that the fact that, as the poet wrote, "Human kind cannot bear very much reality" (hence the backlash against those, like Pamela Geller, who demand that we "get real" re the scriptural provenance of the jihad), and it is clear that we have our work cut out for us.