The Inquisition has returned

Assange's speech is what stirs Inquisitors
who use medieval torments against him
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aSJCI-ik7Q

Liberals warn: anti-Trumpism goes too far

Deplore hysteria-driven damage to careers,
attacks by P.C. crowd on freedom of discourse

Among some 150 signers of an open letter warning against excesses of anti-Trump tactics are the well-known leftist Noam Chomsky; the feminist Gloria Steinem; the the CNN newsman Fareed Zakaria; the writers J.K. Rowling and Salman Rushdie; David Frum, an anti-Trump neocon; Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion; and Roger Cohen, a newsman at the New York Times, where the op-ed editor was ousted after running an opinion piece by a U.S. senator calling for the use of troops to put down the recent riots.

The letter is to appear in the October issue of the liberal magazine Harper's. Careers are being damaged by rash actions of superiors panicking over what is purportedly public outrage, the liberals point out. It is troubling, they say, that

institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

The letter was released by the liberal magazine Harper's:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200707232554/https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

Also,

"The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. 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."

Also,

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

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