I would like to make a note about my recent post, here. Some have expressed concern about it. The purpose was to satirize leftists who seem to express apparently unending personal hatred for Elon Musk, and to satirize many establishment leftists in general. It absolutely does come a personal place. After facing serious professional consequences for my own speech, I am very upset at the calls to “cancel” Elon and paint him as an “enemy of democracy” for expressing his position in support of the protesters in the UK. (Some, even at my own institution, called me a “threat to public safety,” which I believe is the opposite of true, misses the points that I was trying to make, i.e., that public health leaders must not do or say things that destroy the public’s trust if public health, which I ardently care about, is to function properly, and is in my opinion completely deranged.)
Although rioting and hurting other people is wrong, it is easy to understand why many in the UK are upset: there is a flood of low-skilled immigrants coming from entirely different cultural and political backgrounds as those who are currently living in the UK; nearly a million such immigrants arrive in the UK every year. With the demographic transition that will subsequently take place will come a total transformation of UK’s politics and culture. To some extent, it already has. If you believe that the native UK’s politics and culture are worth preserving, then it is not difficult to understand why many may perceive the massive levels of low-skilled immigration from societies that are hostile to many Western values as a serious existential threat to the integrity of what the UK stands for for many people. It is legitimate to voice concerns about such a threat. As it is now, such concerns are denounced as immoral, racist, Islamophobic, etc. by UK’s establishment elite. To me, this is appalling behavior by that country’s leadership. It reminds me of how many in this country and others are demonized when they voice legitimate political opposition to certain policies in the very recent past. An end should be put to this.
Every year, thousands of UK citizens (yes thousands!) are arrested and imprisoned for expressing anti-immigration views on social media. That strikes me as being so incredibly at odds with the ideals of Western civilization, especially in the UK. While the ideals of multiculturalism are just as central to Western culture too—going back to the very founding of Western culture and thought in ancient Greece, who drew heavily from the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and others—sometimes these ideals can come into conflict with other ideals, especially when the ideal of multiculturalism becomes radicalized to such an extent that it begins to swallow a culture’s other ideals. The proof is in the pudding with what can only be called mass arrests of UK’s immigration critics, including very ordinary, sometimes even elderly people who are arrested just for making posts on Facebook. This subordination of all values to one single value is the very definition of fundamentalism. This has no place in a modern, civilized society. I will repeat: an end should be put to this.
To then malign someone and suggest that they be shut down for expressing political views that are legitimate and important to take into account for us to make incredibly important policy decisions going forward—even if we might disagree with those views—strikes me as incredibly wrong. Indeed, this behavior is evil. Again, I don’t think that this is the way a civilized Western society should address dissent—mine or anyone else’s.
But it was not just upsetting to me, it was ridiculous. What kinds of ridiculous views and positions drive this kind of deranged cancel culture drivel and behavior from the establishment left, in the UK and virtually everywhere else in the left? So I satirized these views, painting them as ridiculous (perhaps in an exaggerated way) as I saw them. As a moderate and diehard (classical) liberal myself, coming as I do from a background on the far political left, I was somewhat well-positioned to satirize them, and I believe that these intolerant views deserve nothing but ridicule.
I hope to write more satirical pieces like this in the future, because it was popular and very fun to write. I will do this, of course, until they come for me and try to cancel me again for being “dangerous”—”dangerous” of course, because I call them dangerous!
In conclusion, long live Kamala Harris. Long live Democracy. Die Space Ship Electric Car Man.
I thought your satire was quite creative and rightly got readers to consider the viewpoints exuded and the 'thinking' process employed by those who have been indoctrinated over the past decade by globalist-controlled mainstream media and, hence, have demonstrated the tribalistic, irrational, short-sighted and dehumanizing mindset of the unwittingly subjugated.
I think you are learning that online spaces makes normal people functionally autistic. Speech is a left-brain activity and right brained inputs are unavailable or blunted. As people are reading the information alone instead of aloud in the company of others they miss the cues of deeper meaning that are amplified by other people's reactions and interpretations. We are getting dumb, and we now are happy with ourselves if we get a Tim Walz reference about JD Vance's couch.