A man being burned at the stake.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

Are critics of progressive "woke" trends in American cultural institutions sometimes guilty of exaggerating the threat they pose to freedom in the United States? Absolutely. And so Michelle Goldberg has a point in her latest column in The New York Times. A writer getting fired for a politically incorrect tweet or a public lecture being canceled because the speaker once expressed views that trigger a faction of college students isn't a re-enactment of China's Cultural Revolution or the advent of "soft totalitarianism" in the 21st-century United States.

But neither are such reactions reducible, as Goldberg claims, to mid-career writers feeling grumpy about "new social mores that demand outsized sensitivity to causing harm" and the "shame of turning into the sort of old person repelled by the sensibilities of the young."

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.