RUTHFULLY YOURS

A few weeks before the 2016 election, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a thunderous warning: “A Trump presidency represents a threat to press freedom unknown in modern history.”

“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which some have noted sounds like the working title for an inferior James Bond movie, became the daily front-page leitmotif of a major newspaper, its reporters bravely committed to holding aloft the flickering lamp of freedom amid the gathering gloom of tyranny.

Four years on, it’s clear the warnings were justified. Consider the state of free speech in Mr. Trump’s America. Newspaper editors are forced to quit because of pieces they’ve run. Academics are removed from positions for daring to dissent from the dominant orthodoxy. Corporate executives have been fired for opinions written three decades ago that now fall outside the lines of acceptable public discourse.

In classrooms, newsrooms and boardrooms across the country, you can almost hear the silence as people internally check what they say in the knowledge that if they cross the line they’ll be publicly denounced and very likely terminated.

The darkness has indeed claimed democracy.

But wait. It’s not Mr. Trump who’s silenced them. Can you name a single person in the media who has suffered materially for saying hostile things about the president in the past four years? In fact, there’s no surer way to advance your career in entertainment, news, sports, literature and even business circles than to issue some well-rehearsed bromide on social media about the monster in the White House.

Yes, the president characteristically reaches for the extreme when he calls journalists “the enemy of the people.” But we’ve seen where the real threat to freedom lies: a climate of ideological intolerance in our nation’s cultural institutions that suffocates any attempt to question it.

Last week a few dozen writers of a liberal persuasion gained some attention when they finally mustered the nerve to take a position against “cancel culture.” They were among some 150 signatories of “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” published by Harper’s magazine.

It was nice to welcome these belated converts to the cause of free speech, though as others have noted only a handful of them spoke up when the mob was attempting to cancel conservative thinkers. Now that the vigilantes of ideological purity have come for them or their friends, the soft liberals have rediscovered the inviolable virtue of free speech.

But even this late, limp, self-serving effort at defending (some) free speech was met with predictable vehemence from the intendants of the new authority.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose career hasn’t exactly been crushed under the wheels of Trumpian repression, tweeted: “Odds are you’re not actually cancelled, you’re just being challenged, held accountable, or unliked.” Tell that to the people who’ve lost their jobs in the past few weeks alone.

Others say: We’ve always accepted some limits on speech. The new rules just expand some of the exceptions all agree are needed.

But listen carefully to the words used by the speech police. When New York Times reporters mobilized to get an editor fired, they claimed the offending op-ed he published put their lives “in danger.”

This was no mere difference of opinion. The offending speech was supposedly a direct physical threat to those offended. Echoing the language used on campus over many years, the idea is that the speech they oppose isn’t simply flawed, it constitutes violence. This language is carefully chosen to stifle all criticism.

You don’t argue with people whose speech would harm you physically. You don’t tell them to express their views somewhere else. You have to shut them up.

The modern argot of the left goes way beyond the current heated issue of race. If you’re pro-life, you’re a threat to women’s health. If you favor reducing the size of government, you’re taking away vital services for people and therefore, actually, killing them.

Remember, all this is happening when Republicans—notionally at least—control 1½ of the federal government’s political branches. Imagine what happens when Democrats get control. Will they resist demands from the canceling allies in their ranks to carry these new rules from campus and corporation to their logical endpoint, legislation and executive authority? Will democracy, real democracy, where people can still find a place to express dissent, survive the darkness that will fall then?