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What has the American far left or center-left actually done that's as bad as, for example, the recent attempted insurrection or the stripping of rights from women and LGBT people perpetrated by the right?This line of reasoning would just fall into the same error of justifying oppressive actions by the American left "because they are aimed at a group that is even worse".
I consider the examples cited in the article to be very alarming, for example:
> Soon after that, a few colleagues and I attempted to pass the Chicago Statement—what I viewed as a very basic set of principles about the necessity of free speech on campus. My shock continued as students broke into a faculty meeting about the Chicago Statement screaming “free speech harms” and demanding that white male professors “sit down” and “confess to their privilege.”
This scene chillingly echoes the birth of previous oppressive tyrannies, in Nazi Germany, and Communist Russia and China. Its overt oppression and silencing of opposing views, its deliberate disruption and eradication of civil open debate, its ideological principled and fervent objection to civil liberties such as free speech, the identity politics (and motifs of divisive class/race warfare), the implied violence, the struggle-session public pressure on the sinful individuals to confess their sins...
The fact that the radical American left aligns itself with two of these past tyrannical regimes serves to increase this alarm.
But the worst of all concerns is that these aren't some shrill fringe radicals who are being ignored as such; no, this faction has become dominant to the point of controlling the policies of our academic, social, and cultural institutions.
The article describes leading academic institutions, publications, and even government institutions like the National Science Foundation and the NIH which are bowing to the radical leftist mob and its demand. All these key institutions are increasingly captured and controlled by this radical ideology, putting these oppressive, tyrannical radicals effectively in control of an increasing number of our important societal, cultural, and academic institutions.
(In a way that the small number of right-wing radicals who tried to storm the capitol are very much not; in fact, their magnification as an excuse to further promote oppression, tyranny, and institutional radicalism also evokes alarming echoes of the past.)