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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure I buy that argument. When I was a kid I remember we had the PMRC, panic over violence in video games, and endless debates over a different flavour of “political correctness”. They purveyors of moral panic has a different cast today (on both sides of the political spectrum), but I don’t really buy into this “everything is worse than it used to be” idea. I guess government encroachment on civil liberties tends to only head in one direction, but I’m not sure that’s the topic of the book?

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The argument put forward in the book is that the extreme polarisation is in fact quite new, and that it has lead to a situation where extreme, anti-liberal ideologies, has been given more room to act within their respective communities and been given power to punish non-believers into submission and suppress free speech. Creating a form of vicious spiral.

A quote from the page I was just reading:

> “When Speech First brought a lawsuit against Michigan, alleging that their bias response teams were unconstitutional and “flagrantly violate the First Amendment,” the court agreed, ruling against the school. As of 2022, 456 U.S. colleges⬥ have bias response teams (almost double the 2017 total of 232),49 and very few have been subject to investigations like the one at Michigan.”

Excerpt From What's Our Problem? Tim Urban https://books.apple.com/se/book/whats-our-problem/id64456422... This material may be protected by copyright.

I think the biggest change is that a lot of people just came out of an era where there was a national media narrative that was highly agreed upon and very New England, classically "liberal". Except around sex and drugs of course.

This narrative dominated TV, print and to a lesser extent radio. It really created the notion in people's heads that this narrow band was really what people thought about. What people are reacting to in large part is the newly visible presence of alternative perspectives. They were always there. They were just strategically locked out by people who decided what was "fringe". Basically anything that didn't support institutions was ignored or disparaged.

Waco and Cuba are two prime examples. Waco was written off in the national media because the people in the compound were so "weird". And for years the national media has underwritten the American foreign policy blob's almost neurotic fixation with Cuba.

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