I saw this going viral Social Justice Advocates Don’t Get to Just Exempt Themselves From Politics
But they’re not going to step back. The fact that you might have been able to enforce such a condition in your seminar on the humanities at Columbia does not mean that this is a principle that will survive in the scrum of American politics. Indeed, the only white men you’ll shut up are the ones who are most sensitive to your perspective, which seems strategically perverse to me. But you hear that shit absolutely all the time, that according to social justice, you don’t have the right to speak in this instance, so shut up. I’m sorry to inform you that the people who reject social justice also reject that little childish dictate and all the other bizarre rules that people invented on Tumblr and then expected to simply enforce on the rest of the world. See, you can’t dictate the rules of the fight to the people you’re fighting with, because in order to do so you first have to win the fight. That’s politics, baby.
It seems like Freddie wildly misdiagnoses the problem. He also fails to see the obvious counterexamples; for example, Obama’s Supreme Court appointments. But the woke/SJ-advocates do not need politics when they have control of academia, and more importantly, almost the entirely of the private sector, a good sized chunk of the judiciary, and the federal agencies. Politicians cannot do that much anyway. They are always hamstrung and compromising. The private sector is much faster, uncompromising, and more efficient than government. Courts and judges have the power to order the arrest of dissidents. Being able to deny conservatives’ access to social media platforms or payment processing, is a greater imposition of power than almost any political office.
Same for controlling the school curriculum and acting as intellectual gatekeepers. Social justice activists know they can set the terms of discourse, and then have the discretion to censor anyone or anything or that deviates from it. There are popular people who are allowed to push the boundaries, but they [the left] know they cannot censor everyone or else they lose the pretense of being objective. Twitter knows that if they got rid of too many conservatives it would hurt their engagement and ad metrics. The left does not really care all that much if you’re anti BLM, if you oppose trans women competing against cis women in sports, or think preferred pronouns are stupid. You can still get banned for those things, but you have a lot of leeway. Those are small stakes compared to the 2020 election, in which can oppose the result but are not allowed to dispute its fairness or legitimacy, or debating the efficacy and safety of vaccines, or discussing the veracity of a certain historical event a long time ago. For example, several months ago Google shut down Vox Day’s blogger blog (voxday.blogspot.com), not for any of the stuff he has written about SJWs or Q-anon, but for his posts about vaccines.
It’s also possible Freddie is referring to social democrats like Bernie Sanders, not the far-left/woke-left. But it’s not like the mainstream-right is having big wins either. Neither side is able to achieve important legislative wins, so it’s not like this problem is unique to the left.
So, yes, maybe they don’t get to exempt themselves from politics, but they don’t need politics anyway.