In his new book Panic Attack, he writes,

it does seem like the left proceeded from Marxist assumptions about the oppressive nature of capitalism, swallowed Marcusian ideas concerning the power of language to thwart social change, embraced the postmodernist approach to eschewing the Enlightenment in favor of radical subjectivity, and let intersectionality endlessly expand the circle of grievances. Sprinkle in a new cultural understanding of safety as requiring emotional protection, and the portrait of a suddenly speech-critical left is complete.

I find it implausible that today’s youth came to scorn free speech by discovering Marx or Marcuse. My current rule of thumb is that whenever I observe young people with an outlook that seems alien to me, I presume a technological cause. Think of society evolving into Homo Appiens.

Remember last month, when I gave an impassioned plea for free speech and college students pushed back? I would describe the dialogue as me saying “We need free speech!” and them saying “But there are bad people saying bad things!” and repeating those exclamations over and over, talking past one another.

I’ve been thinking about why it might be that young people are more upset than I am about bad people saying bad things. Think back to the Nazis marching through Skokie in 1977. After one day of marching, those Nazis were never heard from again. Back in those days, bad people saying bad things were invisible 99 percent of the time.

But with today’s technology, Homo Appiens is constantly aware of the presence of bad people saying bad things. Young people know that there are alt-right racists and Antifa goons and Muslim extremists. And if they try to ignore extremists, their “friends” in social media and the mainstream media remind them, in part because commentary gets more attention by exaggerating threats than by downplaying them. As a result, young people feel something tugging at them to do something about bad people saying bad things.

At the moment, Homo Appiens seems to be adapting to the pervasive awareness of bad people saying bad things by heading toward censorship. I don’t think that is the most constructive way to adapt, but I can see why the problem differs from what we experienced back in the free-speech heyday.

Overall, I would describe Soave’s book as a painful must-read, certain to make my list of top non-fiction books of the year. I will be recommending it often.