In my community college days, I wrote a paper on censorship, using the then-relevant PMRC as a thematic center of gravity, so I think you’ll agree it’s fair to say that I’m somewhat of an academic expert on this topic. On that note, I have to disagree and suggest that Plexico is being seduced by rosy retrospection. Today’s priggish, progressive do-gooders will look just as ridiculous in hindsight as Tipper Gore and friends do today, and they already seem very close to achieving self-parody in the eyes of the mainstream. Here we have the latest example of someone finally getting brave enough to say what too many people have only dared to whisper about for so long: today’s social justice fanatics are setting themselves up for an inevitable reactionary backlash, and they’re either too stupid or too devout to adjust their tactics accordingly.

I’ve long been resigned to that happening. At this point, I’m just trying to look at the bright side: a reinvigorated right wing will make a much more stimulating opponent. I mean, I would like to criticize this piece, or at least make fun of it. But no matter how hard I tried to extract something like a tangible point for that purpose, I couldn’t find one. It’s as if she just wolfed down a bunch of half-baked intersectional feminist platitudes and quickly yurked them back up onto the page in an undigested lump. By the end, when she’s rambling like a drunken Jacobin about eliminating the inequality inherent in the commercial concert space and reimagining the power dynamics that privilege male musicians on stage, you’re almost tiptoeing away in embarrassment to allow her to preserve some dignity. These people were never rigorous thinkers to begin with, and the heavily-policed echo chamber of social media has apparently made them soft and flabby. A useful enemy should be like an intellectual whetstone. The edge of your thoughts is honed by engaging with them. This, though, is like trying to sharpen one’s wits against a blob of jelly.