"a thrilling brush with thought police!"

In the Spectator, Chadwick Moore writes,

I’d stumbled upon something I hadn’t realized existed: canceled chic. Being canceled — or at least having flirted with a transgression against militantly progressive opinion — gives a media person a certain edge, which leads to another phenomenon: cancel envy. Liberal journalists are so desperate to be canceled they’ve begun to form secret societies around the theme. At these meetings, they compete over who came closest to the ostracization abyss. Nobody wants to fall in, though.

I soon figured out that the other diners also retained cushy bylines in glossy publications despite having sinned. The dinner wasn’t a meeting of minds, more a support group for journalists who’d had a thrilling brush with the thought police.

Each seemed to have arrived at a new identity. They now called themselves ‘centrists’. They’d become Open Minded, Buddha-like, no longer ashamed to plop down a Sam Harris book on the coffee table before guests arrive or admit to having watched a Jordan Peterson video once.

Read the whole thing here.