Kulturkampf

[Alpacx]

Much about what Klein offers here is objectionable: the appeal to debate as “persuasion,” which confuses the mere appearance of giving and responding to reasons with the substance of good-faith rational inquiry; the silence about the fact that the watchlist Kirk spearheaded generated death threats, along with other evidence that would complicate the narrative that Kirk did politics the “right way”; the breathtaking carelessness or outright dishonesty in deflecting objections to the specific accuracy of this portrayal of Kirk with claims about the general appropriateness of political violence.

If you think wholeness and cancel culture is bad you're a bigot (or a sophisticated crypto bigot)

The norms of political correctness thus set basic ground rules for social life—at least, in politically mixed company. These norms lorded over a motley moral crew. The vocal opponents of PC culture included out-and-out bigots, of course, but also slightly more sophisticated ones who exploited the plausible deniability of abstraction in their appeals for the right to express—and the genuine or performed credulousness of helpful partners like Klein—to help clear social space for the overt stuff.

And then there's this...

The point is that the possibility of overreach is a price worth paying exactly because shame serves as a robustly liberal alternative to the political violence that Klein and company rightly abhor. Most of the alternatives involve either subjugation, combat, or both. Put another way: designating disrespect and denigration as beyond the pale, as grounds for exclusion from polite company, is “turning the temperature down.” Klein and others are helping to turn it up.

 
A right-wing man was shot and killed by a left-wing crackpot, after the left whipped its followers into a frenzy about impending, fascism (which the author adds to) and Kirk being "full of hate", a shooting many on the left outright celebrated and gravedsnced, and you're telling me milquetoast Ezra Klein is the one turning the temperature up?