Jack Fencl: It’s not cancel culture (the external threat) that is the greatest threat to liberalism, or authoritarianism (the other external threat), but the internal threat of “self-cancel culture.” This self-cancelling is cultivated by the shaming of the (merely) moderately woke, rather than the radically woke:

It is the conversations that will never be had, the research that will never be done and the ideas that will never rise to the top that should worry us most. The primary concern about a culture of self-cancellation is not that people will have great ideas, yet feel afraid to share them, but that people won’t have brilliant ideas in the first place because such a culture doesn’t appreciate the premise—and thus the process—of liberal science. This is especially pernicious, because, under moderate wokeness, there is no active or identifiable attempt to constrict the flow of debate (by contrast with the obvious censorship favoured by outright left-wing wokeness and far-right authoritarianism). Moderate wokeness only attempts to make debate responsible, which inevitably results in less debate.