In the last decade or so, there’s been a lot of talk about the “marketplace of ideas.” A prominent example of this is former executive editor of the NYT editorial page James Bennet’s 2023 article titled “When the New York Times Lost its Way”.

Obviously I’m a bit late to rebut this particular piece, but the same line of reasoning comes up again and again: from the people who enabled Trump’s rise by constantly decrying “illiberal college campuses”¹, to the Democrats acting as, at best, useful idiots for the right-wing campaign to eradicate trans people, by fretting to the media about “purity tests” within the party. The through-line in all this is: “we need to be willing to listen to ideas that we disagree with.” And it seems like on its face, of course we do! After all, isn’t liberalism (in the traditional sense) about tolerance and coexistence?

As I’m looking to import all my reading into my personal website, I’m coming face-to-face with my prior representations of JK Rowling’s work, and so I want to talk about it a little bit.

I just have a blog that nobody reads, but I want to express something I think everyone with a platform should be saying right now¹:

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are unequivocally good things, and the campaign against these things (always shortened to “DEI” to divorce them from their actual meaning) is led by people who either publicly or privately harbor ugly feelings about their peers and neighbors; people who are unhappy about having to compete on a level playing field with people whose worth they consider less than their own.