Rowling, Rushdie and Atwood rally against ‘cancel culture’: 150 authors and academics sign open letter denouncing ‘public shaming’ and ‘intolerance’

The Harry Potter author has joined Sir Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and other prominent individuals from the arts in signing a letter warning open debate is being weakened in favour of ‘ideological conformity’.

The 150 signatories say recent protests for racial and social justice are a ‘needed reckoning’ but fear freedom of speech is becoming ‘more constricted’ every day. The letter, published in Harper’s Magazine, comes amid a debate over so-called cancel culture, where public figures are boycotted and shamed for perceived offensive acts.

It states: ‘The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: An intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.’

from Mail+

LOOKS GIVE IN EVERY DEPARTMENT

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/david-simon-interview-the-wire-creator-on-turning-philip-roths-novel-about-a-fascist-becoming-president-into-a-devastating-tv-series-k6f30tgnc

‘It can’t happen here’: the horrifying power of The Plot Against America https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/mar/30/the-plot-against-america-philip-roth-tv-hbo?CMP=share_btn_tw

Sinclair Lewis laid claim to It Can’t Happen Here back in 1935 with a novel that imagined a populist demagogue whipping the United States into a fascist dystopia, complete with internment camps for dissidents and paramilitary goon squads.

 The Trump parallels come early and often, and while the writing occasionally prints its subtext in font a couple of sizes too large, it’s all in order to make the point that much more forcefully.

“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas” almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.”

― Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here