This month of July has been awash in thoughtcrime. Transgender activists condemned actress Scarlett Johansson for the social crime of planning to play a transgendered “man” in a movie project. Ms. Johansson was the driving force behind the movie; she was the producer, a financial backer, and the lead actress. After a brief interlude, Ms. Johansson offered an abject apology and announced her exit from the project.
This very month we have discovered that it is unwise for a prominent leftist to praise Ben Shapiro. When leftist actor Mark Duplass praised Ben Shapiro for being a genuine person with good intentions. After the ritualistic shame storm that followed, Mr. Duplass, too, offered an abject apology to the social media mob.
One remarkable fact about shaming mobs, is that they are tiny. A twitter shaming mob consists at most of a few thousand people. The Social Justice Warriors that create so much trouble on campuses, do so by fielding at most a few hundred activists, and often the ‘mob’ consist of fewer than a hundred activists. How can they be so effective? The key to their success is fanaticism.
Fanatics win by cowering their opponents, or worse. A non-fanatical human being doesn’t need the hassle of fighting the mob; caving-in seems, and often is, the safer option. Corporations are even worse, because nothing is as cowardly as for-profit corporation—they often cave-in at the first hint of conflict, trying to wish the problem away. The asymmetry between the fanatics’ willingness to break norms to get their way, and their targets’ unwillingness to fight back, gives fanatics an enormous advantage, one they have learned to exploit.
A sufficiently large mob of fanatics may bend a whole society to its will—witness Saudi Arabia, or China during the Cultural Revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, roaming mobs of teenagers terrorized urban and cultural elites, and paralyzed the most populous country on Earth.
The same dynamic of a fanatical minority terrorizing the majority into silence occurs in Western republics, and the fanatics don’t need to use much violence. Using the “trans” movement as an example, consider how much they have accomplished, that now it is consider impolite to call a deluded man in drag a “he”. The trans fanatics used tactics such as organized shaming (see the Scarlett Johansson example), occasional violence or threat of violence, and underhanded tactics such as accusing a researcher of improper sexual conduct with a study subject. The vast majority of people who would oppose such a madness decide that the hassle is not worth it, while the fanatics are willing to fight the battle until the end of time. And so the fanatics win.
