J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky among dozens to call for end to ‘cancel culture’

More than 100 writers and scholars — including Noam Chomsky, J.K. Rowling and Malcolm Gladwell — have signed a public letter decrying cancel culture and the rising “intolerance of opposing views.” 

Published in Harper’s Magazine on Tuesday, the letter argued that the recent “needed reckoning” on racial and social justice has also “intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments” that tend to stifle the norms of public debate and tolerating differences. 

“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter states. 

It warns that censorship, while something “we have come to expect this on the radical right,” is also spreading more widely on the left through “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.” 

“The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.”

GRTWT.

HERE is the complete letter, with signatures.