Is it? Because I feel like I've been seeing this "turn our backs" attitude for at least 10 years, and by the article's own admission, it doesn't seem to have affected any of the "bad" people mentioned in the article in anyway.
Perhaps a change of tack is in order.
But keep going, like you say we're not living in the neo-liberal Obama-era anymore. Ten years ago it was a mighty struggle to convince people of how corrosive your ideology was. Keep annoying everyone, keep pushing everyone who doesn't fully comply with your ideology away.
Ok. Here's the line.
Leftie types have played fast and loose with language, rules, behavior and decency. All in the name of role playing the empathetic enlightened intellectual who would never commit the egregious sins of the past.
In doing so, they've been racist against whites, sexist against men, homophobic towards LGBs, fascist against COVID skeptics, naive regarding intellectual frauds, apologetic about criminals, and pliant towards manipulative bullies.
While this was going on, left wing activists and organizations have installed themselves as the defacto moral authority and channeled enormous amounts of other people's money to their comfortable faux rebellion.
Now enough people are wise to that that this will not work anymore. The magic words have no power. Their reputations are sinking. The cry-bullying is despised. And the funding is drying up.
The absolute worst part is that they still can't for the life of them tell you what their opponents actually believe, even if you held a gun to their head. Because they're mediocrities and lightweights parroting ideas, as narrow-minded as the caricature they have of others.
Bye.
A lot has changed over the past decade, and corporate social media now blatantly allows awful, harmful takes in a way that you could only get away with on truth.social or Gab or whatever the fuck years ago. You do not need a tiny, independent platform to say whatever you want, now. A vaccine skeptic is the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. You are no longer anti-authority when the authority agrees with you. You are no longer the little guy fighting in counterculture against the big man in power. You're all on the same team, now.
On January 7th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg posted a five-minute video called "More Speech and Fewer Mistakes." In it, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the US, replacing it with X-style Community Notes, and framed the whole shift as a return to free expression after what Zuckerberg called a "cultural tipping point" brought on by the 2024 election. In the same breath, Meta rewrote its Hateful Conduct policy to expressly permit describing LGBTQ+ people as "mentally ill" or "abnormal" and calling for their exclusion from professions and public life, loosened its rules around immigration status, and swapped proactive enforcement for waiting on user reports. Days later, the company donated a million dollars to the incoming president's inauguration, added a Trump ally to its board, and handed its global policy shop to a Republican former Bush staffer.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate spent six months on either side of the change combing through eight million Facebook comments aimed at elected officials, and found abusive comments tripled, from 24,000 to 78,000, with violent threats and hate quadrupling and harassment doubling. The ADL tracked the Facebook pages of Jewish members of Congress and found toxic comments jumped more than thirteenfold after February 4, 2025. GLAAD, UltraViolet, and All Out surveyed over 7,000 people across 86 countries and found 92 percent worried about the rise in harmful content, and 77 percent now feeling less safe simply existing openly on Meta's platforms. Even Meta's own first integrity report after the change admitted that violent and graphic content, plus bullying and harassment, both ticked upward.