“The issue is not free speech,” says Columbia University professor John McWhorter, “because no society could ever have perfectly free speech; there are certain things we’re not going to say because of etiquette.” But “a certain contingency of people are just making the domain of things that we can’t say, or that we can only talk about in extremely prescribed ways, so large that it’s beginning to choke out what most societies will consider any kind of sensible or thriving artistic moral or intellectual culture…and the way they exert their power is through fear. We’re having this truly frightening kind of cultural development where a large number of people do as they are told because they are afraid…that’s not the way change is supposed to happen.”