On the 'art of shunning' – and the risks that come with it
This year the Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid came, and I was reminded of a quotation of hers that I had shared on Twitter [now X] several summers ago. "It's really important to protect free speech," Kincaid said. "And it's really important to practice the art of shunning. They can say all the horrible things they want, and I never have to speak to them again."
That was during the feverish days of what some of us now refer to, in retrospect, as "The Great Awokening," or the era of left-wing ideological conformity, which began in earnest during the second term of the Obama administration, peaked in the summer of 2020, and seems to have definitively concluded in the aftermath of Hamas's assault on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the extraordinary right-wing backlash that has swept American academic, cultural and media institutions ever since.
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