Instead, the progressives — who occupy the commanding heights of media, entertainment, education, and much of corporate America — have settled on a strategy of opt-in totalitarianism, using political and social pressure to coerce private institutions and companies into doing the Left’s political work for it. If you have, for example, engaged in political speech of an unwelcome kind — even if it was dumb stuff you said as a child — then you may be subjected to censure in the form of, say, a revoked college admission. Our open-minded progressive friends campaign to keep books from being published or stocked in bookstores, to have nonconforming periodicals removed from the shelves, to arm-twist gutless magazine editors into firing controversial writers, to pressure social-media platforms to suppress actual journalism from actual newspaper reporters, to use access to education and employment as a means of imposing political discipline, etc. The taste for suppression is difficult to satisfy — l‘appétit vient en mangeant — and, like a bad pornography habit, the need becomes more exotic and more specific over time.

For example, you have to read pretty deep into this New York Times story about a woman who has killed several women with whom she was romantically involved before you discover that the “woman” in question is a man named Harvey who decided, after some prison time, and after he was implicated in the attempted rape of an eight-year-old girl, that he would henceforth be a woman. This leads to such inexplicable sentences as: “People close to Ms. Leyden questioned whether, despite her gender identity, Ms. Harvey should have been placed in a homeless shelter for women, given her history of attacking and murdering them.” Just so. This is what it looks like when you are trying to do news journalism while tied up inside the wet sleeping bag of ideology.