The Tone Police are out in
force. Were they tipped off? Asking for a thought criminal.
If you are a normal person, with normal views of the world as it obviously is, you understand what it is to live in this time of ours, when the most basic truths must be inverted.
For example, if you consider it incontestable that men cannot get pregnant, you understand.
You know that in the Current Year, if you’re allowed to say it, it probably isn’t true.
It stands to reason that you are also familiar with the degrees of coercion applied to make you repeat things that you and everyone within earshot, including and especially those pressuring you, know to be nonsense.
It begins with appeals to civility, politeness, and good citizenship. This is Good Tone Cop.
You want to be accepting, don’t you? You don’t want to be rude, do you? We’re all in this together, are we not?
This is how decent, otherwise sane people find themselves repeating madness about gender, excusing away crime, and wearing masks while driving alone.
Good Tone Cop often affects an uptalking, minatory tone; asking nicely, but letting you know that if you refuse to comply, you won’t like what happens next.
And what comes next is Bad Tone Cop. This character is all about dox and destroy. He (or often, she) lacks all sense of proportion and will never, ever let it go.
But unlike the dogged detective protagonist of so many movies and comics, Bad Tone Cop is not the good guy.
Cancel Culture is Bad Tone Cop’s lockup. But Bad Tone Cop has more violent and aggressive means and is eager to use them. BTC has superb research capabilities, can easily find your home address, and would like nothing more than to round up a posse and come on over.
In all their incarnations, the Tone Police are fond of disqualifying labels, rendering those with dissenting views as illegitimate.
Be warned that you will almost certainly be called some or several names from their “istophobe” arsenal.
You may also be called toxic, hateful, even unhelpful. Learn to live with it. Moreover, if whatever you are doing even slightly corrodes our current culture of lockstep conformity and absurd, deathly obsessions, bloody well good for you.
Fortunately, most of us have developed antibodies, both to being called racist and to paying much attention when hearing the insult hurled at others.
Right up until the moment their teeth are bared and their truncheons come out, the Tone Police will appeal to your sense of comity, asking you to compromise with what you know to be incandescently stupid and/or outright evil.
A good analogy I have heard is that if one person wants to build a bridge over a river, and another person does not, it is not a sensible compromise to build the bridge halfway. The truth is not always somewhere in the middle, as people are fond of saying.
Sometimes, uncomfortable as it may be, someone is right and someone is wrong.
For me, the issue that has prompted me to take crayon in hand and write again is this global health panic and its crippling effect on liberty. The masking, monitoring, and restricting of people by power-drunk politicians and their conformist allies in the general public must be stopped or, I believe, our freedom will slip away forever.
The sight of actual police assaulting formerly free citizens for non-compliance makes me feel that a line has been crossed. If you have read this far, you likely feel it, too.
I am not willing to build the bridge halfway by compromising for another few months. You see, I am old enough to remember “15 days to flatten the curve.”
Perhaps you have seen, or experienced, some or several of the degrees of tone policing brought to bear on dissenters lately. At the initial, benign, Good Tone Cop level, you are inconsiderate, impolite, and anti-science. As we progress to Bad Tone Cop, you may find your online presence restricted or erased, your livelihood imperiled, and actual police may come to your home and arrest you.
The enforcement starts with words, with tone, with appeals to the better angels of your nature to go along because we are all such dear, dear friends.
While I hope to see you all in Heaven, the nettlesome truth remains that we do not all want the same things, and we are not all in this together.
Consequently, while I wish you good health and I pray that I am wrong, there is one phrase of this tumultuous year adaptable to my meaning:
Defund the Tone Police.
Theo Caldwell just wanted to be left alone. Contact him at theo@theocaldwell.com
