This is a great article. It reminds me of a discussion I had about Russia; in Russia (and China) you are essentially told what you are not allowed to discuss freely... In the west, you are told that you can discuss anything but, in reality, the consequences for discussing certain topics are significant... You only find out once you start using your so-called 'free speech'. In the west, 'free-speech' isn't free at all; it's actually very expensive... It's a cost that's increasingly difficult for honest people to avoid; you have to kind of guess where the boundaries are... While the circle of permissible speech keeps shrinking. The circle has shrunk to a point where a lot of honest topics find themselves outside of the circle.

It's difficult to be an intelligent, honest person in the west because of this.

It's like most people don't understand reality. Everything they believe just happens to fit within the circle of allowed beliefs. They are in alignment with the system and benefiting from it (often unwittingly). It's only when the circle of allowed beliefs shrinks that they start to notice what I described above.

I suspect a lot of people were 'awakened' after the most recent Israel/Palestine conflict because that shrunk the circle of allowed topics a lot. A lot of the people who were morally aligned with the ESG agenda before now found themselves partly outside the circle and you could see the agenda shift. Terms like 'diversity' which were originally conceived primarily as racial and gender-based started to drift towards 'neuro-diversity' as a response to the discomfort created by the shrinking circle having shrunk a little too fast...

If you're outside the circle, you can see it much more clearly. The worst part is that you didn't even get to choose your fate. Kind of ironic as the west prides itself on individual choice. The circle shrinks slowly until you suddenly find yourself caught well outside of it when the consequences have accumulated beyond a certain threshold.