Jonathan Chait catches the drift...took long enough

No, Harrison’s crime is that he objected to the punishment of another person for having failed to boycott an Old South dance when she was in college. Harrison’s language — “I’m not the woke police” — made his point sound more controversial. But if you listen to the interview, he was using “woke” as an implicit compliment, placing the point of disagreement on police. Woke was a virtue he couldn’t bring himself to police in a younger and less established colleague. He asked her youthful ignorance be treated with grace and compassion.

This is not even guilt by association. It is guilt by refusal to join in condemnation. That a person who objects to the fairness of the proceedings themselves becomes the target of suspicion is a dynamic straight out of The Crucible.

Last week, I likened the treatment of actor Gina Carano — who was fired from a starring role in a Star Wars feature and then disavowed by her own agency over a supposedly anti-Semitic social-media post — to the postwar Hollywood blacklist. It is different, of course, in a couple important respects. For one, communists were barred even if they had kept their views secret, whereas conservatives have little to fear if they keep their beliefs to themselves. Second, the blacklist pressure came in part from the federal government, whereas the modern impetus to punish conservatives is generated by a combination of internal cultural norms and market pressure.

But the dynamics share some eerie similarities. Washington was not the only force behind the blacklist; right-wing activist groups like the American Legion convinced studios they would be punished at the box office if they could be connected to communism. The social-media dynamics that produce panicky firings or groveling apologies follow the same logic: No film or show wants to be linked, however tangentially, to “racism” or “anti-Semitism,” either real or imagined.