The Chosen Demos is committed to the principle that wide-ranging discussion is a sign of a healthy society. On this site open freedom of speech will trump cancel culture every time.
Thinking outside the ever-narrowing box of modern society is not a form of hate. Words are never violence. Crickets are worse than controversy. Silence is not concurrence. Ideas have consequences, some of which were unintended by the originator of the idea.
Only the supporters of weak philosophies and ideas attempt to silence alternative points of view.
In the digital town square of the Chosen Demos, discussion is the goal, even if that discussion makes some of us uncomfortable. Controversy is not the goal, but it may occasionally be one of the outcomes of open discussions. Agreement is good, but it is not the greatest good. True light drives out the darkness of the world.
Having said all of that, the editorials presented here are strictly the opinions of the author of the particular editorial. These authors are often invited because they are not necessarily centrists, and hence may be more interesting or stimulating. Some authors may even be Californianos. 🙂
While the Chosen Demos does request that the author provide enough source documentation to allow an interested reader access to the information threads which will allow that reader to check out the sources of the author’s assertions. The Chosen Demos does not try to guarantee that the information in these editorials does not cross outside the Overton Window of plausibility of a given reader.
The Overton window was developed in the 1990s by Joseph Overton, a policy analyst at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. It describes the range of public policies that are considered acceptable in public discourse at a given point in time. Since then the term has drifted somewhat to include the range of ideas in the public discourse which lie somewhere within the general range of plausibility for most people.
