Inevitably, people checked the numbers of how many marginalized groups experienced extreme rates of suicide and murder as a result of using the perceived wrong words, and inevitably, the numbers and citations came up lacking.

Say the wrong thing, use the wrong words, and vulnerable populations kill themselves in mass drives. Restrict these wrong words and prevent suicides. The thing is, there is no evidence and never was.

Silence is violence, speaking is violence, being uninterested and uninvolved is violence. Everything is violence and violence is bad. But is that the reality? Far from it. We’ve been swindled of free expression by meekly playing along.

That we’ve been duped by unfalsifiable rhetorical bullying is a cautionary tale. If it walks like censorship, if it quacks like censorship, then without question it’s censorship. Caution must be immediate and succinct to extinguish censorship before it gains footing. Censorship must end before it begins.