I was reading a long think piece on the Brit UnHerd.com about Scott Alexander shuttering his “Slate Star Codex” blog because he was afraid of being outed by the New York Times.

Then I had an idea.

Here’s how to stop the Cancel Culture dead in its tracks. If any social media user accuses someone of being a “racist” or a “sexist” -- or any category in the left’s Codex of Preferred Progressive Pejoratives -- then that user’s social media account is canceled forthwith.

Hey @Jack! Whaddya think of that, pal?

And as a gesture of good faith I propose that the same should apply to right-wing pejoratives, such as “Commie bastard” or “pinko.” Or “poofter,” for, according to the EU, homophobic hate speech is #1 in social media takedowns. Of course, nobody has been canceled over being called a leftie in over half a century, not since the dreaded cancel culture of McCarthyism was defeated by heroic Hollywood foes of the Hollywood Blacklist.

Anyone that really wants to go ahead with an accusation of racism should be required to post a $1,000,000 bond against the possibility of a suit of libel or slander. Because, I propose, the burden of proof for a racism accuser should be the same as in criminal accusations: proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

What I want to know is: how come you battalions of civil-rights lawyers and law professors and anti-hate activists, committed as you are to bending the arc of history towards justice, have not already proposed this remedy?

Whaddya say, civil-rights lawyers and law professors, and activists?

Yes, I heard you: white privilege, centuries of colonialism, systemic racism, blah, blah, blah. Would that apply to the white working class dying of despair from the opioid epidemic? Hey, how about white college professors? And whatabout Brahmin professors in U.S. universities from South Asia, the highest income group in the USA? When we are talking about Brahmins, we are talking about thousands of years of caste privilege.

Yep. I got it. You chaps are as addicted to canceling racists, sexists, and homophobes as the late George Floyd was to fentanyl. To give up the delicious emotional high of canceling “far-right” social-media white-supremacist terrorists would be as hard as kicking the fentanyl habit.

And worse, how would the left recruit its activists and activistes if they weren’t being enticed into the left by the cancel entry drug? Why, the nation’s mental health professionals may need to invent a new PCSD, a Post-Cancel Stress Disorder, for the post-cancel culture sufferers, and enforce a lockdown of all deplorables until a cure for PCSD has been developed in double-blind testing protocols.

Of course, I realize that there would be recidivists, people that just could not stop calling other people racists or other less toxic pejoratives. What should we do with them? Obviously, simple punishment is not enough. Humiliation is necessary. How about banning them for life from Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s on the second offense and forcing them to buy their groceries at Walmart for life on the third offense?

But then there’s another problem that has emerged in the last month. The Maenads, or “raving ones” from the Greek. Yes, I know, they were the rabid female followers of the Greek god Dionysius, way back, and should have retired to mythological retirement communities by now. Except that they have turned up at BLM mostly peaceful protests like here at the Emancipation Monument, yelling in the face of a role-playing Frederick Douglass.

Call it a modern expression of the Maenad philosophy. Back then women were following Dionysius around and getting into all kinds of mischief. According to Walter Friedrich Otto:

[T]hey gird themselves with snakes and give suck to fawns and wolf cubs as if they were infants at the breast. Fire does not burn them. No weapon of iron can wound them, and the snakes harmlessly lick up the sweat from their heated cheeks. Fierce bulls fall to the ground, victims to numberless, tearing female hands, and sturdy trees are torn up by the roots with their combined efforts.

You mean to say that women were that angry way back in ancient Greece, even while modeling prettily for painters of Greek vases?

And as to how we cancel the rabid Maenad cancelers, well, I suppose it will require another One Simple Trick.

For if the world of social media is an instantiation of the male Culture of Insult that the soy boys of Big Tech are determined to cancel, the new Maenads are clearly overwrought representatives of the female Culture of Complaint. And I suppose that their screaming and yelling is merely a form of complaining, ramped up to the max.

I notice that the young girls in my Seattle neighborhood are obviously in training for this immortal experience, as there is nothing they like better than screaming their heads off.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.