Rachel's tears cost me £000s but objecting to a chancellor's emotional dysregulation is 'misogynistic'

LinkedIn is a craven conformity machine

Pic credit: an angry woman on LinkedIn

Last week was particularly bad on LinkedIn.

The authoritarianism of ideologically leftish liberalism already makes LinkedIn the least honest place on the internet and last week was especially rife with examples of that.

LinkedIn is a clearly defined 'room' that you are expected to read before posting on ethical/cultural issues.

My feed is filled with the studenty politics of embracing all weakness as warranting special treatment, which leads to a form of 'soft censorship' resulting in performative consensus.

I'm kind of disgusted by this partly because it makes me cowardly. I daren't join in most of the viral conversations for fear of reputational harm.

Scaled up, this abandons the field to influencers and their mooks who daily tighten the ratchet on ideological homogeneity.

The rest of us pathetically keep our heads down. The modern digital human condition, I'm increasingly thinking.

LinkedIn has become very much like the Twitter that I left, a few years ago. Those whose opinions don't jibe with the loudest voices remain in the shadows or restrict themselves to commenting only under the posts they feel 'safe' to. And the loudest voices are almost all leftish.

Viewpoint policing and the cowardice of people like me makes the monoculture self-reinforcing.

It has amazed me for years how my broad circle of affluent 'symbolic capitalists' can be so resistant to viewpoint diversity, even as the real world ground shifts beneath them.

I was part of the problem once. I simply could not see why people wanted Britain out of the European Union. But they did and I was forced into a choice.

• Sneer at them as misinformed or (my personal favourite signal of incurious leftishist liberal smugness) acting against their own interests.

• Learn why. Acknowledge other worldviews as legitimate.

Choosing the second option proved to be a gateway drug to broadly conservative thought of which I'd previously been ignorant. Then I found much of it compelling, both intellectually and morally.

Gradually, the intellectual and moral vacuity of the various isms of leftish liberal doctrine - famously compounded in 'the Great Awokening' - began to seem little more than top-down control - or coercion - by a kind of priestly caste.

That caste has been losing ground lately. Donald Trump surprised them by turning out to inspire more hope than their offering and now, in Britain, the cartoonish Nigel Farage's Reform party is consistently leading polls.

There's a reason for this, which continues to be attributed variously by 'The Longhouse' to stupidity, meanness and (another personal favourite) hate.

To venture onto LinkedIn is to step inside The Longhouse.