https://www.city-journal.org/article/un ... c-american
Shermer aside, this IS something I've noticed about current American progressives: a weird tendency to harp about how A*W*F*U*L everything is, and an instant kneejerk hatred of actual good news (and anyone delivering the good news). And now we have "identity politics" or "intersectionality" or whatever, which is directly opposed to a color-blind and egalitarian society, and fully in favor of a twisted form of "self segregation". People marched, suffered and died to improve civil rights in the USA for decades--just don't talk openly about it today, or someone will be OFFeNDEd.
Not to mention the ongoing shriek-fests over LGBTQ, climate change (I consider that one totally settled and the only people pushing the opposite view are the fossil-fuel industry and its supporters), etc. These are NOT traditional American "liberal" political positions any longer. They verge on authoritarian craziness and self-defeatism. I've met a lot of San Francisco leftists over the years, and they usually had this "personality feature" in common. Especially in recent years.
Not mentioned: Shermer's ongoing "little problem" with people accusing him of sexual assault. Even his WP article now mentions it.....albeit dismissively.For progressives, admitting that any problem—racism, pollution, poverty—has improved means surrendering the rhetorical high ground. “They are committed to the idea that there is no cumulative progress,” Shermer says, and they angrily resist efforts to track the true prevalence, or the “base rate,” of a problem. Saying that “everything is wonderful and everyone should stop whining doesn’t really work,” his editor objected.
Shermer dug his grave deeper by quoting Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald and The Coddling of the American Mind authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who argue that the rise of identity-group politics undermines the goal of equal rights for all. Shermer wrote that intersectional theory, which lumps individuals into aggregate identity groups based on race, sex, and other immutable characteristics, “is a perverse inversion” of Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society. For Shermer’s editors, apparently, this was the last straw. The column was killed and Shermer’s contract terminated. Apparently, SciAm no longer had the ideological bandwidth to publish such a heterodox thinker.
Also, Wikipedia's City Journal article calls the publication "conservative" but fails to pigeonhole it as "far-right" or "neo-Nazi" or similar. That is something I would normally expect from Wikipedians. They clearly bear hate-boners for City Journal regular Christopher Rufo. You can thank fanatical left-leaner and Trump hater Thenightaway for much of that. (Another Cirt sock?)
Guys like Rufo are admittedly pests, but sometimes you need a few pests to keep the rest of the "activists" honest.