> I think it's presumptuous to assume "it's okay to backslide" was part of that comment.
I wasn't assuming or presuming, I was asking.
> What/when are we backsliding from? There was never some 'golden age' where comments anathema to the culture at large wouldn't have consequences.
We're not just talking about comments that are "anathema to the culture at large", we're often talking about comments that offend only about 10% of the population. Things like "citing a celebrated academic's work on the efficacy of nonviolent protest" or "quoting a black man who wished more attention was paid to other issues in his community [besides police violence]" or "accidentally making the 'ok' gesture". With that out of the way, to answer your question more broadly, it has been rare in my life for people to be terminated even for quite controversial speech, and certainly not due to explicit pressure from large, often coordinated groups of strangers. If you were the public face of a company you were expected to steer clear of controversy, but ordinary people didn't need to fear a loss of income or access to healthcare.
The worst of it was during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars when it was controversial to be seen as unpatriotic, but even then I think ordinary people were mostly insulated from the effects (i.e., it was "punching up"), the effects weren't especially chilling, and society quickly rallied around shared free-speech values and righted itself. For what it's worth, I don't think conservatives 15 years ago were morally better than today's woke progressives; rather, I think the difference is social media (notably, conservatives canceled Colin Kaepernick almost immediately after social media cancelation came into existence).
> It's called sensitivity, not censorship.
I didn't call it censorship?
> Pursuant to the article, I don't really consider it backsliding if authors are now having second thoughts about writing from cultural perspectives other than their own.
I've never found "ends justify the means" arguments to be very compelling, personally.
> And you may miss the mark, and there will be consequences
One problem with cancel culture is that there are consequences even if your speech is perfectly correct and moral, e.g., advocating for nonviolent protest. It turns out people with few scruples about canceling also tend to lack scruples about whom they target. And to be clear, "consequences" aren't "you've offended someone and now they won't speak with you"; rather, they're "you've offended someone and now they've rounded up a hundred people to harass your employer into firing you with the express purposes of making an example out of you for other would-be non-conformists".
> I would contend consequences now are the weakest they have ever been.
I strongly disagree. Worse by far than any time in my memory.