A great many people did say something. We warned that the first sub to be banned was the beginning of a slippery slope. That pretty soon, bans would be used for political purposes, to sway elections.

Pro-censorship advocates, in a move that would today be termed "gaslighting", ensured us that this was not a slippery slope, and that it was only egregious content that would be banned.

2016 was the year things accelerated. Free discussion online, a large part of it in response to Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory, helped secure the election of Donald Trump and the exit of the UK from the European Union. This surge in nationalist sentiment, while modest, spooked the powers that be, and one of the largest propaganda campaigns in history, "The Resistance", set out to prevent it from ever happening again.

Activist groups pressured the media to run 24/7 "Orange Man Bad" content, attacking Donald Trump as a fascist, a Nazi, a sexist, a racist and all manner of other slurs. Disparate elements joined together in reaction to this, including r/The_Donald. This content defending Trump became labelled as so-called "Hate Speech" by activist shill accounts and bots that amplified this message, while at the same time Trump supporters were being accused of being Russian bots in a textbook case of Marx's maxim, "Accuse your enemy of what you are doing, as you are doing it to create confusion."

The cultural rot accelerated. Absurd claims from Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory, having incubated on Tumblr, and widely mocked at the time, now started to become gospel truth in a new religion. Any dissent from these ideas was now being routinely dismissed as "a rise in far-right radicalization". In reality, simply holding a centrist liberal view from circa 2005 was enough to get one branded a "far-right extremist". This widely-reported rise in "far-right extremism" was accepted unthinkingly by the politically-ignorant masses and they unwittingly helped enable further suppression on Reddit, supporting subreddit bans and then quarantines for major subreddits.

In 2020, with the majority of dissenting subs quarantined or suppressed, the second time Black Lives Matter was pushed, there was no memetic resistance to its spread. Systems were in place to downvote and suppress comments critical of the movement. Those claims from Critical Race Theory were now accepted by the visible majority of Reddit, and those claims state that "racism" is omnipresent in society, and that everyone must fight to defeat it.

Of course the only trace of "racism" left was a few humor and debate subs that had been quarantined or suppressed anyway. In the wake of Black Lives Matter, a quixotic Reddit decided to strike the killing blow to the enemy who was already defeated.

The story isn't over. This pattern repeats on scales large and small, through every community, as the Western world spirals into death.