Renounce Your Likes, Comrade President

this tweet is unacceptable to your fellow intellectuals who focus on tweets

FFS:

This is an Eastern Bloc headline. Intellectual renounces heterodox sentiment as higher authorities investigate, news at 11:00.

In the Milan Kundera novel The Joke, a young man on a promising path through his university and on into a government position dashes off a postcard to a woman he used to date. But he makes a terrible mistake, as the title of the book suggests: he makes a joke. She responds with icy silence, and he’s later ushered away to a meeting with a trio of grim-faced party officials that radically changes the trajectory of his life:

A writer from an Eastern Bloc country, Kundera mined this theme often; in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a brilliant surgeon is internally exiled into a life as a window-washer after the authorities take exception to an article he writes — and he refuses to renounce it:

Out-chickenshitting actual communists, we now have journalists who tweet-prowl, hunting for heterodoxy in the damning evidence of when you clicked “like.” He liked a tweet from the unperson Alex Berenson! Got him! He can’t hide behind his Yale PhD and his decades of respectable academic performance now!

Every element of this story reflects Eastern Bloc culture. The ritual of the cringing apology:

"I understand that my lack of knowledge of the Twitter platform created questions and unintentionally offended many," Tykocinski added in his apology message. "Please be assured this will be a learning experience, and I will grow as a person and professional from this misstep."

The ritual of the more senior authorities pulling grim faces and assuring everyone that This Matter Is Being Taken Very Seriously:

The chair of the Thomas Jefferson University board of trustees, Patricia Wellenbach, also added this week that the board is aware of the ongoing circumstances surrounding Tykocinski's social media activity and is giving the matter "the board's full attention."

We’ve developed Eastern Bloc culture in a constitutional republic. How?