This is the distilled essence of political correctness and nasty, aggressive groupthink (pick any current agenda) and the progressive left, have been aggressively pushing it for many decades.
One of the main advocates and protagonists and regarded as the Godfather of leftist thought for the last 60 years or so and the author of more than 100 books, is Noam Chomsky who wrote in The Common Good, 1998:
“..The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the systems are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate..”
Sound or feel familiar?
Note those words: “strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion”
Acceptable opinion? Who determines what is and what isn’t acceptable opinion? To put this another way, when you consider that opinion is a simple thought process, acceptable opinion is about controlling the thoughts that precede your words.
In other words it is the manifestation of Orwell’s thought police.
This is exactly the same as far left Marxist of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse’s ‘Repressive Tolerance’. In his own words from an essay of 1965:
“…the withdrawal of tolerance of speech and assembly from groups and movements” on the Right, and the aggressively partisan promotion of speech, groups, and progressive movements on the Left..”
By the way, Chomsky also wrote in the same book: “the best defence against democracy is to distract people.”
That too should strike a chord.