Evan Urquhart

3) Organization Does criticism appear to be organized and targeted? Are the organizers recruiting others to pile on? Are you being swarmed and brigaded? Are people hunting through your work and scouring social media to find ammunition to use against you?

In critical culture, organizing pressure campaigns against ideological targets is usually considered out of bounds. By contrast, it’s common to see cancelers organize hundreds of petition-signers or thousands of social media users to dig up and prosecute an indictment.

4) Secondary Boycotts Is there an explicit or implicit threat that people who support you will also get punished? Are people putting pressure on employers and colleagues to fire you or stop associating with you? Do people who defend you have to fear adverse consequences?

5) Moral Grandstanding Are the attacks on you ad hominem, repetitive, ritualistic, posturing, accusatory, outraged? Are people flattening distinctions, demonizing you, slinging inflammatory labels and engaging in moral one-upmanship? Are people ignoring what you actually say?

How can a self interested, defensive individual reliably tell if others are engaging in "moral grandstanding" vs hurt and upset bc they've engaged in racism, sexism, sexual harassment, or transphobia?

Generally, the difference is they can and will answer questions with specific answers instead of chanting tautologies at you.

Who, exactly? We all live in this online environment where people will come out of the woodwork to chant a tautology and disappear. If you discount every argument that has even a single tautology-chanter associated with it, you'll end up discount every argument.

Good point, but the people you refer to don't want a good faith debate. I love a debate. If I could be paid to do nothing but debate all day, I'd love it. And by "debate" I mean "consider both sides of the argument and work towards a solution." I don't argue for the sake of it.