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Similarly, it is highly likely that in a given sample of corporate businessmen or soldiers there will be sharp prevalence in the group toward conservative positions. The reasons are clear. Because while individual soldiers or businessmen may in fact be both highly analytical people and lovers of individual freedom, both work in institutions that regularly ask their members to sublimate their desire to express their individual critical insights to the organization’s overarching pursuit of “stability” and/or hierarchical “discipline.”

Am I saying that journalists and academics are totally free of similar demands to tame their own personal “take” on social and political matters? Not at all.

Rather I am suggesting that the demands that they do so are—thanks in no small part to the existence of tenure in the case of academics and the First Amendment in the case of journalists—generally much less effective than the similar attempts to intimidate or bully or silence people in military or corporate environments. This is no doubt the reason that this core academic institution and people like Julian Assange irritate many Conservatives so much.