With its hire of Sarah Jeong, a plucky, own-the-trads style leftist whose tweets range from irreverent (“#CancelWhitePeople”) to misandrist (“kill more men”) to downright anarchic (“why don’t we ever talk about banning the police?”), the New York Times has taken us one step closer to a dark future, where racial tribalism is the norm and racial liberalism the exception. Polarization has been hastened— identity politics, intensified—but the most important point is that both forces have now been institutionalized by the nation’s premier editorial page. It’s not clear yet what happens next, or, frankly, what should; what is clear is that the damage is cutting ever deeper, and recovery, if possible, will not be coming anytime soon.

For its part, the Right is up in arms about yet another case of double standards. Meanwhile, the Left is rolling its eyes and trying to convince us that Jeong’s tweets are just satire—a way of parodying white ignorance. In the middle are voices like Reason Magazine’s Robby Soave, who seconds the double standard complaint while also chastising the mob looking to get Jeong fired. “A culture in which people are allowed to seek forgiveness, grow, and go on with their lives without losing their jobs is vastly preferable to one in which armies of trolls are constantly hunting for that one career-ending tweet, statement, or association,” he writes, no doubt speaking for many on the political center.

Rage against the outrage machine is good advice, agreed. And it’s true that if the Times caves now it will set a terrible precedent, for itself as well as for the public square. But it’s equally true that not caving in this case will do its own damage, at least as bad and maybe worse than anything we’d be likely to suffer from Jeong’s ouster. That’s because Jeong’s ascendance to the Times does not represent a double standard so much as a triple one, which will undermine the media, exacerbate cultural malfunction, and, yes, harm free speech.

This triple standard inheres in the fact that Jeong has said more outrageous things about more people, and with much more consistency than a host of censured right-leaning pundits, most of whom rate orders of magnitude higher on the civility scale than, say, Ann Coulter or Milo Yiannapolous. Whereas The Atlantic fired Kevin Williamson for having once floated capital punishment as an acceptable penalty for abortion—a view he later walked back, or at least qualified, in spite of its resonance with several conservative premises—the Times has stood by a woman whose tweets, taken literally, called for white genocide on not one but three occasions; encouraged abolishing the police and assaulting them to boot; and compared the opinions of white men—all white people, in fact—to dogs urinating on fire hydrants.

Should she be “taken literally?” That presents another set of challenges. Jeong’s explanation that, no, she doesn’t really think every white person in America is trash, that her tweets were at worse a form of “counter-trolling,” is a Trumpian response in our Trumpian times. “Do we think Sarah Jeong actually enjoys chasing down and bullying white men for fun?” asks Libby Watson over at Splinter News; “Jeong’s tweets were clearly jokes, not policy proposals,” asserts Slate‘s Inkoo Kan. Fair enough. People say things they don’t mean, and our online panopticon is notoriously bad at spotting context. Still, the sense of bigotry-for-me-but-not-for-thee is hard to ignore.

According to Jeong’s defenders, however, all this is beside the point. “What makes these quasi-satirical generalizations about ‘white people’ different from actual racism,” Zach Beauchamp writes, is “the underlying power structure in American society.” Even if Jeong did want whites to be rounded up, beaten, and exterminated, that wouldn’t constitute racism under his logic, because racism equals prejudice plus power—something which Jeong, as an Asian-American woman, supposedly lacks.

The irony, of course, is that in her new role at the Times, Jeong will have plenty of power. She will have the power to recruit writers she likes, and to discourage ones she doesn’t. She’ll have the power to craft op-eds that inform public policy and shape public opinion. And she’ll have the power to express her views—her prejudices—in the nation’s most read editorial page, provided she’s a bit more polite about them.

Those powers add up to something of which most Americans can only dream: a controlling hand in the culture industry. Here the hypocrisy kicks into overdrive. For years progressives have argued that it is precisely this industry that needs, in their words, “decolonizing,” insofar as it produces the social and ideational conditions for racism. But if that’s right, the question of whether Jeong “really” wants to cancel white people is irrelevant: because intent isn’t necessary for oppression. All that’s needed is a discourse that delegitimizes legitimate complaints and shunts aside pressing concerns, allowing them to go untreated, out of sight and out of mind, by the ruling class.

That would make tweets like the following somewhat problematic:

Here is Sarah Jeong, Harvard Law graduate and soon-to-be New York Times opinion editor, insinuating that the problems of the white working class don’t matter as long as there are any white supremacists in the world, period. If you’re a caucasian thirtysomething guy from the Rust Belt, this ought to scare you: A publication that has establishment liberalism on speed dial just hired somebody who believes that your day-to-day struggles should command zero public attention at best, that job loss and drug abuse and suicide are only of interest when they affect people who don’t look like you, and that your complaints about these things must reflect your insufficient hatred for Nazism.

If that’s not power plus prejudice I don’t know what is. Nor, it would seem, do most progressives, who spent much of last weekend attempting to explain away Jeong’s statements with increasingly elaborate contortions. “When she writes ‘dumbass f***ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants,’ she is not ‘equat[ing whites] with animals,’” assures Beauchamp. “Rather, she is commenting on the ubiquity of (often uniformed) white opinion on social media.” No caveats. No calls for civility. Here we have a textbook case of the Left being racist by its own self-constructed standards, but as soon as this is pointed out, we’re told the tweets have somehow been misunderstood, the trolling taken deliberately out of context.

Yes, whites do enjoy a certain kind of privilege most blacks, Asians, and Latinos don’t. Yes, real bigots exist: the Richard Spencers and the cross-burners. And yes, we should be worried about them. But the wisest thinkers on the Left have always understood that power operates in different ways across different networks—and hence, that a group’s domination in one sphere does not necessarily entail its domination in the others. Who rules Wall Street may not rule Congress, who rules Congress may not rule culture.

Or, as the broadway musical Avenue Q once put it, “the Jews have all the money and the whites have all the [political] power.”

But journalism? That belongs to the Left, which means keeping Jeong at the Times can only be Pyrrhic victory. The decision may rebuke the heckler’s veto, it may please some free speech absolutists, but it will also make right-wing conspiracy theories more believable, strain the media’s credibility, and deepen our nation’s most polarizing divides. It will validate the existence of what some less-than-savory folks on the internet call “The Cathedral”—folks who really don’t like liberalism— while confirming the suspicion, more and more widespread, that democracy is indeed dead, and the people filing the police report have killed it.

Progressives, meanwhile, will lose an important incentive for defending free speech, because the usual quid pro quo argument—we get Krugman, you get Stephens—no longer applies. “Who decides what’s too far” used to be a rhetorical question, its indeterminacy a powerful reason for supporting speakers with whom you disagreed. To shut down dissent was to run the risk that you yourself could be shut down once the other guy was in charge, and so Left and Right could achieve a kind of detente, held together by—what shall we call it?—“mutually assured deplatforming.” Post-Jeong, however, the logic underpinning that consensus has weakened. Both sides now know who draws the line, in nearly every case, and, spoiler alert, it ain’t sensible centrists.

By all means denounce censorship on procedural grounds. Call out illiberalism where you see it, on campus or in Breitbart or in the “Failing” New York Times. But don’t imagine that it will make much difference, or that a few civil libertarians are going to somehow save the day through sheer force of principle. More and more, the choice is between Sarah Jeong and mob rule. Which, really, is no choice at all.