And then there is the matter of Sir Richard “Tim” Hunt, an honorary professor at University College London. Tim Hunt is a Nobel Prize-winning British biochemist who made the mistake of trying to tell a joke at a women’s forum at the 2015 World Conference of Science Journalists, in Korea last June. Here’s the joke: “It’s strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, seriously … ”

Self-censorship is the most effective form of censorship—and leaves no traces. Illustrations by Barry Blitt.

Bizarre, no? The only reason we can be sure that Hunt intended this as a joke is that he used the official International That-Was-a-Joke Protocol by ending with the words “Now, seriously.” But, joke or no joke, within days Hunt’s distinguished career was in ruins. A British academic named Connie St. Louis had tweeted an accusatory account of the episode, and it took wing. Although the Daily Mail raised questions about aspects of her credibility—a C.V. that didn’t quite pass muster—she has suffered no repercussions. Hunt, for his part, apologized. He was nonetheless pushed out of his honorary professorship. Women he had worked with testified on his behalf, as did his wife, Mary Collins, who is a professor at University College London. She said they had both been “hung out to dry.” The accusation that Hunt was trying to keep women out of science was untrue. In his speech, Hunt had in fact urged women to go into science, saying explicitly that “science needs women and you should do science despite all the obstacles.”

The rush to judgment against Hunt is indeed shocking. There seems to be no evidence, apart from the published snippet from his June remarks, that Hunt has discriminated against women in his work or that anything he has done indicates that he is a secret sexist. Professors everywhere are self-censoring like mad, to make sure they don’t stray beyond permissible territory, although avoiding Hunt-like infantile sexism does not strike me as a particularly difficult challenge.

There are plenty of reasons why people don’t—and shouldn’t—simply open up their heads and pour out whatever goo is inside. You don’t want to be a bore, or hurt someone’s feelings, or spread inaccurate information. But there are bad reasons for keeping your mouth shut as well. Many of them cluster around the concept of “political correctness,” or P.C. This is an unusual term in that it is used only ironically. If you label a statement or remark—or the avoidance of a statement or remark—politically correct, you are criticizing it. If you label it politically incorrect, you are congratulating the speaker—generally yourself—on having the courage to say it. No one has ever labeled a statement “politically correct” and meant this as a compliment.

Or at least no one since the collapse of Communism. People who accuse other people of being “politically correct” are actually stealing a bit of ancient Communist Party lingo from the 1930s, when it was an approving reference to people who were adhering to the party line. When the term started to reappear in the 1960s, it was a fairly witty recycling of an old, forgotten term. There’s not much humor in it now.

Self-censorship is the most effective form of censorship. When it can be arranged, it leads to a situation in which people don’t want to say what other people likewise don’t want them to say. Self-censorship also has the advantage of leaving no footprints. But I would no longer try to argue, as I once believed, that it is a minor problem in America and virtually nonexistent in Britain. The Public Health department there does not use the word “obese” in its National Child Measurement Programme for fear of “stigmatizing the child.” The BBC recently made available for downloading a number of classic programs from decades ago that don’t meet modern standards of inoffensiveness. As The Wall Street Journal noted, each program comes with a warning label noting that it is “an un-PC product of its time.”

Henry Porter, *Vanity Fair’*s London editor and a prominent British journalist in the anti-P.C. camp, reported talking to a group of students recently. “I realized,” he explained, “that these kids have very few thoughts on the subject of liberty and far too many on the subject of personal rights and various classes of victimhood.” Porter noted that “this is one reason why the liberties that were accepted as being part of the British tradition, but are not written down anywhere, are so easily being attacked and readily abandoned.”

So, Hitchens may have been right after all. Always write it down.