antecedent

It's important to recognize that cancellations exist to hold people accountable, said Krishauna Hines-Gaither, the associate vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a cofounder of African American Linguists.

"Social media is full of swarming political and ideological mobs," she wrote. "In an interesting departure from democratic tradition, they don't try to win the other side over. They only condemn and attempt to silence."

n a column last year, The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan compared it to China's Cultural Revolution.

"Cancel culture is a very grave threat to American freedom,"

"That's not activism. That's not bringing about change," he said. "If all you're doing is casting stones, you're probably not going to get that far. That's easy to do."

"cancel culture needs to be canceled."

In addition to Hubbard, other Twitter users made similar arguments that year. "Cancel culture is SO toxic, you can't even learn from your mistakes anymore because you're not even allowed to make any," another tweet in November 2017 said.

The trend of calling someone out laid the groundwork for full-on cancellations.

Others have criticized that criticism, saying cancel culture doesn't exist.

people tend to call out cancel culture itself as a negative movement, suggesting that the consequences of cancellation are too harsh in minor instances or represent rushed judgment in complicated situations.

On the other end are everyday people like David Shor, who faced criticism on Twitter after he tweeted a study from an academic journal questioning the political consequences of violent and peaceful protests. Shor, who tweeted the link during the George Floyd protests, was fired, though the company has said it wasn't over the tweet.

On one end of the spectrum are people like Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and R. Kelly who were canceled by the public before their sex-crimes trials.

"Cancel culture," which President Donald Trump last month called "the very definition of totalitarianism,"

The simple fact of the matter is that censoring speech is a recipe for illiberalism and regression.

What promoting unfettered thought and speech does is allow us to weaken the viruses of bad, untested and morally bankrupt ideas before they infect all of society. It smokes them out and allows us to interrogate them. Free speech, it turns out, is the best vaccine against the speech we don’t like.

Worse, silencing these ideas might mean stifling knowledge about their very existence. That helps make bad ideas fester, spread and mutate before they can be countered with facts, logic and evidence.

If we don’t try to solve the fundamental problem behind the speech that we dislike and work only to mitigate the symptom — by censoring it — we drive the problem somewhere else. Out of sight, out of mind and into the gutter:

Both science and liberalism also require intellectual humility.

Science and progress require openness, curiosity, skepticism, and the articulation and testing of strange, unconventional hypotheses. That means entertaining heterodox ideas in the first place, which means fighting the urge to peremptorily dismiss them when they strike us as odd or threatening.

Becoming our best selves is the key to bettering ourselves. This means being free to make mistakes and learn from them. It means the freedom to speak our mind and freedom to give people the benefit of the doubt.

while it may also be true that those doing the censoring have noble intentions, it is not true that attempting to stifle speech is a good idea. It’s always certainly a bad idea. 

I hasten to emphasize that this is not simply a problem on the left

Yet even if free speech was never an ideal that liberals truly lionized, there is mounting evidence that some progressives don’t even recognize it as a legitimate right.

what previous generations of liberals understood is that allowing others to say something is not the same thing as endorsing what they say.

Once upon a time, folks who considered themselves left of center believed in and practiced free speech and freedom of conscience.

Left unanswered is what explains the urgent need to not just call out but condemn

shambolically

a woman in a “crush video” — a fringe genre of erotica that traffics in animal cruelty — wielding stilettos to stomp a kitten to death. Once these offenders were identified and their personal details exposed online, they were hounded, verbally flogged and effectively expelled from the community.