I think so much of our free speech debate suffers from treating things that are actually on a spectrum as black-and-white issues.
Everyone agrees that certain speech deserves to be excluded from prominent outlets. It's uncontroversial to say that, for example, the New York Times shouldn't publish an op-ed by David Duke on "the Jewish question."
Similarly, I don't think anyone of good faith and good intentions thinks that National Review was wrong to fire John Derbyshire for being a huge racist. Derb was "cancelled," but generally speaking it was seen as a positive step.
However, it's also more than possible to take this too far. The shameful treatment of David Shor is a very good example, the most commonly cited in this debate on the "free speech" side for good reason.
This conversation is quickly polarizing into "cancel culture is a threat to liberal democracy" versus "anti-cancel culture people are doing violence to marginalized communities." But the cancelers are operating within liberalism; many of the pro-speech voices care about injustice
What is actually a conversation about where to draw some particularly difficult and blurry lines is being turned into a kind of intra-left culture war, making a challenging task even more challenging.
