Welcome to spring 2022!

Before we dive into our contretemps du jour, take a look at this item from the NYT this weekend, about a new weapon that the Ukrainians are using to great effect on the battlefield: NLAWs, for Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapons. “In perhaps 15 seconds, and sometimes even faster than that, the soldiers can unsling the weapon, unfold its aiming sight, release a safety catch and wait for their prey to appear.”

A gift from Britain, the NLAWs are turning out to be a dramatic game-changer.

They are the result of decades of weapons research dedicated to building small lightweight guided missiles that may have evened the balance of power in combat between the fearsome tank and the soldier.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians continue to hold on, even as Russian war crimes multiply, and their brutality intensifies.

Perhaps appropriately, given the ongoing clash between autocracy and democracy, another debate about the nature of liberalism has broken out. In case you missed it, the New York Times editorial board set off the latest kerfuffle over cancel culture and free speech with an editorial this weekend.

For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

As a horde of flying critics has pointed out, this both overstates and understates the problem. As a simple matter of constitutional law, there is no “fundamental right” to be free from the fear of “being shamed or shunned.”

So that is an overstatement, and it has been widely dunked upon.

But the NYT also understates the problem because the threats to free speech often go far beyond merely shunning and shaming.

Right-wing politicians have widely embraced bans on ideas and words in education, and have mobilized the power of the state on behalf of their anti-speech crusade. As JVL noted in this podcast last week: “Conservativism, as it exists in the wild, not as an academic construct, no longer has any attachment whatsoever to free speech, except as a cudgel with which to pursue the exercise of power against its political opponents.”

My colleague Cathy Young also reminded us that cancel culture often means organizing a “mob to get you fired and/or make you unemployable, shut down your business, browbeat your publisher into canceling you book, etc.” When one critic objected to the Times equating “the left criticizing hate and the right burning books,”

Yes, this is very real, and it has been demonstrated over and over and over again.

Cathy documented examples of it The Bulwark, including “the witch-hunt against a distinguished University of Michigan professor of composition who showed his class the 1965 film Othello with Laurence Olivier in blackface” and “MIT’s cancellation of a scientific lecture by a geophysicist who had criticized race-based affirmative action.” But, as she wrote, this culture of censorious illiberalism has now spread out far from the rarefied world of academia.

For example, in 2017, a burrito shop opened by two Portland women was forced to shut down shortly after its launch because its white owners’ account of collecting recipes on a vacation in Mexico prompted a frenzy of denunciations for “stealing” and “culinary white supremacy” in the local left-wing press and the progressive digital media (and a torrent of negative online reviews).

In June 2020, during civil unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, a Denver chain of yoga studios, Kindness Yoga, was driven out of business by a social media backlash that started with “callouts” from a few employees who felt that the company’s Instagram statement of solidarity with Black Lives Matter was “too little, too late.” (There were other grievances: for instance, that the management consulted “certain diverse members of the staff” about issues of diversity and inclusion instead of hiring an outside “diversity expert.”)

In July 2020, the following month, Gary Garrels, senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, stepped down after staffers circulated a petition demanding his removal for “toxic white supremacist beliefs.” Garrels’s offense: He had concluded a presentation on diversifying the museum’s holdings by saying that white artists would still be collected and that a blanket rejection of their work would be “reverse discrimination.”

In the Atlantic, Anne Applebaum catalogued even more cancellations.

Even if you have not been suspended, punished, or found guilty of anything, you cannot function in your profession. If you are a professor, no one wants you as a teacher or mentor (“The graduate students made it obvious to me that I was a nonperson and could not possibly be tolerated”). You cannot publish in professional journals. You cannot quit your job, because no one else will hire you. If you are a journalist, then you might find that you cannot publish at all.

“How has this happened?” asked the Times.

In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around “cancel culture.” Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.

So, what about the charge that this is “both sidesism”? For many on the Twitter Left, the Times’s acknowledgement that this is two-front war was an occasion of High Umbrage.

But, let’s be clear here. Both sides are, in fact, guilty.

You don’t have to regard these attacks on free speech as either legally or morally equivalent to recognize that the attacks do, in fact, come from both sides. Recognizing the bipolar assault on speech doesn’t excuse or minimize the other side’s illiberalism; instead it underlines the fragility of the one-time consensus over the centrality of free speech in our culture.

FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff called out the denialists, tweeting that the criticism of “both siderism” is not actually an argument, “it’s just another flippant dodge.”

For all of its flaws — and the newspaper itself really is emblematic of what it is criticizing — the NYT gets it right here:

The full-throated defense of free speech was once a liberal ideal. Many of the legal victories that expanded the realm of permissible speech in the United States came in defense of liberal speakers against the power of the government — a ruling that students couldn’t be forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, a ruling protecting the rights of students to demonstrate against the Vietnam War, a ruling allowing the burning of the American flag.

And yet, many progressives appear to have lost faith in that principle.