Eh a more witty version of something like:

-The movement now MAGA conservatives have never been principled on any of this, as we are seeing now. It was all a kind of confidence or 'sh*t' test in the handful of places the left totally dominates like academia

-The left has failed the tests in epic fashion in large part by not appreciating that the audience isn't just the person canceled, hecklers vetoed, etc., it's the normies who see it happen, which now includes a multiracial working class

-Being a constructive force for a better tomorrow requires avoiding the same mistake, which probably includes some laying off of the piling on or recounting already thoroughly discussed hypocrisy. Ward Churchill may have been an ass and an incompetent academic but there was a difficult truth to what he said and punishing him for it was wrong.

-You've made the observation that the grey tribe is likely to get a reminder soon of all the things it hates about the red tribe.

I had a long reply that seems to have been eaten. Not sure if it can be salvaged.

I agree with your assessment, and that experience contributes to my politics today.

I think you're failing the sh*t test with this line of reasoning, same as they have been. We either live in a world where people can deal with these kinds of questions, including when they're asked in ways many may deem offensive, or we can't.

I think you give the game away when you ask if I know what 'important rights' are, so much so that everything in your comment before and after is best interpreted as a kind of nihilism, not a real attempt to grapple with the rights or principles in play, on the merits. Even if for the sake of argument we concede that at the end of the day nothing profoundly bad happened as a result of name your incident (and to be clear, I'm not doing that), all it would mean is that left wing or progressive illiberalism is the weaker prong of a pincer movement. Which is something I'd have agreed with well before we started putting the theory to the test.

That was part of it but I think it may have also been an early indicator of otherwise highly obscure academic silliness becoming widely disseminated to non academic audiences via the internet. People like him and numerous pro-Palestinian/Israel skeptical types were in many ways the OG victims of 21st century cancelation campaigns. It's among the reasons that trying to treat everything from FedSoc judges or jurists to conservative provacateurs to just normal liberals who don't toe the line on some issue or another as safety threats was so self evidently a mistake from the outset. Anyone with a memory longer than a nat could see where this was going. People at these places are reaping what they spent 15 or so years sowing.

The irony about the Niemoller quote that's the subject of this piece is itself head spinning. When was the last time someone worked up about the current environment prominently stood up for the rights of someone they disagreed with, just on the principle of the thing? It just doesn't really happen anymore.