The Left Needs to Reclaim Free Speech

’m a reluctant participant in the debate over free speech and the alleged threat of “cancel culture.” I’ve hesitated to join in part because these controversies seem like a rehash of the earlier sterile arguments in the 1980s and ’90s about political correctness. In the brouhaha over both PC and cancel culture, there’s been a disheartening reliance on ridiculously overheated metaphors (guillotines and gulags always in the wings) and bogus anecdotes. In 1991, Dinesh D’Souza, already a notorious charlatan, snookered many liberals, including, sadly, the great historian C. Vann Woodward,...