I think the tension here has always come from the fact that we've never had a right to free speech with no respect to context. If I run a coffee shop and let pe

I think the tension here has always come from the fact that we've never had a right to free speech with no respect to context. If I run a coffee shop and let people pin flyers to the corkboard, I have a say in what flyers get to stay up. If Bob posts flyers for his Alt-Right Potluck Dinner, I'm going to take them down. I may, in fact, ban Bob from the coffee shop entirely. If Bob protests "but you've let Jennifer post flyers for her Antifa Vegan Cookbook," I'm going to say, "Yes, Bob, and her dairy-free brownies are surprisingly delicious." Bob doesn't have a protected constitutional right to use my space. It's certainly true the left can have illiberal tendencies, and there's some indication that's on the rise, and that's worrisome. But when people yell "cancel culture" in a crowded online letter, it's always worth asking how many people have been "cancelled" and to what degree. Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss have never been denied an audience and will almost certainly continue to have huge ones. J.K. Rowling, for all of the articles about her "cancellation" over the past couple of months, turns out to still be a multibillionaire author who still has a book contract. Yes, every day brings us complaints from prominent conservatives about how Twitter is stifling their voice -- complaints generally tweeted to their millions of Twitter followers who like and retweet them in support. In any case, while I'd be loathe to carve out explicit exceptions to the First Amendment, I'd also be loathe to invoke it too cavalierly. Would I lock someone up for "something just slightly racist"? No, but in practice that's very rarely what we're arguing about when we argue about cancel culture: you mentioned it was a social media phenomenon in another comment here. Would you demand that social media networks not be allowed to make decisions about what content they're willing to carry? How about employers? Firing someone for that "something just slightly racist" is harsh, but do we want to say that HR departments are no longer allowed to make those calls? If so, who is?