"Relying on charges of hypocrisy to defend attacks on free speech is a dodge. It willfully neglects principled defenses of liberal norms in order to justify abandoning these principles. Just as dictators assume that all leaders abuse human rights and gangsters think that everyone would break the law if given the chance, people who move to censor their opponents are quick to insist that they are just doing what their rivals were already doing, so quit complaining."
"The Trump administration's systemic attack on free speech is hard to defend. The easier move for the president's apologists is to attack critics for their hypocrisy. "The left has amnesia when it comes to the cancel culture they perpetuated. It is a game they created with rules they made up. Now they hate that it's being applied to them," the USA Today columnist Nicole Russell writes."
The Trump administration has mounted a systemic attack on free speech. Apologists often respond by accusing critics of hypocrisy rather than defending the attacks on principle. Public commentary and social posts cite perceived left-wing cancel culture and prior controversies to justify reciprocal censorship. Relying on hypocrisy conflates judging people with evaluating ideas and thereby excuses illiberal measures. Such reasoning permits abandonment of liberal norms by treating reciprocal wrongdoing as a moral equalizer. Significant debate exists within the American left opposing illiberal cancel-culture tendencies, including public letters and intra-left criticism.
Read at The Atlantic
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