Surely one can find ways to fight the irrational, inconsequential leftists (which there are many) without bullying institutions by cutting their funding, or kidnapping people in broad daylight in the street?

Civilized western countries do it all the time.

The unfortunate truth is that, also, one is a consequence of the other.

This is just the 'you made me do it' defense argued by every abuser ever. Someone is behaving as an ass, they get told 'you're an ass, stop that' and then they escalate and say 'you made me do this'. It happens in families, it happens in schoolyards, it happens on streets, it happens in business, it happens in dictatorships. Just yesterday, the president of South Korea was formally removed from office after trying to stage a military coup and this was his whole defense.

Free speech in the US is about not having consequences for what you are saying. In particular not having consequences from the government. Therefor you can only say that it is a legitimate consequence if you disregard free speech. Free speech in the US is about being able to be an asshole to 10%, 50% or 90% of the population without having to be responsible for what that part of the population does. And even more so what they do with the government. As such if you believe in free speech the government's actions stand on their own. What you actually don't get to say is that it is a consequence. Because that is what free speech in the US is supposed to prevent. Consequences from the government.

In many countries in Europe we have hate speech and defamation laws, we don't have at-will employment and many of our universities are public. This means there is less freedom to make others upset, questioning someone's character, firing them and ways to affect our education. This is by definition illiberal. (Worse or not is an open question). In Europe we can't say that "I might have offended 50% of the population, but sending me to prison is worse" because our laws says it isn't. In the US you can.

Does US law also say that the government can do all kinds of things, including pardoning criminals? Yes, but it still goes against the credibility of free speech in the US. One of the things the US still had over other countries.

Eh, you can prove anything but starting history at a particular point.

For instance, "GamerGate", where a bunch of anonymous people on the internet tried to get a number of women in the game industry fired, predates "cancel culture" by a year or two.

Or how the whole #MeToo movement was, you know, a response to powerful people abusing people in their power, and firing or otherwise limiting their careers if they resisted.

If <insert famous talking head from ten years ago> didn't want to be "canceled", well, he could have always just not sexually harassed his underlings.

Part of the problem here is that you're abstracting the actions of a handful of relatively powerless people to a principle: "People whose opinion I don't like can be banned from society." The 'I' here is, from your framing, the 'left' or something.

Strawman. The fired people you're talking about weren't banned from society by the people pointing them out on the internet. If someone's on an international flight yelling racial slurs and causing a commotion, and someone else publishes video of that person yelling racial slurs on an international flight, it's not the people commenting on the video who fired that person from their job. It's their employers. What would be the alternative? No one takes video of the person yelling racial slurs? Or, if the video is posted, no one comments on it? Or, maybe, the person yelling racial slurs could simply avoid losing their employment by not yelling racial slurs on a flight full of people with their phones out? Or maybe the employer could choose to ignore the negative publicity and keep the person on staff despite the risk to their revenue? Who exactly is the responsible party here?

I generally find it pointless to point out that 'right' perspectives suffer from a lack of practical logic--pointing out the fundamental irrationality of a position rarely changes the mind of the person holding that position. But, your position ignores power differential between people--your argument is a matter of 'principle,' but this isn't fundamentally about principles.

Is your argument then that a person yelling racial slurs on a full airplane shouldn't have their employment threatened by their behavior? That their employer shouldn't fire them?

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First it’s people disagreeing with me, then it’s deportation to the death camps. There is zero nuance and the slippery slope is basically guaranteed so I should have freedom of consequence for everything I do!

Took me all of 5 seconds to find an example. Tattoos are a form of protected speech: https://archive.is/2025.04.03-041258/https://www.theatlantic...