The last few weeks have been absolutely insane, and if you’ve been keeping up with my work here on ERI and our work at FIRE — or if you’ve just…you know…been alive — lately, you know why I’m saying that.
It started, obviously, with the horrifying political assassination of Charlie Kirk on campus, in front of a crowd of thousands in person and millions more on social media. It continued with the unfortunately all-too-predictable Cancel Culture campaign, with countless people across a variety of private businesses and industries being investigated, threatened, or losing their jobs for protected speech surrounding Kirk’s death.
It was worsened by government officials, including the vice president, who enthusiastically cheered this behavior on and engaged in it themselves. We have senators calling for the firingof college professors over their comments on the Kirk assassination. We have the FCC openly calling for censorship of comedy. And we have the Attorney General promising to pursue what the administration considers to be “hate speech.”
It’s nuts, especially considering how many of these people claimed in the recent past to be ardent defenders of free speech. As I wrote in my recent New York Times op-ed, however, this kind of whiplash is unsurprising. When you defend free speech on principle, you have to expect to be disappointed.
All that mayhem nearly caused me to forget that it’s been ten years this month since Jon Haidt and I published “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic, a piece that pointed to a serious problem in higher education. The piece was published online in August of 2015 but actually became the cover story for the September 2015 issue, and was surprisingly well received (at least at first).