This is why liberals don’t believe conservatives care about free speech

People trying to outlaw the teaching of the 1619 Project and people challenging Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” on the grounds that it includes White saviors and racist language don’t disagree that some material should be banned from schools. They just disagree on which ideas ought to be verboten. College Republicans digging up old social media posts in efforts to get alumni fired aren’t so different from a high school student who releases an old video of a classmate using a racial slur intending to make it harder for her to get into college. Both agree that certain behavior by young people should have material consequences long after that behavior took place. To actually seize the high ground on speech issues they already claim to occupy, conservatives will have to take an example from Reason Magazine’s principled cancel culture chronicler Robby Soave and get used to defending people that they may not like, or ideas that they’re embarrassed to be associated with. Maybe that means standing up for a professor who advanced the lab-leak theory of the origin of covid-19 in terms some interpreted as insulting. It could mean making the case for a Central Michigan University professor who displayed a racial slur in his classroom and invited members of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church to dinner with his students as part of their First Amendment education. Or it might mean defending Nikole Hannah-Jones instead of telling voters that a liberal Black journalist is coming for their precious George Washington. Engaging with the 1619 Project’s contentions will do more to advance both the goals of free speech and a conservative interpretation of history than trying to ban it.