What the free speech fretting from the political Right often misses is that this culture war is largely a Left-wing civil war — and its worst casualties tend to be self-inflicted wounds. American society is increasingly segregated along political lines: we live, work, befriend and marry people with whom our primary point of commonality is that we all vote the same way.

So when Shapiro describes the grave consequences people have faced for so much as nodding toward a conservative perspective — the newspaper reporter who was fired for mentioning the n-word in a discussion about offensive speech, or the Hollywood director who was dog-piled on Twitter for saying something nice about Shapiro himself — the people he’s talking about generally aren’t on the Right. They’re liberals, being excommunicated from their professional and social networks by members of their own tribe.

When Senator Tom Cotton published a NYT op-ed arguing for the use of federal troops to quell civil unrest during last summer’s protests, the staff revolted — not against Republican Cotton, but against the Left-leaning editor who’d approved the piece. The people who lost friends and professional opportunities because they signed the Harper’s Letter in defence of free speech? All liberals. The group of women founders ousted from their own companies last year for crimes against diversity and inclusion had not a single Trump voter among them.