Cancel culture prescribes affirmative action as the means to install diversity in all activities that it values. But affirmative action means very different things to different people. It ranges from greater outreach to unrepresented groups—which Americans largely favor—to numerical quotas for minority groups, which most, including most black Americans, largely oppose. The same distinction applies to inclusion and equity; many of us endorse them in the abstract but often disagree when faced with specific applications.

Cancel culture is different—and actually yields less genuine diversity. For example, its orthodoxies often contradict minority communities’ actual, intense desires for greater police presence and enforcement in their neighborhoods. These same orthodoxies also impede more effective discipline of unruly and violent students where such discipline might enable their children to learn and pursue pathways to a brighter future. Cancel culture’s zombie-like insistence that white racism today is still the main reason for continuing poverty, high violent crime rates, poor health conditions, domestic turmoil, and chronic family dissolution in troubled inner-city communities is a perverse distraction from, and even a denial of, the more important causes and possible remedies for these tragic, debilitating conditions.

The MIT fiasco should remind us how much cancel culture has to answer for. Although this culture’s activists are relatively few and its rhetoric is often risible in its hyperbole, its militants on college campuses sometimes have an outsize effect on others: cruelly blighted reputations, perverse policy agendas, stigmatization of moderate Democrats, and much more. But Princeton’s swift response to Abbot’s cancellation by providing an alternative, honored forum also suggests a hopeful, low-cost remedy, consistent with free speech and liberal academic values. MIT should be ashamed of its craven support for bullying—and perhaps other more principled institutions will heed this simple exemplary lesson.