How would any libertarian not be disgusted by cancel culture? We're in the middle of a cultural revolution: previous ones France in the 1790s; Russia in the 1920s and 30s and China in the 1950s and 60s didn't work out very well.
"Get Rid of the Four Olds" shouted the Chinese Red Guard. Cancel culture, the disgusting bigotry of CRT is this generations version of it. Let's hope we can avert the ish that came the last few times.
But this would imply that there is such a thing as "cancel culture", that it's real... It's not. Cancel culture is a meme used by the political right to make people angry, to cultivate in them a victim mentality, to convince white straight males that they're the victim. This started a long time ago when Nixon started campaigning with the slogan "the silent majority", which was a reference to that same white, straight, male majority. There is no cancel culture my friend; there's only the corporate-backed upper class that wants to use the politically correct diversity tactic to maximize their customer-base.
Cancel culture is using the hecklers veto to disrupt speeches. (Do I need to post links?)
Cancel culture is protesting speakers, preventing access by attendees; causing property damage; threatening violence so that venues don't lease the space or increase insurance fees to a ridiculous amount. (Do I need to post links?)
Cancel culture is part and parcel of the current incarnation of the left which has adopted Herbert Marcuse's viewpoint that any ideas that contradicts or prevent the rise of a socialist state is to be met with animosity - that tolerance of contracting ideas is counter-revolutionary.
Cancel culture is pressuring companies to deplatform opposing viewpoints. (Do I need to post links?)
Everyone who wants to live in an open and free society should be actively defending free speech; which means, by definition, speech which you are opposed to.
That's a nice sentiment to have, but it doesn't work in practice. In reality not one freedom is absolute, so freedom of speech isn't absolute. For example: should we defend the freedom of expression of the intolerant? Should we defend racists or fascists? I don't think so, not in a democracy. Some speech should be discouraged, especially the kind that is averse to democracy itself, or we risk losing what freedom of speech we have. Look up Karl Popper's "tolerance paradox".
And yes, you're free to provide links on whatever topic you believe may be helpful. I can guarantee you though that for every link you provide I'll be able ti find one that shows the opposite; so I don't know if that's very productive.
I'll provide links - but absolutely all speech except that which calls for the immediate call for physical violence is to be considered free political speech.
Communism is considered evil by many people. I find it disgusting that the hammer and sickle isn't considered as repulsive as the Nazi swastika. By that logic I would be within my right to shout down DSA meetings.
Christian and Muslim fundamentalists consider many things to be outside the bounds of the tolerable should they be allowed a hecklers veto.
This "out-of-bounds" stuff does not lead to a cohesive Republic. It leads only to a totalitarian state - which is why the left is completely fine going down this road.
There are no simple answers here; simple answers lead to the absolutism you speak of. So, no, I don't agree. Speech has consequences and the right wingers who complain about "cancel culture" seem to want there to be no consequences at all. If some influential people are free to spread the lie, for example, that "those darned foreigners are stealing our jobs", that leads to the belief that those foreigners hurt us. Using violence against those foreigners, especially when the lie is compounded by calling them all "rapists, drug-dealers and murderers", then becomes a righteous act of self-defense. I hope you've seen, as we all have, the stupendous rise of far right domestic terrorist attacks, not just in America but in many western countries.
This belief, unfortunately, is the product of ignorance about what communism is and what the Nazis were. Hitlers party wasn't a socialist party. His biggest adversaries were the communists and socialists; he killed them first before going after the Jews. And you are in your right to shout down DSA meetings, but there will be consequences...
Well, Thank God for the separation between Church and State then ;-)
This is the extremist reaction to ANY impediment on ANY freedom. Again, I repeat, no freedom is absolute. Never has been and never will be. You're part of a society and all freedoms are granted by that society; that's always been the case. For absolute freedom you'll have to emigrate to an uninhabited island.
I have read Marx, Trotsky, Lenin and Lukács and the underdevelopment marxists like Wallenstein. My opposition to Marxism has nothing to do with ignorance. It is a complete and utter rejection of the concept - the evil of equity - so to speak.
The difference between Marxist hatred of the bourgeoise and Hitler's hatred of Jews and CRT's hatred of whiteness stem from the same philosophical root - an opposition to the concept of individuality. You are "wrong" because you belong to a particular group.
One reason our Republic survived is because of the concept that a person could speak his mind. To be opposed to this is to say that we do not tolerate "wrong think" and will root it out.
Welcome to the world of 1984.
There is no political speech that should be banned. Are you going to ban the Black Israelites from preaching? If not why not? They argue that one race is genetically superior and other races are the cause of the world's ills and should be removed.
Reminiscent of a mustached German from the 1930s isn't it?
I've only read Marx and Smith, but I suspect you haven't, or if you did, you didn't understand. Marx wrote, not about the evil, but the sheer fantasy that is "equity"; like cancel culture, it doesn't exist in the real world. Furthermore, Marx was a great admirer of what capitalism had accomplished in his time. And lastly, he understood and loved individuality, but he also understood that it arises from interaction with the community.
Marx was a materialist, and saw human history through the lens of man's interaction with the objective material world, and saw that capitalism, just like feudalism, creates and maintains a class division that's unnatural, one that didn't exist in our tribal roots. The trick is, my dear friend, to enlarge the tribe so that it encompasses all of humanity; we're a long way removed from that still, and maybe we'll destroy ourselves before we even have a chance to reach that goal. But in the meantime it would serve all of us best that you understand that there's no such thing as an individual without the community that shapes the individual, and that therefore every single freedom of every single individual is the product of the community they're part of. The most important of those freedoms is, like Marx said, economical freedom, material freedom. That can't be realized in a system where some own all the means of production with the rest only selling their time, brainpower and muscle-power. There's no such thing as "equity"; we're all unique, uniquely talented and with our unique interests. And we'll always have natural leaders and a lot of followers; that's only human. But... leaders and followers is something quite different from rulers and the ruled. Capitalism creates those rulers and ruled, creates the class division Marx saw to destroy. But, again, that's not "equity".
There's no political speech that should be banned by a dictator. Like Hitler's book-burning for example. Speech that's banned in a democracy however, is just society deciding what's best for itself. This whole "culture war" and "cancel culture" is just a by-product of this eternal class-warfare that's waged against you and me by the capitalists who decide what's "politically correct" and what's not. I wish you would see that...
Re: " I can guarantee you though that for every link you provide I'll be able ti find one that shows the opposite; "
What opposite is there? The claim is that there is cancel culture, which is the preventing of speech that people find offensive. The "opposite" of cancel culture is tolerating said speech.