My experience was no isolated incident — not even for March 2022! The following week, a similar thing happened at Yale, ironically over a panel bringing together lawyers from the left and right who agreed on the importance of free speech. Then it happened again at the University of Michigan, when students obstructed a debate on Texas’ heartbeat bill. And that’s just law schools; forget the craziness that’s been going on for some time on undergraduate campuses!

The only thing these events had in common was that non-progressive speakers were presenting ideas that some students found objectionable, offensive, even repulsive. We’ve gotten to a place where questioning affirmative action or abortion is outside the academic Overton window, the acceptable range of policy views. It’s a damning indictment of the state of academia at a time when a toxic cloud has enveloped all of our public discourse.

But this problem isn’t limited to ivory towers and leafy quads. The trend of canceling speakers rather than challenging them also represents the loss of grace in our culture more broadly, the desire to ascribe malign motives to one’s political enemies and unwillingness to think of them as merely wrong, rather than evil. 

Given the left’s control of the commanding heights of culture, education and technology, those expressing conservative views are much more frequently targeted by both online and real-world mobs and boycotts. But it happens to left-wingers too, like Whoopi Goldberg — who was ignorant about the Holocaust, not anti-Semitic. Even worse, it happens to regular people whose meager donations to politically incorrect causes gets them doxed, boycotted, fired, or, in Canada, frozen out of their bank accounts.

Although this cancel culture is easy to diagnose, it’s hard to remedy. Too many people have lost sight of the golden rule of treating others as they want to be treated. Although often ascribed to the Bible, that principle predates Christianity and indeed needs not be tied to any faith. Still, as American society has secularized, politics has replaced religion to fill the spiritual needs that humans have had since time immemorial. In that context, it’s easy to see one’s political opponents as heretics — and then of course their sacrilege isn’t worth hearing.

The problem goes far beyond academic freedom or speech on campus, worrying as developments in those areas are for the next generation — especially young lawyers, who’ll face much more challenging situations than bad tweets. How are we to continue as a nation if every policy disagreement is existential and every election a Manichean battle?

Two months ago, I jokingly tweeted at Whoopi that she and I ought to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast to hash stuff out. Indeed, I’m willing to go anywhere, or on any media program — Bill Maher might be good — to debate constitutional law or the importance of civil discourse. 

But it’ll take more than canceled professors and pundits to get us back to a place where we can disagree without wanting to ruin the lives of people with whom we have those disagreements. It’ll take real courage from political leaders and cultural influencers to disrupt the current toxic moment.

Ilya Shapiro, author of “Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court,” is on still leave from his position as senior lecturer and executive director of Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution as he awaits the result of the university’s investigation (now in its third month).