Niall Ferguson On His "Cancellation"

I don't like the term. But progressives are now using their gaslighting / denial-of-existence tactic--denying the reality of "cancellation" and "cancel culture." Like political correctness and Antifa, it turns out that cancellation and cancel culture are fictions! They don't exist! Can you believe that? Huh. I guess we've just imagined the whole thing... They're inventions of the evil liberals and conservatives who hate so-called "social justice!" Well I'll be danged.

Anyway, we know the M.O. of the PC left: if you push back against them (and maybe even if you don't)  they will respond with an organized campaign of character assassination. It doesn't really matter all that much what you've actually said and done--because everyone has said and done things that can be spun up into a pretext for a two-minute / two-week hate. And that's all it takes--as Ferguson's account (and those of innumerable others) clearly shows. 

At one point Ferguson says almost exactly the same thing that one of my graduate professors said to me about 15 years ago:

The ultimate casualty is, of course, not me but free speech. Once, universities represented the spaces of greatest intellectual freedom, openness, and diversity. Now, they are among the places in the Western world where the inhabitants—students and professors alike—are most inhibited about what they say aloud

I wasn't smart enough to realize how right he was at the time. I thought we'd beat politically correctness a decade before. Well, that prof was so much smarter than me that it's ridiculous. And he read almost constantly. I've never seen a human being consume books--I mean serious ones--like that guy did. At any rate: he certainly did call it, and call it right.