SOONER OR LATER, THEY’RE GOING TO COME FOR PEOPLE YOU DO LIKE:

This is going to happen: sooner or later, some CEO or sports team owner or similar is going to get ousted because he or she supports a woman’s right to an abortion, or the cause of Palestinian statehood, or opposes the death penalty. It’s inevitable. I can easily see someone suggesting that, say, Israel is an apartheid state, and watching as the media whips itself into a frenzy. And when that happens, the notion that there is no such thing as a violation of free speech that isn’t the government literally sending men with guns to arrest you will be just as powerful, and powerfully destructive, as it is now. So what will these people say? I don’t have the slightest idea how they will be able to defend the right of people to hold controversial, left-wing political ideas when they have come up with a thousand arguments for why the right to free expression doesn’t apply in any actual existing case. How will Isquith write a piece defending a CEO’s right to oppose Israeli apartheid? A sports owner’s right to do the same? I can’t see how he could– unless it really is just all about teams, and not about principle at all.

To follow up on Sarah’s link to this post earlier, the left’s PC round-up of the last few years will quickly be forgotten once there’s a Republican in the White House — and in any case, all attempts at ousting someone for his leftwing views are easily explained away by those 60 year old catch-all words: McCarthyism and Blacklisting.

Or as Canadian journalist and blogger Kathy Shaidle likes to say, what passes for “liberalism” these days boils down to: “it’s different when we do it.”

(See also: How easily history of the 1990s was tossed down the Memory Hole.)