Many on the left believe that “free speech” is exclusively a right-wing concern. In June 2018, Justice Elena Kagan famously declared that conservatives had “weaponized the First Amendment,” a charge that was dutifully picked up on the front page of the New York Times the following week and echoed by many liberals since. This insidious notion is so ingrained in the modern day left that today, when a liberal becomes a victim of cancel culture, they suddenly find themselves branded as right wing. Call it a sort of political Doppler effect: Just as stars moving away from an astronomer appear redshifted, so too do canceled liberals shift from politically blue to red.
