Cancel Culture: The Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process

Summary

Alan Dershowitz has been called "one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America" by Politico and "the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights" by Newsweek. Yet he has come under intense criticism for his steadfast and consistent championing of those same principles, and his famed "shoe-on-the-other-foot test," to those who have been "cancelled" for any number of faults, both real and imagined.

Cancel Culture is a defense of due process, free speech, and even-handedness in the application of judgment. It makes the case for restraint and care in decisions about whom and what to cancel, boycott, deplatform, and bar from public life, and offers recommendations for when, why, and to what degree these steps may be appropriate, as long as objective, fair-minded criteria can be determined and met. While Dershowitz argues against the worst excesses of cancel culture, he also acknowledges that its defenders ostensibly try to use it to create meaningful, positive change, and notes that cancelling may itself be a constitutionally protected form of free speech.

In the end, Cancel Culture represents an icon in the defense of free speech and due process reckoning with the greatest challenge and threat to these rights since the rise of McCarthyism.