As the signatories of the Harper's letter shows, as well as interventions by Yascha Mounk, Toby Young's Free Speech Union, Spiked, Niall Ferguson and the 'Sokal Hoax' people (amongst many others), the campaigns for free speech and against 'cancel culture' are not homogenous.

Those who proclaim these public concerns about 'free speech', 'cancel culture' and 'wokeness' range from the centre left to the far right, with varying degrees of agreement over what kind of speech should be tolerated in the public sphere.

But they have latched onto a common enemy - a 'woke' or 'politically correct' left that takes the politics of identity seriously.

Depending on their POV, either liberalism, democracy or Western civilisation itself is under threat from the supposedly neo-McCarthyite mob.

A campaign to 'protect' free speech stretches across many political divides and we can see how seemingly liberal/centre left end up occupying a similar political/ideological space to the far right when mobilised around this issue.

This is key to understanding the modern moral panic (for lack of a better word) about free speech. It brings together people (possibly) acting in good faith and bad, but the bad faith free speech warriors will end up dragging the discourse to the right.

As I wrote in my book on the history of 'no platforming', the issue of free speech being under threat at universities brings together the centre left and the far right, but the discourse ends up being phrased in similar tropes.

https://www.routledge.com/No-Platform-A-History-of-Anti-Fascism-Universities-and-the-Limits-of-Free/Smith/p/book/9781138591684