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Cancel culture is a real thing, it is dangerous, and you should be against it even if (especially if. . .) you think fighting racism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, and classism are important. https://twitter.com/lwoodhouse/status/1286444643723251712
When people talk about the tendency to proceed without concern for due process, what that means in practice is that people who have legitimate harassment concerns can be painted as reactionaries as a way of denigrating their allegations.
It also means that in debates over important issues, the side which curtails speech in its favor most gets to be heard the most, and this creates a bubble that may not curtail all speech in society but makes that particular group of people's understanding of the world brittle.
And it's absolutely true that there are instances where a person is promoting an idea that's ludicrous, offensive, etc., but the appropriate response to that is to increase the access people w/ non-offensive views have so that that idea can be countered.
If you remove someone who is a scientific racist for instance, you don't remove racism, you remove the most egregious form of it. But you could leave that person in place & create spaces for anti-racist people to debate him/her & the ideas would be defeated.
Despite the impression that the left has some overwhelming control over the debates in journalism or educational institutions, it doesn't. The main ally we have in getting more left voices is the agreed upon process that all ideas should be heard.
When you remove that idea, you can no long cry foul when the administration says that the anti-war group isn't patriotic enough, or that the Palestine group's boycott of settler produce is "anti-Semitic", or that transwomen are just encroaching on feminist spaces, etc.
It's also foolish because many of the ideas we believe on the left are not popular yet. Certainly some are! Universal healthcare is very popular! But some are not. We need open spaces that draw a variety of people so that our ideas can be heard.
If you want to live in a bubble you can, but having set the boundaries of the space so that only the good, progressive views can be heard, gradually the only people around to hear those ideas will be the proverbial choir. That means you're not spreading those ideas' power.
In my own experience at Brown, I had a problem where a male supervisor was a harasser, and my charges against that supervisor weren't taken seriously because the university chose to portray me as an aggressive liar.
The foundation for that charge, that I'm dishonest, was that I had had a conflict with a professor over our opinion about the election. When I spoke to lawyers about this, all of whom were too expensive for me to actually employ, they assumed I was conservative.
But actually, far from being conservative, I'm pretty left. The disagreement I had with the professor was about what the results of the election meant for the left, and it was an intra-left conflict that led to me being seen as untrustworthy.
Basically, I feel as many people on the left do, that the Democratic Party continues to lose elections it could easily win because it enthralls itself to its donor class instead of representing working class issues like Medicare for All.
And for some people on the left, when you say "working class" what they hear is "white", which to me has to be one of the most absurd things I can imagine, because any working class issue you take on will disproportionately empower people of color.
But in the ensuing debate between me and another student, the professor lost her temper and screamed at me, and in subsequent conversations pulled power plays about what kinds of assignments would be available to me.
The university initially backed me, and had that been the only situation I encountered at the university, then that would be no problem.
