Chait has been getting a lot of shit from mainstream liberals of the non-caricature variety (your Slates and TPMs and what have you) over writing this. Can't say I blame them. Examples of actual intimidation and violence aside, he seems to fall into the idea that free speech means putting up with bullshit.
Sure, and when there is *actual* bullshit afoot, fine. However, the point is that members of the far-left are attacking people for *non-bullshit* on specious reasoning, and defense of yourself / defending others is only seen as further evidence of your culpability, like in bad Mafia games. As someone who also supports their aims (usually), there can be no more counterproductive stance to take, and it's important to fight back. Merely because
somebody CLAIMS that Stephen Colbert making a joke (at the Redskins expense, a deserving target!) means he's racist against Asians doesn't mean it's true, as anyone with half a brain could tell by watching the clip. However, there are definitely people who assume that because 1 person got offended = whoever said something first MUST have been wrong.
For another example not from Chait's article, there was a conference for women computer scientists a few months back. Great. Lack of women in CS is as usual a major concern, and there's a lot to be done to improve the gender balance there. However, there are a lot of ideas on how to do it. Anyway, there was a panel for "male allies" or the like with a bunch of important CS executives, but somehow somebody said the wrong thing and someone got offended, so it was shouted down as an example of "mansplaining" and the participants were forced to sit through a "listening session" where they merely heard complaints from women in computer science rather than try to give advice. Now, I don't know what exactly was said. It's possible it was totally worthless corporate blather. But this is still a bad precedent, since even if they had "wrong" advice, the correct thing is to argue against that line of thought, rather than decree the person bad for even giving it. These are executives who voluntarily came to your conference to support it; they are probably not the enemy! Why the circular firing squad?! This is a great way to discourage broaching any ideas that don't already have 100% consensus behind them, or that aren't meaningless feel-good nonsense. Bah, depressing. (Of course, I'm sure the answer from some would be "well if they were offended, then we don't want their help anyway." Lovely.)
Of course, to some degree, this is nothing new, the far-left has always inherently been incredibly self-destructive and spends most of its time fighting itself since the 1960s, but it's worth calling it out occasionally. (It'd be nice if they weren't, but as an alternative fantasy, I wished the far-right turned their looniness similarly inward - like, crazed arguments over whether the UN's black helicopters coming to take away our guns will have Chinese pilots or Vietnamese pilots, and the other side is clearly freedom-hating for daring question the obvious truth that it's Chinese pilots.)
