Would you please stop posting flamewar and/or flamebait comments to HN? We're trying for something else here, and comments like this contribute directly to destroying that possibility. You've done it repeatedly in this thread already. If instead you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I think parent is saying that the progressive Twitter mob has been labeling and attacking people who support merit-based admissions policies that ignore race as racists for many years already. This cancellation is not “different” as the author says, they are only now becoming aware of the pervasiveness and wrongness of this type of thinking since it happened to someone they care about and not someone they didn’t.
Mounk is famous for writing exactly this piece, over and over again, with only the names changed. As long as the person getting “canceled” is in some way conservative, Yascha Mounk (and Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi) will be there to write this article.
I mean, not being super familiar with this guy outside of what is presented in the article, there does seem to be a pretty important difference between someone like Milo and an actual academic giving an academic talk. I see why some would worry about cancelling a talk by the former (despite him being utterly repugnant and bringing nothing of substance to the audience), but the latter cancellation seems worse to me.
