I am strongly pro-life and have strongly opposed former president Donald Trump. Equally strongly, I hold that abortion rights advocates should not be prevented from demonstrating outside the homes of Supreme Court justices, and that Elon Musk is right to say Trump should not be banned from Twitter. Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates It is troubling that, increasingly, advocates across the political spectrum are abandoning the insight of Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address that “error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.” Lacking confidence that criticizing error will be adequate to suppress it, some now urge censoring it. On one side, there is an effort to ban books and such topics as critical race theory that might be “divisive” and make primary and secondary students uncomfortable. On the other side, some argue that students — especially in colleges — must be protected from “microaggressions” and given “trigger warnings” to protect them from emotionally disturbing material. And many are convinced that the effectiveness of social media platforms in spreading disinformation calls for more and more censorship to protect those who would be led astray.

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