Rich Lowry: How I was canceled for what I DIDNT say

Everyone in my business takes lumps for things they say.That comes with the territory.

What’s different is getting smeared for something you verifiably didn’t say.This has been the project of malicious accounts on X the last few days that have insisted that I said a racial slur during an appearance on “The Megyn Kelly Show” last weekend.These ridiculously false accusations on social media — that have been rebutted even by people who disagree with me politically — have now resulted in cancellations in the real world.I was scheduled to speak at Indiana State University in a couple of weeks, but the university has scrapped my appearance “in light of recent developments and following the advice of our public safety officials regarding campus and community safety concerns.”This is a classic pretext, often used by university officials to dispense with speakers they find inconvenient.They’d really love to have them, don’t you know, but it will take as much security as is required for Donald Trump to play a round of golf, so, sadly, it just isn’t possible.Like all cancelers, the university wants you to believe that this is just an exception to its scrupulous fair-mindedness: “It is important to stress that this cancellation is not intended to limit our neutrality on different political viewpoints.”Uh-huh.

Taking the side of a woke online fringe and giving it what it wants on the basis of an almost certainly nonexistent security threat doesn’t speak to political neutrality.And if there is a real security threat, what does that say about Indiana State University? If the young people under its care and tutelage are liable to storm a lecture hall if I show up, that is an indictment of them, not me.It pains me to say I’ve also been canceled by the Badger Institute, the right-of-center think tank in Wisconsin.The president called on Tuesday to ask me to withdraw from an address at an upcoming dinner, and when I refused and asked him what I’d...