But our organization is trying to have the product pulled by boycotting it. If we are successful, we are taking that decision away from other people. They can't decide to buy it if we successfully get it pulled from the shelves.
I do think free speech absolutism is most persuasively criticized on freedom of association grounds. That is, we also have to respect direct action rooted in freedom of association such as boycotts, strikes, etc., even when the object of the direct action is suppressing "undesirable" speech.
The superficial problem, of course, is that almost everyone is hypocritical about it: When left-of-center folks are boycotting Goya Foods because the CEO supports the current U.S. president, that's fine: It's not really suppressing free speech, it's simply a matter of imposing "accountability" or "consequences" for the exercise of free speech. But then the same people will argue that Collin Kaepernick has been unjustly silenced when he lost his career (at least for a few years). In this case, it's not about "consequences for the exercise of free speech," it's something unjust, something sinister.
The deeper problem is that the success of direct action at suppressing speech, especially in the case of things like culture-war boycotts, tends to hinge on which group wields the most power in any particular cultural institution. The left tends to wield the most power in institutions such as pop culture and academia, so the speech that gets suppressed is whatever speech the "woke left" deems undesirable. A few dozen oligarchs hold most of the power in the NFL, so the speech that is suppressed is whatever those oligarchs deem undesirable.
I think it can be really harmful to those cultural institutions. It's only tangentially related to TTRPGs, and I don't want to open up another can of worms, but I think the YA community is devouring itself. You've got a Black, queer author who has worked for major publishers as a sensitivity reader joining the dogpile of a Chinese immigrant debut author who ultimately cancels her own book, only to have his own debut get cancelled due to charges of Islamophobia. On the one hand, it's a good thing that the more diverse community is wresting some power from almost exclusively white, cis, het traditional publishing gatekeepers. OTOH, the way that power is being wielded seems cannibalistic and self-destructive.
I think this is a danger in the TTRPG community. Just as we've always had people whose primary participation in the hobby is theorycrafting, I believe we're starting to see people--a very vocal group--whose primary participation is "critical theorycrafting." If that's your thing (not to be dismissive: if that is your
cause), there is going to be an incentive to keep digging into everything published until you uncover all the problematic elements, disseminate your work as widely as possible and get all those tasty "likes" that are the social/status currency of your community. And just as with regular theorycrafting, if you're good enough at it, you can have a successful YouTube channel or Patreon and make some real money. You just have to know your audience and always keep giving them what they want. And man, if you can get offending works cancelled or pulled, if you can get offenders fired from their jobs and run out of their careers, that's the big prize.
Yes, people will say, "That's all just premised on a slippery slope fallacy!" But I think it's actually a vicious cycle rooted in underlying incentive structures and that vicious cycle inevitably leads to excesses, such as professionals being fired for posting peer-reviewed studies, people getting forced out of their career for liking the wrong Tweet, or Black, queer writers being cancelled because, no matter how sensitive you are, no matter how much you've participated in the cultural policing of the community yourself, you can never be sensitive enough about
everything.
