The fact that you can find a few from TYT who are willing to debate (which is kind of their thing, they're like a left-leaning daily wire), doesn't negate the overarching idea. Cenk is one of the people who have publicly debated Shapiro on more than one occasion (and has also debated people like Tucker Carlson and Dinesh D'souza). He didn't try to start a petition to have them disinvited from PolitiCon, he said "their ideas are wrong, and I have a rebuttal to each of them".
The notion that so many on the left (especially in the realm of college campuses) will band together to shut down a speech shows that something has changed...they were the party of anti-censorship a few decades ago.
College-aged liberals should try to be more like Cenk, and less like their freshman year Philosophy professor.
I think it ties into what I said before, the ideas progressives used to argue for & against were positions that were a lot easier to defend in a spirited public debate, largely because they were grounded in static principles that could be easily defined and were consistent, as to where a lot of what's discussed these days is in the realm of abstracts and are talked about in conditional contexts where "it depends on who the group is being discussed and where they rank on the intersectional hierarchy"
A example of that would be Bill Maher being disinvited at Berkeley. Being able to criticize religious institutions if they're infringing on the secular human rights of citizens (even if it hurts someone's feelings) would've been a pre-2000 progressive principle. However, that shifted into "religion can be criticized as long as it's a religion that's made up of mostly non-marginalized people, if it's a religion made up of people who are in a protected class, then criticism equates to Islamaphobia".
An example of the "abstracts" I referred to would be debates on gender/pronouns. Some progressives on the farther left end of the spectrum seem to be very passionate about the subject, but don't seem to be able to define their position, or the position changes so much, so often, that it would be very tough to debate it from their perspective.
I know people have tried to draw some parallels between the fight for gay equality and this subject, but they're actually quite different in that the former could be (as I noted before) clearly defined and were rooted in some static principles, as to where the latter is rooted in conditional abstracts.
The defense for gay equality was a simple one to define
"A person being attracted to someone of the same sex shouldn't have any impact on employment, the ability to enter into a marriage contract, or adopt children" - then the other side can disagree, and they can hash it out
The modern-day debates on gender related topics are quite different
"Transgender women are women, and if this person makes up a new pronoun, you have to have to refer to them as that at their request, and if you fail to agree to either of those, you're a bigot" - yet, they refuse to define their terms in any meaningful way
Another way things have changed is that it changed from an emphasis on defending negative rights (that oblige inaction), to asserting positive rights (that require someone else to do something for you).
en.wikipedia.org
