Reality can be known and measured and we need free speech to convey that knowledge.

From The Taboo That Killed Iryna Zarutska by Kat Rosenfield.  The subheading is A young woman fled war for a better life. She wound up in an America where we have abandoned public spaces to the most disordered and depraved.  A not particularly well argued essay but with a couple of insights.

It doesn't come through clearly but Rosenfield's useful insight is a Hayekian one.  For public policy to work well, it has to work in a marketplace of ideas interacting with reality.  If we put things beyond the pale of polite discussion, then we receive no feedback on policy and things begin to degrade.  

The greater issue is a cultural one: a growing frustration with what often feels like limitless tolerance for public disorder and antisocial behavior—and with it, a sense that one must not only avoid discussing these things to remain a liberal in good standing, but actively pretend they don’t exist.

If we cannot discuss a problem, there only a marginal probability it will just go away on its own.  

Zarutska’s murder has received a striking lack of coverage from most mainstream media outlets, and while on one hand this is hardly surprising—there are tens of thousands of homicides in this country every year, and only a handful of these ever become national news—it’s hard not to see the silence of the press on this matter as representative of a certain bias in what kinds of American crime stories are deemed worthy of public attention. It’s hard not to compare, for instance, the media response to the death of Iryna Zarutska last month with its coverage of the May 2023 encounter on the New York City subway between Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely—who, like Brown, was black, homeless, mentally ill, and prone to violent outbursts on public transit.

Then, as now, there was a sense that it was in bad taste—if not outright racist—to acknowledge that men like Brown and Neely are a familiar presence in American urban public spaces, and that this presence is not a good thing. Then, as now, the progressive party line was that it’s “real corny” and “a mark of low moral character” to admit that you are discomfited by encountering people on public transit who behave in ways that telegraph the imminent possibility of violence, or confrontation, or the lower-grade-but-still-unpleasant spectacle of seeing someone evacuate his bowels onto the seat where, but for your instinctive choice to herd your family down the car, your 3-year-old toddler would still have been sitting.

But then Rosenfield loses track of her argument and devolves into petty partisanship.  

The problem with this taboo around certain uncomfortable truths about public disorder is that when you make discussing those truths a thing that is Simply Not Done by decent progressive people, you leave the field of discourse wide open to the kind of person who cares about neither progressive politics nor decency. That is where we are now.

No, the problem with the taboo of discussing reality among progressives is not that it gives others the opportunity to discuss reality.  The problem is that the progressives taboo of discussing reality is that it blinds them to reality.  

In one paragraph she gets it profoundly wrong and profoundly right.

In shying away from what is politically inconvenient, ugly, or otherwise uncomfortable, we not only cede the conversation to racist idiots, but relinquish with it all hopes of a better future. The problem is not politics per se, but an inability to course correct when what seemed like progress turned out to be a misstep.

The first half of the paragraph is offensive.  She is casting the world as good progressives and racist idiots, the sort of othering which is profoundly unuseful and at the core of progressive taboos.  Either you are in the village with the good people or are outside among the barbarians.  This Manichaean attitude is immensely inhibiting and destructive.  She is both remonstrating the consequence of Manichaeanism (taboos and purifying rituals) and demonstrating that Manichaean attitude at the same time.

With this ideological overlay it would be easy to overlook the real insight in the second half of the paragraph.

The problem is not politics per se, but an inability to course correct when what seemed like progress turned out to be a misstep.

Indeed.  Smith, Hayek, and everyone in between would agree.  All classical liberals (distinct from progressives) are in agreement that there is a knowable reality and that we approach that reality through an empirical engagement with reality.  We want to know.  It is why the First Amendment and free speech is so critical to the Classical Liberal model and so anathema to the Progressive model.  Reality can be known and measured and we need free speech to convey that knowledge.

She ends with a truth that is argued by her against her fellow progressives but which all Classical Liberals would endorse.

The tragedy is that a woman who fled the terror and disorder of war for a better life in a peaceful America instead ended up, unknown to her, in an America where we have tacitly abandoned certain public spaces to the most disordered and depraved among us because enforcing the law feels mean and makes us uncomfortable.