On Tuesday, ABC canceled its hit reboot of Roseanne following a horrifyingly racist tweet that star Roseanne Barr wrote about former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett. The tweet was only the latest offensive comment in a Twitter feed packed with Islamophobia, conspiracy theories, and “Make America Great Again” memes. Regardless of—or perhaps because of—her individual beliefs, her show was popular among Trump supporters who were thrilled to see a regular, middle class Trump voter portrayed on network television. The news of the cancellation has no doubt upset many conservatives, but also most likely B*ri W*iss, New York Times opinion writer and general first thought clickbait shit-stirrer. I am not B*ri W*iss, but trust me: this is her Op-Ed.

Imagine this: You’ve created a TV show that, among endless prestige television offerings, manages to secure fantastic ratings and inspire lively conversation. You’ve made a show not just for men or for women, for conservatives or for liberals, but truly for everyone who is white. And then, in the blink of an eye, after you’ve sent a tweet that would get you fired from a job in practically any industry, your show is gone.

I might be the only non-Trump voter who thinks this, but that doesn’t sound fair to me.

After outsized Internet backlash following an unfortunate tweet Roseanne Barr wrote about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett (who is black), ABC caved to the foaming Twitterati and pulled the plug on her show. But at what cost?

Now, I’m not saying that Roseanne’s racially offensive tweet—in which she said that Jarrett was the “child” of “Planet of the Apes” and the “Muslim brotherhood”—was good or warranted, even though that’s kind of what I will end up saying. Even if Roseanne was tweeting while on Ambien, she absolutely needed to apologize, and apologize she did. I’m not even saying the show should have been greenlit in the first place. But the swift cancellation in the midst of backlash sets a dangerous precedent for intellectuals and artists who work in the public sphere.

I tend to agree with Shakespeare’s belief that “‘Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed, / When not to be receives reproach of being, / And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed / Not by our feeling, but by others' seeing.” If the court of public opinion matters more than the true content of our character, why not express our truest opinions? Barr already weathered incredible criticism for her show despite the fact that it was politically moderate; as always, the backlash says much more about the audience than it does about the creator.

We suddenly live in such a neutered world where you can no longer claim that women are more sensitive than men, or that left-wing college campus ideologues are in the same fascist tier as Bashar al-Assad. It’s a new and suffocating set of rules if you’ve never been held accountable for anything your life. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t hold racists accountable, but that is basically what I’m saying. The left often claims that they want a culture predicated on respect and presumed good will, yet it seems that any attempt at civil discussion is thrown out the window.

It’s at this time that I’m going to confess that I’ve never seen Roseanne and don’t particularly care about its cancellation. There’s actually no good reason that I’m writing this at all, except that I’m addicted to being a mindless agent of controversy and get a perverse pleasure out of writing stuff like this. Someone around the office said “free speech” and “political correctness” and my ears perked up and I hurried over to my desk to type so hard that I might have broken a finger.