If you have a social media account, you must certainly have come across the phrase cancel culture. It describes the act of collectively unsubscribing from a person, the way you might from a Netflix or New York Times subscription. The term was first coined on black Twitter. What started as a righteous call to boycott celebrities like Bill Cosby and Louis CK in light of the sexual assault allegations against them during the #MeToo movement has now turned into an insidious bipartisan undertaking, which targets journalists, academics and activists who do not toe the line within their political cliques.
Cancellation is a natural extension of call-out culture, wherein the person guilty of wrongthink is often not only publicly called out, in order to turn her into an outcast on social media, but her livelihood and real-world social affiliations are targeted.
On the liberal-left, gender critical feminists have become the latest targets of cancellation. Tax consultant Maya Forstater lost her contractual employment with a think tank for her tweets questioning the UK government’s policy on self-ID. When J. K. Rowling came out in her defence the woke mob turned on her as well. But as they found out—much to their chagrin—it isn’t quite as easy to boycott a billionaire, who is also one of the best fiction writers of our time. Dominican student Raquel Rosario Sánchez was forced to end her studies at Bristol University for her ties to radical feminist organization WPUK, and filmmaker Vaishnavi Sundar was invited to screen her documentary film on workplace sexual harassment in New York by The Polis Project, only to be informed a week before the screening that the event was being shelved due to her gender critical tweets. The last two instances are especially interesting, since the victims are women of colour, and their detractors are predominantly privileged white liberals—a peculiar case in the Social Justice realm, where every action is first weighed against the balance of intersectionality and power structures.
Almost every piece written in the liberal publications that have been defending cancel culture as righteous justice paints its victims as rich celebrities with large audiences, in an attempt to downplay its toxicity. They conveniently leave out regular folks like Julie Bindel, Forstater, Sundar and Sánchez because these women don’t fit their righteous little David versus the privileged, politically incorrect Goliath narrative.
But the malady of overzealous cancellation is not restricted to liberal-left circles. Indian right-wingers routinely share social media hashtags calling for the boycott of Bollywood celebrities, such as Swara Bhaskar, and stand-up comedians, such as Kunal Kamra and Varun Grover, for taking shots at the incumbent far-right Hindutva government. When journalist Barkha Dutt’s book Unquiet Land was released on Amazon, the page was inundated within hours by bad reviews from right-wing trolls, who hadn’t even purchased the book.
Cancel culture as practised on social media, then, is a form of tribal justice that seeks to achieve one or all of the following:
- Deplatform the victim and turn her into a social media pariah.
- Rob the victim of her livelihood by reporting her wrongthink to employers, or at the very least, cause a financial dent in a corporation or brand.
- Send a message to others with similar ideas, that not toeing the line—be it the left’s line on gender or the right’s line on nationalism—will have consequences.
What Cancellation Is Not
When I shared Nick Cohen’s brilliant piece on cancel culture on Facebook, a classical liberal acquaintance accused me of practicing cancellation myself based on my social media practices. It seems that my personal choice not to indulge rabid Trumpists on social media with my time and patience is “a microcosm of what is wrong with the liberal-left.”
As a liberal who broadly subscribes to the ethos of democratic socialism, I have a few conservative commentators among my mutuals, whose opinion I value, and whom I consider friends. I believe that there is a difference between a conservative in the John McCain mould and a Trump supporter. I can disagree with and debate the former on fiscal policies and gun control, knowing that he also has some basic human decency and a mutually agreed upon foundation of reality.
But I can’t be bothered to debate a dogmatic supporter of a sex offender who mocks disabled people and thinks neo-Nazis chanting Jews will not replace us are decent people. This doesn’t mean that I want Trump supporters deplatformed and fired from their jobs. I just do not wish to devote my time to arguing with them. I’m sure most of them will not find my political opinions of any interest either.
While working in the oilfield, I have known a bunch of Bible-thumpers from the southern states who believe that black people are inherently lazy, have a higher propensity towards violent crime and that the slave trade was started by Africans, who sold their kin to white colonizers. To those who wish to debate such colleagues with facts and data—more power to you. I do not have the time or patience to point out why their beliefs are flawed. But my refusal to engage does not amount to cancellation. I still work side with side with them and do not think they should lose their jobs.
There is also a fundamental problem with the sanctimonious advice that we should talk to the other side—as famously propounded by self-proclaimed centrist talk show host Dave Rubin—when that side believes that a section of society is inherently sub-human. To ask victims of racism to sit down and chat with those who dehumanize them is condescending.
People often seem to interpret cancellation as a right to have their sense of entitlement validated on an individual basis.
Most Areo readers will probably find this distinction quite elementary. But I felt the same way about freedom of expression, until I found that the vast majority of Indian right-wingers on social media think that being blocked by a celebrity to whom they have sent rape threats is a violation of their free speech. So I wrote a primer explaining freedom of expression in terms that I hoped they’d understand.
The misinterpretation of cancellation is similar to confusing freedom of speech with the fallacy of demanding to be heard, a distinction succinctly explained by Helen Pluckrose here.
- If you reply to my tweet telling me that adding pineapple to pizza is a Soros, Clinton or Deep State-funded conspiracy, and I block you, or refuse to debate the subject with you, that is not cancellation.
- If you are fired from Pizza Hut for believing in Soros, Clinton or Deep State-funded conspiracies, that’s cancellation, and I’d be outraged at your wrongful termination.
- If you were fired from Pizza Hut because you accused all patrons who ordered pineapple toppings of being Soros, Clinton or Deep State agents, and voiced your intention to poison them, then you’re not being cancelled. You’re being terminated for being dangerously unhinged.
- If a feminist is invited to speak at a public event about women’s rights and the invitation is later rescinded due to her gender-critical views, she is being cancelled.
- If I refuse to address your Facebook comment about why you think Munroe Bergdorf is from the planet Andoria, you are not being cancelled.
- If you’re a creationist who writes suspense novels and I do not wish to buy your book because I judge you to be dim-witted, you are not being cancelled.
- If you’re a creationist and I remove your suspense novels from the fiction section of a school library where I am the librarian, then it amounts to cancelling.
- If you’re a creationist and you write a book about why evolution is a hoax, and I refuse to include that book in the school syllabus, that is not cancellation. That’s just separating the fiction from the science syllabus.
Cancel culture is an exigent problem in a leftist ecosystem that is becoming increasingly authoritarian in its pursuit of social justice. However, let us not hand out the label to every victimhood games Olympian, who mistakes a Twitter block for a social boycott.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez
15 comments
Probably best to leave McCain and his supporters out of it. McCain seemed pretty anxious that we bomb as many not-americans as we could. I’m not even sure what it says about our country in that you feel like you can discuss policy analysis with supporters of a mad man like McCain but you can’t talk with common folk who just want to be left alone like most Trump supporters.
Excellent piece…i do have a bone to pick though. You mentioned that African blacks were NOT involved in the slave trade and anyone who claims that is a nutjob.( im paraphrasing) However i encourage you to read some more on this subject, and i recommend you start with some Thomas Sowell. Here’s another article you can refer to
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53444752
No I did not contest the accuracy of that historical fact. I merely meant that using it as a way to absolve white colonialists of their part in slavery as many of my southern colleagues do, is disingenuous.
Man, Areo is really losing it. Crap like this is something I could read in The Nation, or Salon.com. Why is it on an IDW platform? What is this writer doing here? Speech like this isn’t controversial, or being silenced!
How about we stop calling any of it “cancel culture”. It’s fare too cutesy for what it is. It’s like when people say “rapey”. But then “witch hunts” reminds one of adorable trick-or-treaters, and “McCarthyism” conjures images of either vantriloquism or the villain in UHF, depending on your age.
Well what an ignorant ‘identity politics’ advocate (or ‘useful idiot’ for ‘identity politics’) the article’s author, Zubin Madon, is here.
What he pointedly examples here as supposedly nothing to do with ‘cancel culture’ is on the contrary very much to do with it.
A comment that “black people are inherently lazy, have a higher propensity towards violent crime and that the slave trade was started by Africans, who sold their kin to white colonizers” is not at all what he claims.
Does he not read up and discuss?
Africans DID procure other Africans in the relatively brief interlude of European slave-buying: Africans and Arabs having initiated African slavery many centuries if not thosands of years before, and have since continued the practice.
Africans DO have different — indeed, evolved different — individual- and group-level characteristics, as do Asians and Europeans, owing to the very different challenges faced in the highly contrasting environments of Africa, Asia and Europe. It would be amazing if they didn’t exhibit evolved behavioural and attitudinal differences given the very long elapse of time since humans separated geographically and became distinct groups, as obviously evidenced in their different facial bone structures, physiques, susceptibilities/resilience re diseases/conditions, etc. Even the former deputy editor of Nature recognises this: see his new book all about this.
Zubin’s ignorance and his certainty that his ignorance is instead right, and that he’s right to be morally superior about it: all is driven by the ‘groupthink’ religious fervour of ‘identity politics’ that is precisely the stuff of ‘cancel culture’.
Given you clearly have no idea what identity politics is, an 8 year olds grasp of history and a truly laughable understanding of group characteristics and how that relates to stereotypes I’d suggest be a little less strident in your comments.
Well done at least for getting through a post without chucking in the word Marxist at pretty much random.
What a dumb tedious apologist for Marxism you are, Andrew.
An obscene bastardisation of Marxism is very precisely what ‘identity politics’ is.
It’s extremely well-documented historical fact that ‘identity politics’ is the Left’s major backlash against the mass of ordinary people for them not buying the ideological bull.
The appalling reality of this and the rotten egg that will be stuck to the face of the Left is not going away: the likes of you are.
And as for your scientific illiteracy re differences between major race categories: try actually reading up before parroting knee-jerk political baloney lamely trying to make out all difference is somehow unwarrented stereotyping.
There is a large peer-reviewed science literature here. As an introduction there’s the new book by the former deputy editor of Nature journal, Nicholas Wade: ‘A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History’.
Fools like you exemplify what is currently rotten in our culture.
But Trump supporters weren’t said in the piece to lack basic human decency. All the author said was that, by contrast with their knowledge of Trump supporters, they knew John McCain-style conservatives to have basic human decency. If I take myself to know that there’s eggs in my fridge, but to not know if there’s any in your fridge, you aren’t being logical to ascribe to me the belief that there aren’t any eggs in your fridge. What also isn’t logical is the claim in the piece that Trump “thinks neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” are decent people”. From what I remember he only said that he thought there were decent people on that side which also included neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us”, not that those who chanted that were decent people.
These sentences clearly labels all Trump supporters as lacking basic human decency
“I believe that there is a difference between a conservative in the John McCain mould and a Trump supporter. I can disagree with and debate the former on fiscal policies and gun control, knowing that he also has some basic human decency and a mutually agreed upon foundation of reality.”
As for your second point, yes, Trump did not say the Neo Nazi’s in Charlottesville were good people. In fact he specifically condemned them in the exact same press conference that quote is taken from. If I remember correctly, the “both sides” he was referring to were the people protesting the removal of confederate statues.
Replying to Kevin B’s comment. Yes, I checked and Trump indeed said, after he’d talked about those decent people on the side of those protesting the removal of the statue: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally”. But I’m still not with you on the idea that the 2 sentences from the piece clearly label all Trump supporters as lacking basic human decency. I think the natural implication is just to a lack of knowledge of decency rather than to a knowledge of a lack of decency. (So the problem as I see it here is a crazily omniscient claim to know that any McCain conservative one meets are fundamentally decent, rather than a crazy claim to know that all Trump supporters lack decency.)
Describing all Trump supporters as lacking basic human decency is just flat bigotry, no different than describing all Muslims as terrorists or all Native Americans as savages. I am disappointed Areo allowed that to go through the review.
People support Trump because they’re sick of the toxicity of the left. The left is driving people to vote Trump. He’d be holding steady at 15% in the polling right now if the left hadn’t spent his entire term sinking PRECICELY to his level.
No kidding. First time here and thought I had found a new site to bookmark, but with that kind of knee-jerk “calling out” — no, thanks. And by the way, the reason you could “talk to” McCain people is because they didn’t have the fear that with the next election, their country will be gone. Yeah, we’re intense, and with good reason.
I’m so sick of hearing PDT to blame for everything when the left is tearing the country to bits and leaving the remains in ashes that I couldn’t finish the story (why they are never criticized for actions such as replacing political discourse with character assassination, I’ll never know.) But I read long enough to see that you get your news from cable TV and know only mythology about PDT.
He did not mock the disabled. Not even the ONE time the corporate media accused him of it, let alone as a habit as your sentence (“mocks the disabled”) implies. His physical actions represented “flailing,” and he used the same hand motions with others to describe their uselessness despite “trying” to be “journalists.” So get your facts straight before accusing whole groups of people of having firm beliefs. (Yeah, that’s really horrible — although not nearly as bad as praising an ex-president who is still attempting the overthrow of his successor.)
I’ll just add — way past time that we started calling out the TDS patients — by constantly trying to tear down the reputation of a man they’ve never met and only know what journalists tell them, they show that they are FOR all he is fighting against (for free and under great pressure, for himself and his family) – — and ordinary Americans (those without TDS) hereby accuse your type of being FOR the destruction of America, special privileges for identity groups, outright bigotry against others, and constantly implying that most of us are racist and too dumb to know it (implicit bias). We don’t even have to mention the violence, burning, looting, and outright murder committed by Biden supporters AFTER three years of spying on the president — and attempted sedition.
We’re tired of taking the blame. It’s a new era, and we’re now calling out Biden supporters, Dems, Never Trumpers, Leftists, Globalists, or Corporatists – whatever you call yourself — for spending time criticizing the president and his voters and NOT calling out those who are currently burning down our cities. And if you think this is too intense to print (I expect that), check out the similarly-lengthy, complimentary comment I just posted under “Why Are Academics Such Bad Writers?” I’m not a nut. Just a very angry American. And there are a lot of us.
Shame.