I agree. I would like for someone to enumerate all the people who have been “cancelled” and then compare it to those that have been violently attacked.
I have lived in the East Europe pre-Perestroyka and back then, it was "just count political prisoners; see how few there are!". And it was true -- there were not that many by 1980s. But there were few not because thought police was not real, but because any appearance of acting against it would be quickly dealt with. So very few people would dare.
> "just count political prisoners; see how few there are!"
You see how it comes across as a little ridiculous when you equate "being cancelled on twitter" to "being a literal political prisoner"? Especially when there are actual political prisoners, in prison, in the US right now?
Losing your livelihood, in a nation famous for it's relative lack of safety net, is in fact a big deal.
Here's the thing, you don't have to pick a side so hard. It's not, either we get this dude fired for citing a study about the 1968 riots or you're in favor of the border patrol arresting citizens without due process. These things are actually highly unrelated, and both can be bad.
I mean I agree with you: broadly I think things like the Yascha Mounk case are bad (I mean there are even better examples on the left: take Matt Bruenig, for instance), but like it's totally insane to say it's the main authoritarian crisis in the US today in the midst of brutal police violence.
Also, I do think that the Mounk or Bruenig case are actually a little different from "cancel culture": they seem much more like political machinations at the places those people worked. Like I think either of those things could have happened just as easily 20 or 30 years ago. When I think "cancel culture" I think more about random people getting twitter mobbed for saying something offensive.
Really I think it's an issue of emphasis. And I think identifying some social pressure to be more "woke" with threat of ridicule on social media as being the first step on the way to totalitarianism, while simultaneously insisting the police brutality is nothing of the sort, reveals quite a lot about people's lack of perspective and warped priorities.
As oisdk points out, I would consider the very real threat of violence different than a celebrity getting their contract cancelled. But that’s an important point to also make. There’s a vast difference between a celebrity being cancelled and an average person. Cultivating popularity is a part of being a celebrity — so isn’t avoiding being cancelled a natural extension of that profession?
As for regular people getting cancelled, there only seems to be a handful - particularly those that might actually have committed a crime (thinking of the Central Park Karen).
Maybe there's only a handful of "regular people" getting cancelled... but that's enough to create a chilling effect, scaring others into compliance with convention.
A good example might be Walter Palmer, the hunter who killed Cecil the lion. He's rich, but wasn't a celebrity. What he did was legal, as far as he could tell. He didn't ask for his guides to break the law for him. Yet he was doxxed, received death threats, and had his house graffitied. People showed up to protest at his business (which is unrelated to hunting) and lowered its rating on Yelp through bad reviews.
(Incidentally, I disagree with the practice of hunting for sport, but think sport hunters should be stopped with new laws, rather than through mob action.)
I don’t know that we can attribute doxing or death threats to “cancel culture”. It’s certainly unjustified outrage. However, it does beg the question what exactly “being cancelled” means.
A woman in Kentucky was fired after 20 years from her job as a Hearing Instrument Specialist after she said she didn't support BLM in a facebook video: https://reclaimthenet.org/tabitha-morris-cancel-culture/ (Her GoFundMe was also shut down.)
I can post more if you'd like. None of these people are celebrities. None of them committed a crime. Some of them have stupid opinions, some of them made stupid decisions, one of them cracked his knuckles in the wrong way.
But if you don't believe that "regular people" are at risk here, well - I hope your opinions are all non-heretical and that they stay that way for the next 33 years.
Whenever I see lists like this, what's interesting to me is what's omitted. In this particular case I don't see mention of workers getting fired for trying to organize or advocate for unions[1]. I don't see the abuse that gets piled on cops who report the misdeeds of their colleagues[2]. And I don't see the NFL effectively blacklisting Colin Kaepernick for his views on police brutality.
It seems like it's only "cancel culture" when it happens to people we identify with.
In my mind, "cancel culture" refers to the phenomenon where an outraged group (usually on social media) seeks to retaliate against someone over a (possibly inferred) political opinion. Firing union organizers or harassing whistleblowers is bad, but doesn't fit into my mental model of cancel culture.
I'm glad you're expanding the list a little, but I'd also encourage you (and anyone else reading) to reflect on the difference and asymmetry, here.
(Rhetorical questions--no answer needed) What's the bottom-line difference in getting fired for roughly free-speech reasons by an employer of their own accord, or of their own accord but because a single person wrote them to bring your behavior to their attention, or instead because of a Twitter mob or a petition or a letter-writing campaign or a flood of bad news coverage or a boycott started by some group? How do we adjudicate which path is worse?
Part of what I find frustrating about this debate (as someone who takes this risk seriously, and has for a while) is selectiveness of the cases/scope/concerns that get brought up by a certain segment of outlets eager to catalog certain cases to build a narrative about who is censorious and who is censored.
There's a long history of people mobbing decision-makers (at schools, or libraries, businesses, media standards boards, advertisers, etc.) to lobby for action against things they don't like. The Dixie Chicks got caught in this fire. When One Million Moms threatened JCPenney over their deal with Ellen DeGeneres--what obvious outcome were they demanding? (They keep a brag-list of things they've gotten canceled at https://onemillionmoms.com/successes/, and a list of ~20 current campaigns. You can find even more at their parent org, AFA).
There are numerous teachers over the years who claim they were fired for being an atheist, teaching evolution, and a sad graveyard of articles about teachers sacked for exactly how they taught sex ed (of particular irony in this case, those fired for not teaching top-down abstinence-only dogma), or what books they're teaching.
(I realize this list is itself biased; I'm advocating expanding the umbrella, and suspicion of slanted lists, not trying to whatabout.)
But companies firing organizing workers isn't an example of cancel culture. Why would you be surprised that someone answered the question asked, and not a different question?
You're suggesting the person would have to remain jobless for a long time for it to be a cancellation? We're talking people deliberately going for other people's jobs in a country where access to health care is often tied to employment.
Have we started killing cancelled people? Who has been “cancelled” anyways? What punishments have they endured? A lost job at a very public position?
As someone wisely pointed out, the only person possibly going to be jailed in the #MeToo movement will be Harvey Weinstein. Many comedians and politicians have recovered. Look at Al Franken - polls show he’s electable in his state (by the group that ostracized him no less).
More importantly, if cancel culture had any teeth, this President would have been cancelled.
That's actually a great summary of the beef with cancel culture -- it only punches down.
They can't touch Trump, or Ben Shapiro, or any of the other people that they really hate. Those people's actual jobs are to say things progressives hate.
Who can the cancelers get? Moderate liberals, working in liberal enclaves, who said the wrong thing. Get'em! That'll make me feel better.
And what are the consequences of you getting cancelled? Really? You lose your job? People are fired everyday for silly things or no reason at all. But would you really want to continue working for a company/culture so incapable of enduring free thought? Perhaps companies need to suffer the consequences of losing talent to realize how intellectually bankrupt this process is.
Incredible how clueless some people can be to true mob evilness.
Being cancelled can mean that you will never get another job in your field. It depends on the circumstances. A cancelled professor on tenure track will probably never get another tenure track position.
So, to rephrase your words, "What so bad about not being able to feed yourself and your family...is that really so bad?"
Do you really think that the effect of "losing talent" will be accounted for when cancelling people? MAO "cancelled" (murdered) the intellectual class in his cultural revolution. Rational though isn't going to be emphasized in the midst of an irrational political movement.
By the way you write and think, you're probably a Millennial with a very weak grasp of history. Yet, you feel qualified to tell people that LIVED through communism that they should't fear what they are seeing.
I mean I think there's an argument to be made that discourse has become more rigid (although I do think it's overblown), but like I don't understand how you can write this:
> Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells going off. I'm legitimately scared. I've seen this before, I know where it goes.
And not be talking about a massive police crackdown on protest and the army being brought in to police civilians. Like your alarm bells are dead silent for all of that, but some celebrity has to apologise for not saying "latinx" or whatever and suddenly you're all "ah yes, just like in the Soviet Union"?!
It's difficult, when we are in thorough disagreement of the facts.
> And not be talking about a massive police crackdown on protest
Is the police crackdown on protest or rioting? I can buy an argument that Trump hates the protests and is secretly hoping that sending the police will also disperse protesters, but on its face, do we disagree that there's rioting in Portland, and that it's the police's job to stop it?
> and the army being brought in to police civilians.
Huh?
> but some celebrity has to apologise for not saying "latinx" or whatever
This is disingenuous strawmanning. There's plenty instances of people losing their jobs for saying the wrong thing, and even a few extreme cases of people ending their lives after intense internet vitriol(although it would be equally disingenuous of me to focus on those cases and claim that cancel culture "kills people"). I don't know why parent jumps on celebrities as go-to examples - a stronger example would be academia, where political censure has been normalized for decades.
I think that’s the point. “Cancel cultural” has always been around in some form or another when you challenge the cultural norms of some society or institution. The outrage over it now seems silly, particularly when it’s predominantly liberal people suffering from it. However, unlike other oppressed minorities of the past, the consequences are much less severe.
