Everyone is pro-Cancel Culture

There are no objective standards for who deserves to get cancelled

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, some conservatives have started building lists.

An organization calling itself the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation has compiled a list of tens of thousands of people it says are ‘celebrating’ Kirk’s death. Prominent conservative accounts are calling hundreds of employers to try to get people fired for their reactions to Kirk’s death. The Secretary of State is promising to revoke visas over Kirk posts and our Vice President is urging his followers to report people to their employers.

It’s absolutely true that there are some on the political left openly celebrating Kirk’s death. I think those people are wrong to do so. But many of the accounts in question are far more restrained, saying something akin to “Killing is wrong, but Kirk was still a bad person and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise”. I wrote something along those same lines last week, and I honestly won’t be surprised if I end up on someone’s list somewhere for it.

Conservatives are eagerly taking the opportunity of Kirk’s death to lead a wide-ranging cancellation campaign against people whose speech they disapprove of. They’re tracking down the workplaces of random, non-prominent internet users and trying to get them fired. They’ve even succeeded in taking a few famous scalps - MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd and the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah have both been fired for Kirk-related comments. Suddenly, the movement that once prided itself on defending free expression and railing against “cancel culture” is stridently pro-cancel when the targets are liberals or leftists.

There’s a very simple post here I could write here. Collect quotes from conservatives who spent years insisting that “speech is just speech” and “cancellation is authoritarian” and then contrast those quotes with their current zeal for punishing wrongthink about Kirk’s death. Point out how Republican politicians and thinkers have done the same things that they’re currently trying to cancel others for doing. I could quote this old Charlie Kirk post, which says “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There's ugly speech. There's gross speech. There's evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.” If I felt like making things both-sides-ish I could point out the liberals who eagerly cancelled people in the past now yelling about how cancellation is wrong. It’d be easy. You could practically write that post in your sleep.

But there’s a deeper, more universal and more useful point I think we can make about this episode. The truth is that everyone is pro-cancellation. Including them. Including you. Including me.

The Long History of Cancellation

Cancel culture is a modern phrase, but the instinct goes back as long as society has existed. Ancient Athens practiced literal ostracism,¹ voting citizens into ten years of exile. In Rome they would deface the names, records and statues of disgraced individuals even after death, in a practice called damnatio memoriae. We’ve had excommunications in medieval Europe, scarlet letters in Puritan New England, the employment blacklists of McCarthyism. More recently, we’ve had moral panics led by the religious right in the 80s and 90s and woke lectures from the left in the 2010s.

Most of these practices instinctively make us recoil. Hester Prynne is a sympathetic character and Joseph McCarthy is a historical villain synonymous with abuse of power. Finger-wagging lectures leave a bad taste in most people’s mouths, whether those lectures come from the religious right or the woke left. But cancel culture isn’t just McCarthyism and tiresome scolding.

We’ve cancelled plenty of bad people throughout history as well. Bill Cosby is persona non grata in the entertainment industry for his many, many crimes. There were organized attempts to shame and cancel Southern segregationists in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. Nazi propagandist Leni Reifenstahl, despite her obvious talents, was never able to have a career in film again after the second world war. Other Nazi bureaucrats had their heads shaved and were forced to walk around in public with signs proclaiming their complicity in crimes. And in Japan, most people seem to think the major post-war problem was that we didn’t cancel enough of the Japanese leaders guilty of horrific crimes against humanity.

I bring up these historical examples to make the point that cancellation isn’t something people oppose as a moral universal. It’s something they support when they think the person deserves it, and don’t support when they think the person doesn’t deserve it. Unless you’d be fine with Hermann Goering teaching your daughter’s second grade classroom, everyone is pro-cancellation when the person in question is heinous enough.

The Speech vs. Action Objection

One common objection is that today’s cancellations target speech, which is different from actual crimes. Of course Nazis and war criminals should be ‘cancelled’ for killing people, but that’s not the same as cancelling someone for pure opinions! I understand this objection, but I think it falls apart with any amount of scrutiny.

First, nobody actually thinks this way. Imagine a prestigious university has just hired a new admissions officer, who can decide which people get admitted. This individual is discovered to have a private Twitter account that in the past said “[RACE] people are disgusting, they’re subhuman monsters. They do nothing but leech on society. Their men are brutish apes and their women are worthless sluts. We should send all the {RACE} back where they came from”.² When asked to clarify, the new admissions officer says “That’s correct, I stand behind that. But it won’t impact my judgment, I promise to follow university procedures to the letter and be impartial in every admission decision to those filthy animals.” Would you really say “freedom of speech” in response to that? Of course not. You wouldn’t wait to catch them being racist. You’d insist that their speech alone was disqualifying, and you’d fire them immediately.

This pattern holds throughout our historical examples. Many of the cancellations that are widely supported by public opinion aren’t explicit war criminals. Segregationists were often ‘just voicing an opinion’, but were still shunned from polite society (to varying degrees). Leni Reifenstahl was never formally charged with crimes³ related to her work in Germany but was permanently cancelled all the same.

In addition, speech and action can’t always be cleanly separated. There are words we can say that make violence more likely, even though the person involved isn’t taking any action themselves. When leftists cheer the death of a conservative and speculate about who deserves to be next, that makes violence more likely. When Donald Trump calls his political opponents ‘the enemy within’ and ‘fascists’, he’s making violence more likely. The academic term for this is stochastic terrorism - not issuing direct orders, but shaping an environment where someone else is more likely to act. Hasan Piker tweeting a gun in response to a senator’s post was not “just words”.⁴ Neither was Charlie Kirk fantasizing about publicly executing Joe Biden.

It’s also relevant that cancellation is not a single, uniform penalty. Sometimes it means losing a job. Sometimes it’s social ostracism. Sometimes it’s merely harsh words and ridicule. Cancellation can refer to actions taken by private citizens, powerful corporations, or the state itself. The severity and details vary in any given incident. In some cases it may be appropriate to cancel someone at a lesser level (social shaming) but not at a higher level (permanent job loss).

In practice, everyone is pro-cancel culture for sufficiently bad things. Where does that leave us?

Cancellation is a Partisan Tool

Cancellation, as actually implemented in the real world, is a moving target. The details vary in each case. Is the behavior in question mere speech, or direct actions, speech that could incite actions, or something else entirely? Is the person in question a public figure or not? Is there further context that makes the cancelled figure more or less sympathetic? What level of cancellation is being attempted, and by whom?

Because these lines shift so easily, what happens in practice is that cancellation becomes a partisan tool. When liberals were culturally hegemonic, they eagerly arranged boycotts, damaged careers, and sought the firings of conservatives whose views or actions they thought were beyond the line of acceptability. In response conservatives denounced the concept of cancellation as antithetical to free speech and a free society. But now that conservatives have an advantageous cultural position they’re eager to cancel liberals for their own missteps, often with exactly the same playbook they previously protested. The last week has provided dozens (if not hundreds) of examples of this kind of hypocrisy, with liberals and conservatives neatly switching sides about whether or not cancellations are morally justified.

Vanishingly few people have consistent, objective standards of any kind about who deserves to be cancelled. It’s entirely ad-hoc and based around the tribal instincts of the moment. It’s much less about abstract principles and much more about power. Whoever holds the upper hand insists cancellation is legitimate. Whoever does not insists it is oppression.

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If I was a better social theorist, this is where I’d dazzle you with a set of neat principles to separate unjustified cancellations from good ones. But I’m not nearly smart enough to solve this problem, and frankly I’m not sure anyone is.

We can throw out ideas. If cancellation is unavoidable, and it’s inevitable that all societies will police their moral boundaries through shaming and exclusion, then the question isn’t whether we should have cancel culture. Instead the question is what form it should take, and what standards should govern it.

Maybe those standards could distinguish between temporary and permanent consequences. Maybe there should be separate rules for private actions (criticism, boycotts) and public ones (laws, state power). Maybe they could weigh the seriousness of harm, the proportionality of the response, the possibility of redemption. These all sound like good ideas to me. But I worry that in practice this means treating each case carefully, considering all the relevant details, and then tossing all that out and doing whatever the most rabid partisans on your side demand.

What’s clear is that nobody can pretend cancellation is something only the other side does. Everyone is pro-cancel culture for the people they despise enough. Until we admit that, we’re stuck in a hypocritical cycle - protesting cancellations one day and cheering them the next depending only on whose head is on the chopping block.

1. Today’s etymology fact - ostracism comes from the Greek ostraka, which were the pottery shards used to vote if someone should be exiled for ten years or not. Thus, ostracism.

2. Imagine it’s being said about whichever race you happen to sympathize with most.

3. She was arrested by the French and found to be a ‘fellow traveler’ of the Nazi party, but despite being held for several years was never formally charged with war crimes.

4. Although to be fair, Senator Cotton’s post also blurs the line between words and calls for violence