The Harper's Letter, Cancel Culture, and Free Speech

[Mark^Bastard]

I confess my viewpoint of public speech has altered considerably in the last few years, from a boilerplate libertarian attitude to something … much less so. While recognizing the dangers of gatekeeping and marginalizing voices, I lean more to a communitarian attitude where some speech does deserve public censure right out of the gate. Too much of the libertarian position has come to mean speech meant to offend and without consequences, which has pushed me to consider whether we, as a society, are mature enough to be entrusted with genuine free speech. Related to that, I'm bothered by the decline in the sacred. By this, I don't mean in the religious sense, but rather a shared decency. Gleefully using slurs and seeking to diminish people based on their race or gender. Some things we should understand are not appropriate, not because of law but because of shared custom. A victim, I suppose, of our fragmented culture where everything is open as a target.

Firstly it's very refreshing to see someone self-aware that their attitude has changed. I'm one of the few people that hasn't changed with the world, I still believe in left-libertarian values as much as ever, and it's been frustrating seeing so many other people change and then pretend they haven't.

A couple of other points:
- It's often better to let people say what they think and get it out in the open, even if it's uncomfortable. They will receive feedback and they'll take it on board and likely be less extreme.
- The extremist views of the last decade or so are in part due to censorship. It allows these people to believe that they are truth bearers that are being censored. It keeps them going.
- Well intentioned policy with bad outcomes is disastrous and people need to think critically when this happens and change accordingly.
- Cancel culture absolutely does exist. It isn't the same thing as censorship but it can lead to censorship. For example, if someone says something and a lot of people disagree with it and call them out on it, that is free speech both ways. If the mob 'cancel' a regular blue collar worker and their employer fires them and they can't get work any more because their name is mud and a simple google search will show how bad they are, that is censorship. To say this doesn't exist is a big cope, there are numerous examples, including where people have been 'wrongly convicted' due to fraudsters that make videos on youtube claiming racism (etc).
- Overall, the point of left-libertarian values is to take away the power from both government and corporations. It's sort of paradoxical then that cancel culture is often neither of those, but a more democratic style of backlash. But people are also not showing the kind of restraint they should, looking at both sides, being fair with people, understanding that redemption exists and people can grow etc. Without that it's horrible. Particularly bad in this post-modern culture we have now.

[Dr. Medulla]

A few comments about the above.

I'd need to see examples of what is being called censorship here because I think there's a misapplication of the term. Censorship is done by the state, legally punishing citizens who violate laws regulating speech. A "mob" or Google search can't censor anyone. That's not picking nits, I don't think, because censorship is about being going up against the power of the state, not interacting with fellow citizens.

What I think you're claiming as censorship is what should be understood as consequence. Speech, if it has value, has consequences. We want to influence others with our speech, opponents wants to counter the influence of our speech, government censors want to ensure our speech does not have consequences it doesn't like (like promoting a revolution), etc. If speech simply evaporated the moment it appears, no one would care. It wouldn't be worth censoring, it wouldn't be worth responding to, it wouldn't be worth the burning of calories to produce. So, speech must be consequential if it's worth a damn. That's central to all this.

But because life (or history, if your prefer) is fluid, what produces good consequences and bad consequences is always changing. Always. Life is only static in nostalgia. In some social groups, using racial slurs, say, produces bad consequences. in others, good consequences (even if it's just to affirm solidarity with the group). How we dress for certain contexts produce different consequences. Wearing jeans and a t-shirt with "Fuck You" on it will likely produce a different response from others than a three-piece suit, whether it's at a concert or a job interview. Those are consequences of speech. Different time frames reflecting different social norms will produce different consequences, too. A hundred years ago, or twenty years ago, saying certain words or how one dressed in public would generate bad consequences, now they generate good consequences or only mildly bad ones.

The point is that it's fluid … and it's always been fluid. Those who think the changing norms and values are some huge violation of an objective good standard are complaining that those good and bad consequences that used to favour them are less likely to do so. They claim they're being canceled. No, they're experiencing the bad consequences of being out of the norm. It happens. That's politics. Some groups and values rise, others fall. It may suck for those who wish it was like the old days when they could, say, openly mock people of colour, queer people, or women, but it's better than speech having no consequences, having no value. If you only want your speech to have good consequences, that's being entitled and immature. That's a toddler's or a billionaire's perspective.

It sounds nice to suggest super duper open conversation and all, and in the abstract I agree, but if there are no consequences from that openness—if it's all just air—we'd quickly feel it's a pretty hollow exercise. We can argue about the quality of the consequences, good and bad, and whether they're justified, but just calling for openness ends up devaluing what it is we want.

Cancel culture is the complaint of those whose values, which once produced good consequences when expressed, now produce bad ones, even if it's just being mocked on twitter (the bad consequence in this case is a realization that one's status is shakier than you think it should be). That's politics and that's history, and denying each isn't going to get you very far.

[Dr. Medulla]

A fine piece from Ken "Popehat" White:

Regarding Efforts By You, In Inferior Person, To Cancel Me, A Genius
As you know, I recently said something incendiary and provocative, and you reacted, as did many people like you.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

You see, I said what I said knowing that this would be your reaction. I did it to prove a point. The point is that I am a genius and you and the rest of society is sadly inferior. The good news is that you may have a limited capacity to improve, with the help of people like me. There are not many of us, but there are a few, we brave few.

When I said the incendiary and provocative thing, intending that you would react, I was not actually being incendiary or provocative. I was being thoughtful, and deep. If you had followed my clever wordplay, or my superior use of rhetoric, you would have seen that I was not incendiary at all. I was insightful. However, I will not clarify exactly how you misunderstood what I said, or how what I said was somehow exaggerated or rendered misleading for effect. That's not what geniuses do for inferior people. In fact, many of the incendiary parts of what I said are actually literally true, and I did not go far enough. Wait. Do I mean that? Or am I being deliberately incendiary again to illustrate a deep social truth? Not telling.

When you think I am getting facts "wrong," you are missing how I am illuminating what truth means. When you say I am "ignoring context," you are missing how I am illustrating the unknowability of context. When you say I am contradicting myself, you fail to recognize I am in a Platonic dialogue with myself, and both sides of myself are winning.

I set out boldly to illustrate many things: how society in general and people like you are thoughtless sheep, how you fail to appreciate the geniuses among you, how you resist wisdom, how you persecute and oppress the most enlightened in your society, how you shun and mock and divorce and occasionally pepper-spray them, how you call them things like bigot, emotionally spavined, narcissistic, sociopathic, kinda creepy. Your reaction, reviling me, is simultaneously exactly what I intended and anticipated and a deep, sigh-provoking disappointment to me. It is a sign of genius to be able to accommodate both of these feelings at once.

Your reaction shows what is wrong with society. Specifically: when I, a genius, speak, you, a mediocre person, should listen, and appreciate. That's what freedom of speech means. When you react by criticizing and shunning me, you demonstrate your contempt for freedom of expression. Freedom of speech means I talk and you listen respectfully and make occasional soft noises of affirmation, whether it is on one of my YouTube videos or when I initiate foreplay by explaining why women are overrepresented in engineering. When you don't, you are part of the mindless mob, heirs to the tradition of people who condemned Socrates and crucified Jesus and were really quite rude to that thoughtful young man Nick Fuentes.

When you react to me with criticism, or by deciding not to associate with me, you are driving a stake through the heart of free speech culture. Free speech culture means that I can say whatever I want about other people but they shouldn't say anything that would make me feel badly about what I said, if I had the emotional capacity to feel badly about what I said, which I do not. You must abandon your instinct to criticize or shun me as if that instinct were a troubled stepchild.

I know this is very difficult for you to follow. But you should continue to try. Please pay to subscribe to my various things, to help stand up against the mindless hordes silencing me. If you don't, you hate speech and Western Civilization. Thank you for trying to follow me.

https://post.news/@/popehat/2MQJ4k9HJnheREhy6iguOZmsbhT

[Flex]

A fine piece from Ken "Popehat" White:

Ahh, the inevitable message of every substacker in existence.

[Dr. Medulla]

Just gonna throw this here without comment. If people want to bounce off it, there you go. This is from Claire Dederer's Monsters, discussing Richard Wagner, antisemitism, and a documentary that Stephen Fry narrated:

When Stephen Fry describes the letter he’d like to write to Wagner—“Listen, you’re on the brink of becoming the greatest artist of the nineteenth century and future generations will forget that, simply because of this nasty little essay that you’re writing”—he’s actually describing the dynamic that we call cancel culture. The very term “cancel culture” is hopelessly non-useful, with its suggestion that the loss of status for the accused is somehow on a par with the suffering endured by the victim. Stephen Fry’s distance from the past—his assumed enlightenment—allows him to say something to a historical figure that he might not say to someone alive.

…

What (miserably) gets called cancel culture is the contemporaneous act of telling someone that the thing they’re doing or saying is, to use Fry’s word, “nasty.” Cancel culture is, from this perspective, the most sensible thing in the world—rather than fantasizing about confronting someone in the past, practitioners of cancellation are confronting someone in the present. And such confrontations should be welcome, right?

This is a hint that our self-concept of being at the apex of enlightenment is maybe a little off. Because if we were really so enlightened, wouldn’t we celebrate that this pointing out has occurred? I don’t mean to pretend an innocence that I don’t really have. Of course I know that the pointing out of wrongdoing can become, has become, virulent. Of course I know that because of the way we process accusations, there now exists a culture of fear, a sense of imminent exposure. Personally, I regret things I’ve said, things I’ve written, things I’ve done. They’re out there and I know I was wrong. I have a sense of fear that I might be shamed for my mistakes. Is this shame-in-waiting the price we pay for the reckoning of #MeToo? Is it some kind of Greek myth–like trade-off where we don’t get one without the other? If so, is it worth my potential loss of status for victims to be able to say what happened to them? My answer is, tentatively: yes. Even though loss of status can be pretty fucking awful.

This trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman—but, to my mind, it’s the bargain that’s on the table right now. Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half the equation: the half where people are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain; probably it is. But it’s the reality we live in.

The liberal fantasy of effortless enlightenment simply assumes we’re getting better all the time. But how on earth can we improve unless we listen to people saying what’s wrong?

[Dr. Medulla]

This could go in the Stand-Ups thread, but more appropriate here, I think: https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/ricky- ... 235851313/

Not that I've made a serious accounting of it, but it seems like the comedians who have crashed and burned raging against wokeness and cancel culture and all that are Xers. Maybe it's a generational tic or maybe they just happened to be having their career midlife crisis at the wrong time (wrong, that is, in terms of their respectability). A comedian in their 50s these days will give me premature shudders.

[Dr. Medulla]

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/ ... ns-musical

There's a lot of question begging around the idea of cancel culture. Which is to say, does it actually exist? Some people have their reputations sullied a bit, but "cancelled"? They all still earn their living from that thing they do. Maybe it's just a question of definitions, where the phenomenon is mislabeled or its effects exaggerated, but I can't help but think, with time, it'll be looked at with more of a shrug.

[Flex]

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/ ... ns-musical

There's a lot of question begging around the idea of cancel culture. Which is to say, does it actually exist? Some people have their reputations sullied a bit, but "cancelled"? They all still earn their living from that thing they do. Maybe it's just a question of definitions, where the phenomenon is mislabeled or its effects exaggerated, but I can't help but think, with time, it'll be looked at with more of a shrug.

Yeah, canceled usually means "I'm famous and some people hurt my feelings for the bad things I did." I struggle to find many examples of truly canceled famous people. Like, they were movie stars and then had to make ends meet pumping gas because they were completely cast out of respectable society. "Going to prison" seems like something of a red line for at least Weinstein. Matt Lauer has been pretty MIA (partly because I suspect he's guilty of shit that hasn't even come out yet that would get him in a lot of legal trouble). I dunno, it's a short list. Even guys like Kanye West who come out as actual Nazis seem to do pretty okay career-wise even if they don't get the universal acclaim they used to.

Here's an interesting test case roiling around: Norman Finkelstein is a professor and extremely controversial writer about Israel and Palestine. Has long called Israel's policies towards Palestine genocidal, that sort of thing. So, with the current ongoing war, "what does Norman think about this and what's he been up to" was a pretty logical inquiry for some folks. And it seems like what he's been up to is... becoming an anti DEI/ anti trans/anti woke person. Like... it's been an embarrassing fixation of his for a while now, apparently. So now there's a whole debate about whether Finkelstein is a voice we should be listening to on Israel/Gaza because of his retrograde views on other stuff (trans rights, especially).

Leaving aside the merits of Finkelstein's work on Israel/Palestine (not a debate I want to entertain here), I think this is notable partly because it's such a niche debate. Finkelstein is in some sense a public figure, but he doesn't have any real crossover appeal. His intellectual and popular support comes from a certain segment of the left. He can subdivide that group slightly but there's a real possibility of being pushed into irrelevance. He doesn't even really have the broad reach of other former left-of-the-spectrum darlings like Greenwald or Taibbi or similar who made the left to right leap pretty successfully after getting blowback from their natural fanbase. So it seems like at this level of marginal pop existence, where you really survive thanks to a specific niche of people, maybe canceling could be real. Also, notably, Finkelstein and guys like that aren't really entertainers. I think the most successful "cancellations" are generally folks people don't associate directly with their own pleasure-seeking. Once someone has that association, they seem basically untouchable.

[Dr. Medulla]

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/ ... ns-musical

There's a lot of question begging around the idea of cancel culture. Which is to say, does it actually exist? Some people have their reputations sullied a bit, but "cancelled"? They all still earn their living from that thing they do. Maybe it's just a question of definitions, where the phenomenon is mislabeled or its effects exaggerated, but I can't help but think, with time, it'll be looked at with more of a shrug.

Yeah, canceled usually means "I'm famous and some people hurt my feelings for the bad things I did." I struggle to find many examples of truly canceled famous people. Like, they were movie stars and then had to make ends meet pumping gas because they were completely cast out of respectable society. "Going to prison" seems like something of a red line for at least Weinstein. Matt Lauer has been pretty MIA (partly because I suspect he's guilty of shit that hasn't even come out yet that would get him in a lot of legal trouble). I dunno, it's a short list. Even guys like Kanye West who come out as actual Nazis seem to do pretty okay career-wise even if they don't get the universal acclaim they used to.

Here's an interesting test case roiling around: Norman Finkelstein is a professor and extremely controversial writer about Israel and Palestine. Has long called Israel's policies towards Palestine genocidal, that sort of thing. So, with the current ongoing war, "what does Norman think about this and what's he been up to" was a pretty logical inquiry for some folks. And it seems like what he's been up to is... becoming an anti DEI/ anti trans/anti woke person. Like... it's been an embarrassing fixation of his for a while now, apparently. So now there's a whole debate about whether Finkelstein is a voice we should be listening to on Israel/Gaza because of his retrograde views on other stuff (trans rights, especially).

Leaving aside the merits of Finkelstein's work on Israel/Palestine (not a debate I want to entertain here), I think this is notable partly because it's such a niche debate. Finkelstein is in some sense a public figure, but he doesn't have any real crossover appeal. His intellectual and popular support comes from a certain segment of the left. He can subdivide that group slightly but there's a real possibility of being pushed into irrelevance. He doesn't even really have the broad reach of other former left-of-the-spectrum darlings like Greenwald or Taibbi or similar who made the left to right leap pretty successfully after getting blowback from their natural fanbase. So it seems like at this level of marginal pop existence, where you really survive thanks to a specific niche of people, maybe canceling could be real. Also, notably, Finkelstein and guys like that aren't really entertainers. I think the most successful "cancellations" are generally folks people don't associate directly with their own pleasure-seeking. Once someone has that association, they seem basically untouchable.

This speaks, I think, to the problem that Dederer raises: that the internet and especially social media has made (reduced?) everything biography. Which, to me, has an emotional quality to it, where we like or dislike, love or hate people as a whole. We want perfection and eagerly condemn for failures. Does Finkelstein's views on X get discredited (cancelled) because of his views on Y? Are we able to break away from the biography element and compartmentalize into ideas, values, positions? We don't have to buy the complete package, yet that does seem to be the trap. Which isn't me saying we should happily ignore a person's ugly views just because we agree with other positions, only that we stop engaging in a kind of fandom and behave in a more disengaged manner when invoking and assessing public figures. We're not friends with them, so let's not be so invested in their existence that way.

[Flex]

This speaks, I think, to the problem that Dederer raises: that the internet and especially social media has made (reduced?) everything biography. Which, to me, has an emotional quality to it, where we like or dislike, love or hate people as a whole. We want perfection and eagerly condemn for failures. Does Finkelstein's views on X get discredited (cancelled) because of his views on Y? Are we able to break away from the biography element and compartmentalize into ideas, values, positions? We don't have to buy the complete package, yet that does seem to be the trap. Which isn't me saying we should happily ignore a person's ugly views just because we agree with other positions, only that we stop engaging in a kind of fandom and behave in a more disengaged manner when invoking and assessing public figures. We're not friends with them, so let's not be so invested in their existence that way.

I think biography can become important when it may speak to issues of credibility. With Finkelstein, he fashions himself as a voice of the voiceless. Well, on Israel/Palestine I rely largely on subject matter experts to flesh out my understanding of, like, what the fuck is going on but on trans issues I have better immediate subject matter experience and so I know he's on the wrong side of some of these issues. He's the voice of the voiceful on identity politics stuff. So does that impact his trustworthiness on other issues? Maybe. I genuinely don't always know how to answer that (and for some of these people generally, moving beyond the Finkelstein example) but I think it's worth considering.

Generally I think biography is important when it runs so contrary to how I perceived the person's work or art before. Jerry Lee Lewis is a horrible person and probably even a murderer but that's not really in conflict with his art. The anti-flag guy turning out to be a groomer and a rapist after singing songs for decades about respecting women and whatnot make his work intolerable for me now (another example of someone who seems to have actually been canceled, so far). Matt Lauer's behind the scenes behavior was egregious enough it seems to have negatively impacts his abilitynto credibly deliver the news (giving the today show a very, very generous definition of being news for the moment). So, maybe there's something of a nexus to behavior and credibility in what they do. Or should be. I dunno.

[Dr. Medulla]

This speaks, I think, to the problem that Dederer raises: that the internet and especially social media has made (reduced?) everything biography. Which, to me, has an emotional quality to it, where we like or dislike, love or hate people as a whole. We want perfection and eagerly condemn for failures. Does Finkelstein's views on X get discredited (cancelled) because of his views on Y? Are we able to break away from the biography element and compartmentalize into ideas, values, positions? We don't have to buy the complete package, yet that does seem to be the trap. Which isn't me saying we should happily ignore a person's ugly views just because we agree with other positions, only that we stop engaging in a kind of fandom and behave in a more disengaged manner when invoking and assessing public figures. We're not friends with them, so let's not be so invested in their existence that way.

I think biography can become important when it may speak to issues of credibility. With Finkelstein, he fashions himself as a voice of the voiceless. Well, on Israel/Palestine I rely largely on subject matter experts to flesh out my understanding of, like, what the fuck is going on but on trans issues I have better immediate subject matter experience and so I know he's on the wrong side of some of these issues. He's the voice of the voiceful on identity politics stuff. So does that impact his trustworthiness on other issues? Maybe. I genuinely don't always know how to answer that (and for some of these people generally, moving beyond the Finkelstein example) but I think it's worth considering.

Generally I think biography is important when it runs so contrary to how I perceived the person's work or art before. Jerry Lee Lewis is a horrible person and probably even a murderer but that's not really in conflict with his art. The anti-flag guy turning out to be a groomer and a rapist after singing songs for decades about respecting women and whatnot make his work intolerable for me now (another example of someone who seems to have actually been canceled, so far). Matt Lauer's behind the scenes behavior was egregious enough it seems to have negatively impacts his abilitynto credibly deliver the news (giving the today show a very, very generous definition of being news for the moment). So, maybe there's something of a nexus to behavior and credibility in what they do. Or should be. I dunno.

I won't deny the value of biography—I'm not extremist in my position—but I think we are, in a general sense, overly beholden to it. It's difficult when it causes us to downgrade our evaluation of ideas and values due to the person being a rat. As you sensibly raised a month or so ago, Assange represents certain important values—absolutely critical values to a free society—but the biography element can obscure or compromise that, whether it's condemning him for his personal conduct or denying his sins. Disentangling Assange the person from the values he's promoted should be the goal because those values are so important. But the defenders, who embrace the biography element, end up fucking with the discourse, sucking others in.

In the case of art, when he invoke the importance of biographer, we're agreeing to weaken our power to use art for our needs, to make it ours, by infusing it with the identity of the creator. That can generate extra positive value for us, certainly, but it can also lead us to abandon that which ones gave us comfort and inspiration. It's a gamble, isn't it? By embracing that model or formula—art + biography = our experience—we're risking a milkshake duck that ruins it all. I wish like fuck Morrissey had died a long time ago, before his non-art pronouncements wrecked things for me. I've chosen to infuse the one with the other and so I've pretty much excised him and the Smiths from my life. My choice, clearly, but I can't say for sure it's the wiser choice. I haven't enjoyed his new work since the 90s, so it's not like I'd be giving him my money, but the older stuff has nevertheless suffered for me.

[Flex]

I didn't mean to let this drop, more that I needed some time to properly respond (and also remind myself a little of what we're talking about here).

I won't deny the value of biography—I'm not extremist in my position—but I think we are, in a general sense, overly beholden to it. It's difficult when it causes us to downgrade our evaluation of ideas and values due to the person being a rat. As you sensibly raised a month or so ago, Assange represents certain important values—absolutely critical values to a free society—but the biography element can obscure or compromise that, whether it's condemning him for his personal conduct or denying his sins. Disentangling Assange the person from the values he's promoted should be the goal because those values are so important. But the defenders, who embrace the biography element, end up fucking with the discourse, sucking others in.

The real answer, of course, to these sorts of things is "it depends." With Assange, he's an interesting test case where (at least for WikiLeaks earlier, more vital, work) there's a pretty strong case that Assange is essentially irrelevant. There's some editorial element to WikiLeaks, but he mostly fostered a pipeline of getting classified material to the public. We can evaluate that material with minimal need to consider Assange at all. Later WikiLeaks work, when "WikiLeaks" really became "Assange flipping stuff he got from Russia", well, maybe we consider the relevance of that pipeline in evaluating the material. And that's still slightly different than fixating on Assange's own moral turpitude, as you point out (that I pointed out, lol).

Leaving Finkelstein, let's consider Noam Chomsky (a signer to the Harper Letter! Bringing that back to the start of the circle). Someone most of us would consider an intellectual or political influence to some degree or another, I imagine. Certainly one of the most important writers in my own biography, as it were. Unfortunately, lately I've become more familiar with his own history of genocide denial and some dubious historical work. Do we "cancel" him for that? This is stuff that seems germaine to his general credibility as an academic and a thinker. He's also part of a lineage of political thought that's grown beyond him, individually. I remember seeing him in person give a lecture back in college, and afterwards one of the things we all agreed on was that his ideas seem to have populated themselves in our collective dialogue to the extent that it felt like we were hearing him play an old greatest hits album. So I think those ideas exist and have value beyond a personal reconsideration of the man, but they aren't discredited even if knowing more of his entire body of work makes me less inclined to seek him out for insight on current events.

(He also was apparently on some Epstein flight logs?! Seems super sus, but that's a more straightforward cancel-worthy activity if we ever get more info on that which, to my mind, isn't really relevant to anything he's wrote or spoken about during his career).

This is also in a bucket with other academics, reporters and the like where there's at least some requirement to believe in the integrity of the person to, at least, be trying to tell the truth as they understand it and whatnot. I think of some of these things in the vein of, like, talking heads on TV who end up being secretly on the payroll of a company involved in the issue they're talking about. Even if what they're saying has/had value, it becomes extremely tainted.

In the case of art, when he invoke the importance of biographer, we're agreeing to weaken our power to use art for our needs, to make it ours, by infusing it with the identity of the creator. That can generate extra positive value for us, certainly, but it can also lead us to abandon that which ones gave us comfort and inspiration. It's a gamble, isn't it? By embracing that model or formula—art + biography = our experience—we're risking a milkshake duck that ruins it all. I wish like fuck Morrissey had died a long time ago, before his non-art pronouncements wrecked things for me. I've chosen to infuse the one with the other and so I've pretty much excised him and the Smiths from my life. My choice, clearly, but I can't say for sure it's the wiser choice. I haven't enjoyed his new work since the 90s, so it's not like I'd be giving him my money, but the older stuff has nevertheless suffered for me.

On art, it's all much mushier and seems to at least somewhat come down to "what gives us pleasure and satisfaction?" In music, there are plenty of singles and whatnot where I know nothing about the artist and that's fine, but I'd be lying if I said fusing some understanding of the creator's biography into my listening of my very favorite music doesn't add some undefinable enjoyment to the proceedings. I mean, that's part of why we're all here, I guess. I also think it's fine for these things to not be very consistent. David Bowie's history doesn't really bother me or lessen my enjoyment of his art, even if on some intellectual level I understand I'd find some of his activities repugnant if someone else did them. Hell, Led Zeppelin's excesses are part of their mystique.

I think timeliness has a lot to do with it. David Bowie was still around until relatively recently, but his "cancelable" behavior all seemed to happen many decades ago and he seems (to us, anyways) to have matured and become a much more thoughtful, respectful person since then. Maybe that wouldn't go too far in a court of law, but as a fan that kind of growth actually turns into a positive.

The Anti-Flag guy is a good counterpoint, besides being very explicitly a liar and (alleged) groomer and rapist, the immediacy of his actions suggest being a fan (giving him revenue, going to shows, etc.) actually would give him cover to continue his predatory behavior. I mean, I don't really give a shit how much I like a song or whatever, I don't want to be even a fraction of 1% responsible for helping a guy go around the world grooming underrage girls. Better to know, even if it makes me not want to listen to Anti-Flag anymore. And maybe I shouldn't care about the biography of the artist, but I don't really wanna go around listening to songs extolling the fight for gender equality and need to hold men accountable from a sexual predator. It feels so gross even thinking about it. No art is worth having to do that kind of compartmentalization, imho.

An example where the biography does seem overwrought as far as I can tell is Aziz Ansari. If you don't recall the name immediately, he's a comedian who was Tom on Parks and Rec, does standup, had his own show on Netflix. Sort of built a rep as someone who had some more emotional maturity and insight into dating, gender relations, etc. Anyways, during peak metoo he has an article written about him from a woman who basically went on a date with him and he acted like an entitled, pushy asshole who tried to get her to have sex with him and it ended in a kind of unpleasant way. She didn't accuse him of rape, he didn't actually force himself on her, etc. It was a shitty date, he sucked.

There was some uproar because of how that was in friction with his cultivated public personae, but - like - he was playing characters and stuff in public. Yeah, it's kinda disappointing he is (or can be) a shitty dude to date but the overlay of "Aziz the character" over "aziz the actual person" was over the top. I think netflix canceled the last season of his show, although it looks like they brought it back a couple years later for another season. He took a couple months off of touring his standup but came back and incorporated what happened into his set. Whatever. A case of cancelation where there weren't any real consequences (probably rightly so, in this case). So I think that's a good example of what you're talking about, where the biography is overly important in people's minds.

I think there's also a distinction between "I don't want to read this person's analysis/listen to their music/watch their show/etc." anymore because you know something about the person and don't like/trust them anymore and an actual movement to, like, expunge a person from society or make it impossible to find work. The former is a personal choice and everyone just kinda finds what works for them, the latter is at least ostensibly what the "cancel culture" movement is all about doing. But there are, to the originally, extremely few cases of this happening at all. Morrissey is still doing his bullshit, Louis CK sells out all his live shows, Bill Clinton just hosted a $26million fundraiser for Joe Biden. I'd love to dredge up more than a small handful of super niche cases of cancel culture (or a handful of cases like Weinsten where people were "canceled" by going to actual prison) before I believe it's an actual thing that happened/is happening. So, I agree with your original comment about it that it's gonna be recalled as a big nothingburger in time.

[Dr. Medulla]

The real answer, of course, to these sorts of things is "it depends."

I frustrate students because I never allow that answer (or "it's both") during discussion. Pick a side, bub! But, yes, in the real world, the answer is grey, not black or white.

With Assange, he's an interesting test case where (at least for WikiLeaks earlier, more vital, work) there's a pretty strong case that Assange is essentially irrelevant. There's some editorial element to WikiLeaks, but he mostly fostered a pipeline of getting classified material to the public. We can evaluate that material with minimal need to consider Assange at all. Later WikiLeaks work, when "WikiLeaks" really became "Assange flipping stuff he got from Russia", well, maybe we consider the relevance of that pipeline in evaluating the material. And that's still slightly different than fixating on Assange's own moral turpitude, as you point out (that I pointed out, lol).

Which, in a weird way, suggests that who cares if the NATO whores succeeded in getting him extradited to the US. Maybe he becomes a martyr to some, but the work continues, the principle being greater than the man. Hell, a la "A Plea for Captain John Brown," if one thinks the US/NATO is Satan's dung, his persecution and punishment proves it.

Leaving Finkelstein, let's consider Noam Chomsky (a signer to the Harper Letter! Bringing that back to the start of the circle). Someone most of us would consider an intellectual or political influence to some degree or another, I imagine. Certainly one of the most important writers in my own biography, as it were. Unfortunately, lately I've become more familiar with his own history of genocide denial and some dubious historical work. Do we "cancel" him for that? This is stuff that seems germaine to his general credibility as an academic and a thinker. He's also part of a lineage of political thought that's grown beyond him, individually. I remember seeing him in person give a lecture back in college, and afterwards one of the things we all agreed on was that his ideas seem to have populated themselves in our collective dialogue to the extent that it felt like we were hearing him play an old greatest hits album. So I think those ideas exist and have value beyond a personal reconsideration of the man, but they aren't discredited even if knowing more of his entire body of work makes me less inclined to seek him out for insight on current events.

Ooof, I wasn't aware of his "idiosyncrasies" regarding genocide. He was never a massive influence in my formative years—I was solidly in the world of the past rather than contemporary critique—but that's still rough. In a way, and bouncing off your last sentence above, I think of one of the arguments about limiting copyright. Yes, the Beatles produced inspiring music, but it took audiences, generations of audiences, to make them influential. Accordingly, those songs deserve to be in the public domain, reflecting the importance of the public's role as a creator after the fact. So, whatever the alarming qualities about Chomsky as a thinker in some areas, many ideas have germinated because of what others have done with them. If he's a candidate for "cancelling," take care to not make it retroactive in a way that nullifies everything. But even writing that, I can see that that's not how this shit works. Social media doesn't traffic in nuance.

(He also was apparently on some Epstein flight logs?! Seems super sus, but that's a more straightforward cancel-worthy activity if we ever get more info on that which, to my mind, isn't really relevant to anything he's wrote or spoken about during his career).

Oh lord. Like, what on earth would he have in common with Epstein to place him there? What kind of benign explanation is there?

This is also in a bucket with other academics, reporters and the like where there's at least some requirement to believe in the integrity of the person to, at least, be trying to tell the truth as they understand it and whatnot. I think of some of these things in the vein of, like, talking heads on TV who end up being secretly on the payroll of a company involved in the issue they're talking about. Even if what they're saying has/had value, it becomes extremely tainted.

I'm less invested in this because I don't see many media figures as much more than people who read off teleprompters. Or at least the network people. More independent journalists, yeah, if your stock in trade is incorruptible and speaker against power and all that, so much of what you say depends on people giving you the benefit of the doubt, a person who doesn't lie. And yet, if we find out that, say, Seymour Hersh, has been a serial rapist, does that negate his work? Like, a monster can still tell the truth, they can reveal the horrible truths of others. Does this mean we go brutally relativist? Are those our choices: absolutist in condemnation or putting assets and debits side by side and doing the calculations? Neither one of those options seem to speak well for us as a jury.

On art, it's all much mushier and seems to at least somewhat come down to "what gives us pleasure and satisfaction?" In music, there are plenty of singles and whatnot where I know nothing about the artist and that's fine, but I'd be lying if I said fusing some understanding of the creator's biography into my listening of my very favorite music doesn't add some undefinable enjoyment to the proceedings. I mean, that's part of why we're all here, I guess. I also think it's fine for these things to not be very consistent. David Bowie's history doesn't really bother me or lessen my enjoyment of his art, even if on some intellectual level I understand I'd find some of his activities repugnant if someone else did them. Hell, Led Zeppelin's excesses are part of their mystique.

I'm a bit uncomfortable with the idea that pleasure determines it even if I know that it plays a big role. It makes it sound like our decision to invoke morality isn't rooted in principle so much as convenience. We can condemn X and gain morality points while looking the other way on Y because our pleasure matters more than the morality points. That throws the whole morality thing in the can … maybe. I don't know.

I think timeliness has a lot to do with it. David Bowie was still around until relatively recently, but his "cancelable" behavior all seemed to happen many decades ago and he seems (to us, anyways) to have matured and become a much more thoughtful, respectful person since then. Maybe that wouldn't go too far in a court of law, but as a fan that kind of growth actually turns into a positive.

I'm less sure about that, but I suspect my casual fandom (even that word is too strong) with Bowie means I'm not invested in him. Did he ever do a mea culpa? I'm rather Catholic in these matters where I expect a confession first before I'm willing to consider whether I need to re-evaluate.

I'm thinking of an example, here, that of Dan Harmon, who was accused by a writer on Community who said that he was abusive and demeaning, with sexual undertones to ut all. Harmon replied with a rather thoughtful admission of his culpability, of a selfishness that he rationalized into something acceptable. And the writer accepted his apology as sincere, that there was no deflection or weasel words, but a full acknowledgement that her understanding of what happened was legitimate, that its effects on her were undeniable and wholly on him. That confession and the acceptance from his accuser/victim has meant that he's not fair game for others.

I think there's also a distinction between "I don't want to read this person's analysis/listen to their music/watch their show/etc." anymore because you know something about the person and don't like/trust them anymore and an actual movement to, like, expunge a person from society or make it impossible to find work. The former is a personal choice and everyone just kinda finds what works for them, the latter is at least ostensibly what the "cancel culture" movement is all about doing. But there are, to the originally, extremely few cases of this happening at all. Morrissey is still doing his bullshit, Louis CK sells out all his live shows, Bill Clinton just hosted a $26million fundraiser for Joe Biden. I'd love to dredge up more than a small handful of super niche cases of cancel culture (or a handful of cases like Weinsten where people were "canceled" by going to actual prison) before I believe it's an actual thing that happened/is happening. So, I agree with your original comment about it that it's gonna be recalled as a big nothingburger in time.

Maybe it's the bullshit of social media where a few loud voices get confused for a real movement. An extension of the bullshit where "people are saying on Twitter" becomes a justification to claim that it's news. Some rando declaring a person cancelled with 2000 likes—does that mean anything? Fuck, to the real movers and shakers, I'd be snorting at being "cancelled." Who fucking cares? If you're not going to prison, the judgement of the excitable, short-attention-span masses means fuck all.

[Flex]

I frustrate students because I never allow that answer (or "it's both") during discussion. Pick a side, bub! But, yes, in the real world, the answer is grey, not black or white

Yeah, it's obviously not really a position you want when you're debating in a class or writing a paper or something, but I think it depends/its both/sometimes is underrated in regular life. I've really gotten on this with "ethical consumption" and whatnot (including from discussions here), I think we're always being pushed to make totalizing, black and white decisions - especially when it comes to ethics. But, like, doing incremental amounts of less damage or abstaining from supporting bad people or whatever seems like an obviously better result than just saying "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, so fuck, who cares what I do." I'd way rather have someone who decides not to buy a record from Dicky Barrett for being an anti-vaxxer (to use one example dear to my heart) even if they still can't help themselves from buying Morrissey records rather than just decide it's all pointless if you can't or won't be 100% consistent.

Ooof, I wasn't aware of his "idiosyncrasies" regarding genocide. He was never a massive influence in my formative years—I was solidly in the world of the past rather than contemporary critique—but that's still rough. In a way, and bouncing off your last sentence above, I think of one of the arguments about limiting copyright. Yes, the Beatles produced inspiring music, but it took audiences, generations of audiences, to make them influential. Accordingly, those songs deserve to be in the public domain, reflecting the importance of the public's role as a creator after the fact. So, whatever the alarming qualities about Chomsky as a thinker in some areas, many ideas have germinated because of what others have done with them. If he's a candidate for "cancelling," take care to not make it retroactive in a way that nullifies everything. But even writing that, I can see that that's not how this shit works. Social media doesn't traffic in nuance.

I actually tend to think these things win out over time. Social media is a weird beast, but it's also extremely short in attention span by design. If Chomsky is unfashionable (perhaps for very valid reasons!) for a moment, I tend to think the stuff of his that's worthwhile would resurface and endure far past the social media blip that comes with "cancelling." Also, notably, Chomsky is an example of someone I'm thinking about personally, afaik there's no backlash to him at all, for the past writings or the epstein stuff.

Oh lord. Like, what on earth would he have in common with Epstein to place him there? What kind of benign explanation is there?

Maybe he got confused and stumbled onto the wrong plane. (More seriously, I'm hesitant to say more just because I remember his name popping up when those flight log names were released but I haven't double checked or sought out more info at all, and I don't plan to because I'm trying to not get sucked into Discourse as much these days, so I don't want to get out over my skis even tho, as you say, what other explanation there could be escapes me at the moment.)

I'm less invested in this because I don't see many media figures as much more than people who read off teleprompters. Or at least the network people. More independent journalists, yeah, if your stock in trade is incorruptible and speaker against power and all that, so much of what you say depends on people giving you the benefit of the doubt, a person who doesn't lie. And yet, if we find out that, say, Seymour Hersh, has been a serial rapist, does that negate his work? Like, a monster can still tell the truth, they can reveal the horrible truths of others. Does this mean we go brutally relativist? Are those our choices: absolutist in condemnation or putting assets and debits side by side and doing the calculations? Neither one of those options seem to speak well for us as a jury.

Here's a talking head example I found insane. My wife still likes (or liked, we haven't watched it in a bit) The Today Show and I caught a segment on the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial (you wanna talk about a guy getting... whatever the opposite of cancellation is and the female accuser actually functionally being blackballed instead) and post trial-verdict (which was in favor of Depp, if you don't recall) they ran this incredibly pro-Depp piece, speaking to Depp's attorneys, portraying him as a huge victim, the whole works and as the segment ended and they were about to cut to commercial savannah guthrie quickly says "full disclosure: my husband works on the Depp legal team but wasn't one of the trial lawyers". now, this is not a news story I care about except insofar as it all seemed insanely misogynistic in how it was dealt with but that seemed INSANE to me. I guess the disclosure was something, but I think knowing that about her should have rendered the entire segment complete worthless and untrustworthy for any viewer. You know, the ones that I'm sure were hanging riveted to the TV during the time the hosts usually just say "back after these messages."

But yeah, mostly I'm thinking of independent journalists and, like, opinion writers and analysts like Chomsky, Greenwald, Taibbi, etc. I think it's fair, maybe even necessary, to consider their biographies in assessing THEIR takes.

The Hersh example is actually maybe useful. If he was outed as a serial rapist, assuming that his behavior wasn't, like, with people he had been investigating and whatnot then, no, I don't think it would invalidate his other work. I think it'd be fair to suggest that he stopped being booked on speaking tours or to get new publishing deals, tho.

I'm a bit uncomfortable with the idea that pleasure determines it even if I know that it plays a big role. It makes it sound like our decision to invoke morality isn't rooted in principle so much as convenience. We can condemn X and gain morality points while looking the other way on Y because our pleasure matters more than the morality points. That throws the whole morality thing in the can … maybe. I don't know.

I have a childhood friend who's pretty libertarian and he always used to annoy me by saying that all forms of altruism are really just about seeking our own pleasure because it ultimately is just about making us feel good. Real annoying guy when he got in that mode.

And yeah, I meant to say more that just wanting to learn more about artists that make stuff we like is part of the pleasure of the art for most people (whether that be a visceral pleasure or something more abstract), so I think learning the "bad" stuff about them is just an inescapable part of that pleasure seeking. What we do with that knowledge may be about pleasure, or about moral action, or consumption, or something else.

I'm less sure about that, but I suspect my casual fandom (even that word is too strong) with Bowie means I'm not invested in him. Did he ever do a mea culpa? I'm rather Catholic in these matters where I expect a confession first before I'm willing to consider whether I need to re-evaluate.

I'd be interested in someone like Jon's take. I'm a big Bowie fan, but I feel like I'm still a neophyte compared to Really Big Bowie fans. I don't know if he had a mea culpa moment but I've read a bunch of his late era interviews (conveniently, I was gifted a collection of interviews he'd done towards the end of his life) and he seemed... you know, mature, introspective, good head on this shoulders. The kind of person you hope to grow into being. I dunno, I think if I read a bunch of stories about him being a womanizer and guy who had really dodgy taste in companions up through the end of his days I'd be more skeeved out and less willing to overlook his history.

I'm thinking of an example, here, that of Dan Harmon, who was accused by a writer on Community who said that he was abusive and demeaning, with sexual undertones to ut all. Harmon replied with a rather thoughtful admission of his culpability, of a selfishness that he rationalized into something acceptable. And the writer accepted his apology as sincere, that there was no deflection or weasel words, but a full acknowledgement that her understanding of what happened was legitimate, that its effects on her were undeniable and wholly on him. That confession and the acceptance from his accuser/victim has meant that he's not fair game for others.

Yeah, he's a great example. Also, an indication that a lot of this shit would not be a big deal if those being accused of bad behavior, you know, learned and made amends. It's such a low fucking bar and we have like one example of a dude clearing it.

Maybe it's the bullshit of social media where a few loud voices get confused for a real movement. An extension of the bullshit where "people are saying on Twitter" becomes a justification to claim that it's news. Some rando declaring a person cancelled with 2000 likes—does that mean anything? Fuck, to the real movers and shakers, I'd be snorting at being "cancelled." Who fucking cares? If you're not going to prison, the judgement of the excitable, short-attention-span masses means fuck all.

This DEFINITELY is true. I truly think the "cancelling" thing is like 2% stuff that actually happened and 98% hysteria and backlash because news and magazine writers all post all the fucking time on twitter and that's all they see and think about anymore. So there's this huge churn about a non-existent "problem" of people being cancelled just for, you know, being horrible. Drives me nuts. And it's also part of the anti-cancel culture/anti-woke backlash. I heard on the radio that something like 75% of DEMOCRATIC identifying men think "woke culture" and "cancellations" have gone too far. People absolutely get brainwashed about these cultural panics. Cancel Culture is more like the 80s/90s satanic panic than anything else, imho.

[Dr. Medulla]

Yeah, it's obviously not really a position you want when you're debating in a class or writing a paper or something, but I think it depends/its both/sometimes is underrated in regular life. I've really gotten on this with "ethical consumption" and whatnot (including from discussions here), I think we're always being pushed to make totalizing, black and white decisions - especially when it comes to ethics.

Or, in a related way, to state that you don't know enough to take an informed stance. Which isn't the same thing as an uninterested "I dunno," like a mopey teenager, but "I don't know and I'd like to hear a bit more." It's another of those pernicious effects of our high-speed communication technology, that we're expected to match it by having instantaneous positions on anything, and stuff that we'll go down choking on our own blood defending. Which is why it's often recommended by serious thinkers to unplug and spend some time thinking things thru. Slow is not pejorative.

But, like, doing incremental amounts of less damage or abstaining from supporting bad people or whatever seems like an obviously better result than just saying "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, so fuck, who cares what I do." I'd way rather have someone who decides not to buy a record from Dicky Barrett for being an anti-vaxxer (to use one example dear to my heart) even if they still can't help themselves from buying Morrissey records rather than just decide it's all pointless if you can't or won't be 100% consistent.

"If you can't be perfectly good, be perfectly awful" sounds like something Oscar Wilde would say, and everyone thinks "oh so clever and saucy," but it's a recipe for making the world around you much worse. I remember seeing a demotivational poster:


But it's actually wise advice. Nobody does it all, but everyone pushes or pulls one way or the other, so which way are you going to go?

I actually tend to think these things win out over time. Social media is a weird beast, but it's also extremely short in attention span by design. If Chomsky is unfashionable (perhaps for very valid reasons!) for a moment, I tend to think the stuff of his that's worthwhile would resurface and endure far past the social media blip that comes with "cancelling." Also, notably, Chomsky is an example of someone I'm thinking about personally, afaik there's no backlash to him at all, for the past writings or the epstein stuff.

That may be the most important thing to keep in your conscious brain at all times w/r/t social media—this, too, shall pass (and sooner than you think). Which isn't to say that we shouldn't worry about its effects, because it has a black hole effect where more and more stuff that should be treated with the long-term in mind—politics, social values—gets sucked in. But most of the stuff that generates the loudest voices is a blue/gold dress.

Here's a talking head example I found insane. My wife still likes (or liked, we haven't watched it in a bit) The Today Show and I caught a segment on the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial (you wanna talk about a guy getting... whatever the opposite of cancellation is and the female accuser actually functionally being blackballed instead) and post trial-verdict (which was in favor of Depp, if you don't recall) they ran this incredibly pro-Depp piece, speaking to Depp's attorneys, portraying him as a huge victim, the whole works and as the segment ended and they were about to cut to commercial savannah guthrie quickly says "full disclosure: my husband works on the Depp legal team but wasn't one of the trial lawyers". now, this is not a news story I care about except insofar as it all seemed insanely misogynistic in how it was dealt with but that seemed INSANE to me. I guess the disclosure was something, but I think knowing that about her should have rendered the entire segment complete worthless and untrustworthy for any viewer. You know, the ones that I'm sure were hanging riveted to the TV during the time the hosts usually just say "back after these messages."

Oh lord. Not least of all because you do the full disclosure part at the beginning, not as an asterisk/footnote at the end. It's a newspaper headline in 96 pt asserting that "Adele eats puppies" and then the next day, on page E45 in the corner, "This is just a joke promoted mostly by a Phish fan."

I have a childhood friend who's pretty libertarian and he always used to annoy me by saying that all forms of altruism are really just about seeking our own pleasure because it ultimately is just about making us feel good. Real annoying guy when he got in that mode.

I have a lecture that compares Rock Against Racism and Live Aid in terms of rock and social activism (social conscious raising vs money raising). One of the common criticisms of Live Aid was/is that many (most?) of the performers were there because it was good for their status, that being seen as a good person would sell more records. Okay, sure. But that ignores that their participation did help raise money for starving Ethiopians! I explain that those on the left have a habit of getting up their ass a bit too much in demanding purity of motive and minimized the real world result. So even if you friend is correct that altruism is a rationalization for self-satisfaction, big deal. It just means that we can (should?) have a hierarchy of deeds, privileging those that also benefit others. He's trying to knock you off a high horse by looking into your heart, but ignores the results of your actions.

I'd be interested in someone like Jon's take. I'm a big Bowie fan, but I feel like I'm still a neophyte compared to Really Big Bowie fans. I don't know if he had a mea culpa moment but I've read a bunch of his late era interviews (conveniently, I was gifted a collection of interviews he'd done towards the end of his life) and he seemed... you know, mature, introspective, good head on this shoulders. The kind of person you hope to grow into being. I dunno, I think if I read a bunch of stories about him being a womanizer and guy who had really dodgy taste in companions up through the end of his days I'd be more skeeved out and less willing to overlook his history.

Which is the low-key or indirect redemption aspect. I saw a snippet of something involving Nick Cave the other day in which he invoked the evils of cancel culture, but the part that did make me pause a bit was his concern that it doesn't allow redemption. One strike and you're out. While he's right in that high-handed judgmentalism of social media, again, I'm not convinced that there isn't room for redemption. Maybe it's just the short attention span of social media, but I think we are more capable of appreciating complexity and growth, so his complaint once again comes off as question begging.

Also, an indication that a lot of this shit would not be a big deal if those being accused of bad behavior, you know, learned and made amends. It's such a low fucking bar and we have like one example of a dude clearing it.

When the Brett Kavanaugh hearings were going on and he gave the literal spluttering counter-testimony involving his love of beer, I recall someone saying that everything about his demeanour screamed, "How dare you! How dare you question me!" That's his sense of status—as a guy, a rich guy, a politically powerful guy—in all its ugly nakedness. Which is how shitheads like Ricky Gervais come off. They don't offer a defence for their shitty statements, they're saying, "How dare you!" Because in their mind their status means they're above accountability.

One of the things I do in my seminars is that over the course of the term I evaluate the students to figure out which one would tell me to go fuck myself if I acted inappropriately. It's always a very short list because people are taught deference to authority. But those are the people I respect, and when I return the final essay I tell the "winner." The last couple years, tho, I've revealed it on the last day of class and ask them to consider the classmates. Both years, the students figured out immediately who would put me in my place if I deserved it. What's funny/sad is that I've mentioned this little game to other profs and every single one has been horrified that I would think that a good thing and that I would even plant that seed in their brain. They miss the part about "acting inappropriately"—all they hear is my encouragement to defy the professor. If you conduct yourself respectfully, you don't give students a reason to call you out.

I heard on the radio that something like 75% of DEMOCRATIC identifying men think "woke culture" and "cancellations" have gone too far. People absolutely get brainwashed about these cultural panics. Cancel Culture is more like the 80s/90s satanic panic than anything else, imho.

There are definite parallels there. Be afraid, there is a force out there coming to claim you. It hates your goodness. It can take down the powerful. (And it doesn't actually exist.)