CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 1 How To Tell If You're Being Canceled Nick Gillespie | Reason.com | Dec 2020 Issue In 1993, Jonathan Rauch wrote Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, an influential defense of free speech and open inquiry that was excerpted in Reason. The book took aim at would-be censors on campus and off and made a staunch case for the virtues of radical speech. Reviewing Rauch's book in The New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that "what sets his study apart is his attempt to situate recent developments in a long-range historical perspective and to defend the system of free intellectual inquiry as a socially productive method of channeling prejudice." Nearly 30 years later, attacks on free thought have persisted and in some ways become even more pervasive as cancel culture has become part of the American lexicon. We live in a world where a Boeing executive was forced to resign over a 33-year-old article opposing the idea of women in combat and a respected art curator was pushed out of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for saying he would "definitely still continue to collect white artists." Earlier this summer, the editor of The New York Times opinion page left his job after publishing an article by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.). What, exactly, does it mean to be canceled? Is free thought under unprecedented attack? And if it is, what's driving the repression? Rauch, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution who is working on a book tentatively titled The Constitution of Knowledge, spoke to Reason's Nick Gillespie to answer those questions and discuss the best way to engage today's censors and cancelers. Reason: In preparing for this, I reread Kindly Inquisitors. You've been covering this beat for basically 30 years. Is something different? In Kindly Inquisitors, you were talking a lot about Salman Rushdie, who had a fatwa put against him. He was under a death sentence put out by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Is that a more serious threat than what we're facing now? Rauch: I would argue that structurally, the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie was in fact the prototype of the modern cancel campaign. We didn't have that vocabulary at the time. We called it international terrorism, which it kind of was. We called it Islamist extremism, which it also was. If you look at it, what it was CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 2 actually was an action to cut off an individual from society, make not only that individual but anyone who had anything to do with him toxic. Here's what I think canceling is and why it's different from criticism—because people always say, "Look, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. People are criticizing Jonathan Rauch. He doesn't like it, so he calls it canceling." Criticism is expressing an argument or opinion with the idea of rationally influencing public opinion through public persuasion, interpersonal persuasion. Canceling comes from the universe of propaganda and not critical discourse. It's about organizing or manipulating a social environment or a media environment with a goal or predictable effect of isolating, deplatforming, or intimidating an ideological opponent. It's about shaping the battlefield. It's about making an idea or a person socially radioactive. It is not about criticism. It is not about ideas. The people who went after Rushdie had never read The Satanic Verses and were proud of it. In a typical cancel campaign today, you'll hear the activists say, "I didn't read the thing. I don't need to read the thing to know that it's colonialist or racist." They're not using physical murder now. They're using a kind of social murder of making it very difficult for someone to have a job, for example—to lose their career, or to endanger all their friends. That, of course, is not physical violence, but if you've interviewed people who have been subject to it, and I have, you know that it is emotionally and professionally devastating. The Nick Cannon case came up recently. He is a TV host and impresario. He had a podcast where he had on Professor Griff, who got bounced from the rap group Public Enemy in the late '80s for being anti-Semitic. Professor Griff traffics in the idea that African Americans are the real Jews, so he spends a lot of time attacking "so-called Jews," which would be people who identify as Jewish. Nick Cannon trafficked in a bunch of that on his podcast, and he got fired by Viacom. He's still on with Fox. Should he be able to just say that without having any repercussions on his career? If he shouldn't, what's wrong with canceling people more broadly? You and I do our jobs within notions of implicit and explicit boundaries. If I start writing socialist articles for Reason, I think Reason will stop publishing me. That's CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 3 part of what publishers do. I don't think in a case like that we're necessarily talking about canceling. I think we're talking about ordinary editorial discretion. I'm working on this book. I sat down and said, "How do we know if something is canceling vs. ordinary criticism?" I came out with a list of six things, kind of the warning signs of canceling. If you've got two or three of these, it's canceling and not criticism. First: Is the intent of the campaign punitive? Are you trying to punish the person and take away their job, their livelihood, and their friends? Second: Is the intent or predictable outcome of the campaign to deplatform someone and to get them out of the position that they hold where they can speak/be heard and out of any other such position? Third: Is the tactic being used grandstanding? Is it not talking to the person about their point of view? Is it basically virtue signaling, posturing, denunciation, and sort of ritual in nature? Fourth: Is it organized? Is it in fact a campaign? Is it a swarm? Do you have people out there saying, as is often the case, "We've got to get Nick Gillespie off the air" or "We've got to get this asshole fired"? If it's organized, then it's canceling. It's not criticism. Fifth: A certain sign of canceling is secondary boycotts. Is the campaign targeting not only the individual but anyone who has anything to do with the individual? Are they not only saying, "We think what Nick Cannon is saying on the air is inappropriate"; are they going after the company by saying to boycott it? Are they going after his friends and professional acquaintances? If there's a secondary boycott to inspire fear so that no one wants to have anything to do with the guy for the fear that they'd be targeted, that's canceling. Sixth: Is it indifferent to truth? Well-meaning criticism is often wrong, but if it's wrong, you're supposed to say, "Oh, gee. I'm sorry that was wrong." You're supposed to pay attention to facts. Cancelers don't. They'll pick through someone's record over a period of 20 years and find six items which they can use against them. This is what literally happened to [Harvard psychologist] Steve Pinker. Tear them out of context and distort them, and if they're corrected on CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 4 them, they'll just find six other items. That's not criticism. That's canceling. These are weapons of propaganda. I think what you described in Nick what's-his-name's case does not sound like a propaganda campaign. That helps clarify things for me. But how about Goya, the Latino-owned food products company? The head of Goya said some good things about Donald Trump. Now there's a boycott against Goya products. Does that count as canceling in the same way as the effort to get Steven Pinker, a well-known public intellectual, thrown out of a professional association of linguistic scholars? Are these all the same thing, are they on a continuum, or are they separate? All of the above. They're all the same. They're all different. They're all on a continuum. I think the spirit of the Goya campaign is not consistent with the spirit of an open society where people can disagree. I think it's legal, but it's misguided. It's already backfiring, as these things almost always do. I put it in the same spirit of intolerance as everything else. You mentioned the open society in Kindly Inquisitors. In your work more generally, you often cite Karl Popper, who popularized the term the open society. What do you mean when you invoke that idea? An open society is a place that has a lot of intellectual pluralism and a lot of diversity of viewpoints. Instead of trying to eliminate bias by eliminating biased people, or instead of eliminating wrong hypotheses by eliminating the people who hold those hypotheses, it instead tries to pit bias and prejudice against other biases and prejudices. It does that by forcing contention, forcing critical argument, and forcing people to persuade each other over time. That's really what science is. It's really what journalism is. It's what all the professions that are engaged in the reality-based community are ultimately trying to do: use these tools of critical comparison and discourse to persuade each other. It takes physical coercion off the table. One way to prove that Nick Gillespie is wrong would be to shoot him, right? That's the most traditional way to do it. It gets rid of the hypothesis. It does not advance knowledge. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 5 Karl Popper, among others, pointed out that the open society is incomparably better at producing knowledge than any other society, because it allows us to make errors and not be punished for making errors. It allows us to make errors, in fact, much more quickly. That's the secret of science. You make errors much faster. It's also a more peaceful society, because you're settling differences of opinion without using coercion to do it. You're marginalizing bad ideas. If Nick Gillespie continually says really stupid things, people start ignoring him. They just don't pay attention to him in a properly constructed society. The death rate and the oppression rate go down dramatically. I call it "liberal science" in my book. It's the third great liberal social regime, the other two being market economies and democracies. You wrote for The Atlantic when James Bennet was the editor. Bennet later became the op-ed page editor at The New York Times who got pushed out after running an op-ed by Tom Cotton, the conservative senator from Arkansas. The article was about calling out troops to stem what he assumed was going to be a lot of rioting in cities around the nation. Bennet was forced out after a bunch of New York Times people, particularly black staffers, said that they felt unsafe as a result of that op-ed being run. How does that fit into the way you think about cancellation vs. open debate? The emotional safety argument is at the core of what's going on. In the book I'm writing, I give it no quarter at all. The emotional safety argument, I argue, is fundamentally illiberal, and there is really nothing about it that can be salvaged. It is just inconsistent with the open society. The reason for that is it says that the most sensitive pair of ears in the room gets to decide what everyone else gets to hear or what everyone else gets to say. The notion here is that emotional injury is a kind of harm like physical injury, and because it's a kind of harm it's a rights violation. The problem is this is a completely subjective standard, and it makes any form of criticism potentially subject to censorship and cancellation and lumps science into a human rights violation. There have been various versions of what's now emotional safety over many years. In 1993, in Kindly Inquisitors, I wrote about it. I called it the humanitarian CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 6 challenge or the humanitarian fallacy—the notion that words are like bullets. Harmful ideas are like a form of violence. Emotional safety is just the newest form of that. I would argue that it comes from, actually, out of all places, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC] under the George H.W. Bush administration. Can you explain that? The EEOC in 1989 or 1990 promulgated a notion of hostile workplace environment as being a civil rights violation. They intended to define hostile workplace environment fairly narrowly. It was supposed to have to be targeted to an individual, and this was conduct which would make you, a reasonable person, feel discriminated against or harassed in the workplace. As these things do, this concept quickly spread. By the mid-1990s you had cases, for example, where an employer was brought up under a hostile environment complaint by an atheist employee, because the employer was putting Bible verses on his paychecks. You had a Christian employee bring up a hostile environment complaint because a gay employee had a picture of himself with his partner on his desk. You had an art exhibit in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where paintings were taken down because a city employee said she had to walk past the paintings, and that created a hostile environment. Things very rapidly started moving out of control. And colleges adopted it. We haven't talked about universities. We probably should. That's the other big arm of cancel culture. Colleges adopted it, and it took the form of, "Well, you're creating a hostile environment for students if you say oppressive and discriminatory things." That led to a series of things like formal speech codes. It also led to this notion of "a hostile environment is an unsafe environment." If you have to have a safe environment, then you have to proactively scrub the environment of microaggressions, offensive and bigoted statements, and anything else that might cause the environment to become unsafe. That's a doctrine which has, even conceptually, no conceivable limits. That's where we wound up. What's the appeal to people? Obviously I agree with you when you talk about a liberal society being a good one. The idea of intellectual or ideological pluralism, I'm all in. But people who are saying, "That's a false CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 7 front for a system that is rigged against trans people, against black people, and against other types of racial, ethnic, ideological, or sexual minorities"—how do you engage them when they are not interested necessarily in hearing what you have to say? What are they doing? What do they think they're doing? This is a subject of dispute and conversation. One view is that these are well-intentioned people who are moral campaigners who want to make the world a better place. They're idealistic and they think they have the right answers. Like all people who think they have the right answers, they want to make the world safe for those right answers. Another view is that these are neo-Marxists who are using, essentially, the levers of power to intimidate others because they can, and because it's what people do when they have power over other people. A third reading is that we're talking about a classic public choice problem, where you have an organized minority that can effectively influence, intimidate, or silence a larger majority by picking specific targets and caring about them more than anybody else. What's happening here is kind of like lobbying, right? That's why the rice subsidy still exists: because rice growers really want it. They demand it, and they'll hurt you if you try to get rid of it. Factions in places like universities or the internet can do that as well, and they get something for it. They get prestige in their communities. They may get someone silenced or fired. Then, there's a fourth answer, which is that it's all of the above. I think that's the right answer. I think it's all of the above, and it varies by individual. I don't assume that people are cynical when they come after the curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I assume that they're idealistic. On the other hand, it doesn't matter. Motives are not the issue here. The issue is the social effect of the regime in which these kinds of things are happening. How do you engage with them? The single most common question I get when I talk about free speech and open inquiry on college campuses comes from a student—usually it will be a freshman, sometimes it's a sophomore—who says, "What do I say, Mr. Rauch, when I try to speak up in a conversation and I'm told, CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 8 'Check your privilege. You can't say that.' What do I do when I'm disqualified from the conversation because I don't have the minority perspective?" I used to try to say all kinds of things that they could say: "Try this. Try that." That wasn't a good answer. Then I began telling them, "Well, you figure it out. You know how to talk to your generation. I don't." That wasn't a good answer. The answer that I finally settled on—though the first two were also partly true— was: "It doesn't matter all that much what you say to them, because they're not listening. That's what they're telling you. They're not listening. What matters is that you not shut up. They do not have the power to silence you if you do not allow yourself to be silenced. Insist on your right to continue the conversation to say what you want to say. Don't slink away. You won't necessarily persuade those people, but, as we found in the gay marriage debate, your real target is that third person on the periphery of the circle of the conversation who is seeing one person acting rationally and reasonably and other people acting irrationally and unreasonably. You're probably winning the heart and mind of that third person, so don't shut up." In Kindly Inquisitors, you posed one question that you said was the nut of it. "Do gays and Jews benefit from toleration of homophobic or anti-Semitic claptrap?" You answered, "Yes." You also wrote that any hate speech law that might have passed at that time would have targeted gay people in the name of defending children. Do you feel like that argument works at all in the current moment? Or is that not really operative anymore? It doesn't seem to be super persuasive to people under 30, but I don't know what is, really. I figure my job is just to try to say what's true and to speak from my own experiences—30 years in the trenches fighting for gay equality and same-sex marriage, understanding that the only thing we had was our voices, the ability to make our arguments, and the ability to hold up our opponents and show the kind of people they were, which we would not have been able to do in an environment with stifled speech. I figure the best I can do is make that case again and again. Who knows what works? It's so improbable, if you think about it. The freedom of speech in America, the government guarantee, has strengthened over the past 250 years and not weakened, despite the fact that I think, to this day, if you put up the First CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 9 Amendment to a public referendum it would probably lose. I just tell people, "We don't know what works. Hang in there and just keep making the case, because in the long run we are doing astonishingly well." To go back and look at your work on free speech is both depressing and enlivening. It's depressing, because everything you're saying about the instinct to shut down speech that somebody finds disagreeable seems like it's gotten worse and more intense. On the other hand, you talk about how this is an ongoing process. It never ends. It never stops. That's kind of heartening. Are you optimistic that five years from now we'll be in a better place? Do we get closer to the truth or to more of an open society? We definitely get closer to truth, because science is broadly defined to include what you and I do. Journalism and the test tube of ideas is a cumulative process. It's the human species' great secret to success—the ability to accumulate knowledge and improve knowledge across generations over a period of now hundreds of years. That's not going away. On the free speech front per se, I'm optimistic. I think we're already seeing pushback against the excesses of cancel culture. People are wising up to the tactic of targeting peoples' employers and getting them fired. I think as people wise up to that, they'll develop some immunity. There'll start to be some counter- pressures on employers. Why did you fire this person? How can you justify that? How can you destroy this person's life? I think it's a question of constant social adaptive learning. The enemies of the open society, the adversaries, always find new tactics and new ways to come at it. There's always a response to that. It develops sooner or later, hopefully sooner. The important thing to discover is that this is not a fight between one set of people and another set of people. It is also a fight within ourselves. There are ideas that each of us hates. It's very hard to restrain ourselves from ganging up on [those ideas] in an illiberal way. I'm optimistic in the big picture, because here we are. The idea that wrongheaded, dangerous, heretical, and blasphemous ideas should be not only allowed but protected is preposterous. It's ridiculous. No society has ever had that idea until about 250 years ago. It shouldn't work, but here we are. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 10 The reason is because, despite its ridiculousness, it has the one great advantage of being the single most successful social principle ever invented. What I tell people is, "Me, you, your children, your grandchildren, and their grandchildren will have to get up every morning and explain all of these principles all over again from scratch. You know what? We just have to be cheerful about that." █ Ten Theses about the Cancel Culture What we talk about when we talk about “cancellation.” Ross Douthat | New York Times | Jul 14, 2020 | Opinion Cancel culture is destroying liberalism. No, cancel culture doesn’t exist. No, it has always existed; remember when Brutus and Cassius canceled Julius Caesar? No, it exists but it’s just a bunch of rich entitled celebrities complaining that people can finally talk back to them on Twitter. No, it doesn’t exist except when it’s good and the canceled deserve it. Actually, it does exist, but — well, look, I can’t explain it to you until you’ve read at least four open letters on the subject. These are just a few of the answers that you’ll get to a simple question — “What is this cancel culture thing, anyway?” — if you’re foolish enough to toss it, like chum, into the seething waters of the internet. They’re contradictory because the phenomenon is complicated — but not complicated enough to deter me from making 10 sweeping claims about the subject. So here goes: 1. Cancellation, properly understood, refers to an attack on someone’s employment and reputation by a determined collective of critics, based on an opinion or an action that is alleged to be disgraceful and disqualifying. “Reputation” and “employment” are key terms here. You are not being canceled if you are merely being heckled or insulted — if somebody describes you as a moron or a fascist or some profane alternative to “Douthat” on the internet — no matter how vivid and threatening the heckling becomes. You are decidedly at risk of cancellation, however, if your critics are calling for you to be de-platformed or fired or put out of business, and especially if the call is coming from inside the house — from within your professional community, from co-workers or employees or potential customers or colleagues, on a professional message board or Slack or some interest-specific slice of social media. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 11 2. All cultures cancel; the question is for what, how widely and through what means. There is no human society where you can say or do anything you like and expect to keep your reputation and your job. Reputational cancellation hung over the heads of Edith Wharton’s heroines; professional cancellation shadowed 20th- century figures like Lenny Bruce. Today, almost all critics of cancel culture have some line they draw, some figure — usually a racist or anti-Semite — that they would cancel, too. And social conservatives who criticize cancel culture, especially, have to acknowledge that we’re partly just disagreeing with today’s list of cancellation-worthy sins. 3. Cancellation isn’t exactly about free speech, but a liberal society should theoretically cancel less frequently than its rivals. The canceled individual hasn’t lost any First Amendment rights, because there is no constitutional right to a particular job or reputation. At the same time, under its own self-understanding, liberalism is supposed to clear a wider space for debate than other political systems and allow a wider range of personal expression. So you would expect a liberal society to be slower to cancel, more inclined to separate the personal and the professional (or the ideological and the artistic), and quicker to offer opportunities to regain one’s reputation and start one’s professional life anew. “It’s a free country,” runs the American boast, and even if it doesn’t violate the Constitution, cancellation cuts against that promise — which is one reason arguments about cancel culture so often become arguments about liberalism itself. 4. The internet has changed the way we cancel, and extended cancellation’s reach. On the other hand, a skeptic might say that it wasn’t liberalism but space and distance that made America a free country — the fact that you could always escape the tyrannies of local conformism by “lighting out for the territory,” in the old Mark Twain phrase. But under the rule of the internet there’s no leaving the village: Everywhere is the same place, and so is every time. You can be canceled for something you said in a crowd of complete strangers, if one of them CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 12 uploads the video, or for a joke that came out wrong if you happened to make it on social media, or for something you said or did a long time ago if the internet remembers. And you don’t have to be prominent or political to be publicly shamed and permanently marked: All you need to do is have a particularly bad day, and the consequences could endure as long as Google. 5. The internet has also made it harder to figure out whether speech is getting freer or less free. When critics of cancel culture fret about a potential online-era chill on speech, one rejoinder is that you can find far more ideas — both radical and noxious — swirling on the internet than you could in a sampling of magazines and daily newspapers circa 1990. It’s easier to encounter ideological extremes on your smartphone than it was in the beforetime of print media, and easier to encounter hateful speech as well. But at the same time the internet has hastened the consolidation of cultural institutions, so that The New York Times and the Ivy League and other behemoths loom larger than they did 30 years ago, and it’s arguably increased uniformity across cities and regions and industries in general. And the battle over norms for cancellation reflects both of these changes: For would-be cancelers, the chaos of the internet makes it seem that much more important to establish rigorous new norms, lest the online racists win … but for people under threat of cancellation, it feels like they’re at risk at being shut out of a journalistic or academic marketplace that’s ever more consolidated, or defying a consensus that’s embraced by every boardroom and H.R. department. 6. Celebrities are the easiest people to target, but the hardest people to actually cancel. One of the ur-examples of cancel culture was the activist Suey Park’s 2014 hashtag campaign to #cancelColbert over a satirical tweet from the Twitter account of “The Colbert Report.” Six years later, Stephen Colbert is very much uncanceled. So are Dave Chappelle, J.K. Rowling and a much longer list of prominent pop culture figures who have faced online mobs and lived to tell, sell and perform. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 13 Their resilience explains why some people dismiss cancellation as just famous people whining about their critics. If someone has a big enough name or fan base, the bar for actual cancellation is quite high, and the celebrity might even have the opportunity — like a certain reality-television star on the campaign trail in 2016 — to use the hatred of the would-be cancelers to confirm a fandom or cement a following. However, not everyone is a celebrity, and … 7. Cancel culture is most effective against people who are still rising in their fields, and it influences many people who don’t actually get canceled. The point of cancellation is ultimately to establish norms for the majority, not to bring the stars back down to earth. So a climate of cancellation can succeed in changing the way people talk and argue and behave even if it doesn’t succeed in destroying the careers of some of the famous people that it targets. You don’t need to cancel Rowling if you can cancel the lesser-known novelist who takes her side; you don’t have to take down the famous academics who signed last week’s Harper’s Magazine letter attacking cancel culture if you can discourage people half their age from saying what they think. The goal isn’t to punish everyone, or even very many someones; it’s to shame or scare just enough people to make the rest conform. 8. The right and the left both cancel; it’s just that today’s right is too weak to do it effectively. Is it cancel culture when conservatives try to get college professors disciplined for anti-Americanism, or critics of Israel de-platformed for anti-Semitism? Sure, in a sense. Was it cancel culture when the Dixie Chicks — sorry, the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks — were dropped by radio stations and tour venues, or when Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” was literally canceled, for falling afoul of patriotic correctness? Absolutely. But as the latter examples suggest, the last peak of right-wing cultural power was the patriotically correct climate after Sept. 11, a cultural eon in the past. Today the people with the most to fear from a right-wing cancel culture usually work inside Trump-era professional conservatism. (And even for them there’s often a new life awaiting as a professional NeverTrumper.) Attempted cancellations on CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 14 the right are mostly battles for control over diminishing terrain, with occasional forays against red-state academics and anti-Trump celebrities. Meanwhile, the left’s cancel warriors imagine themselves conquering the entire non-Fox News map. 9. The heat of the cancel-culture debate reflects the intersection of the internet as a medium for cancellation with the increasing power of left-wing moral norms as a justification for cancellation. It’s not just technology or ideology, in other words, it’s both. The emergent, youthful left wants to take current taboos against racism and anti-Semitism and use them as a model for a wider range of limits — with more expansive definitions of what counts as racism and sexism and homophobia, a more sweeping theory of what sorts of speech and behavior threaten “harm” and a more precise linguistic etiquette for respectable professionals to follow. And the internet and social media, both outside institutions and within, are crucial mechanisms for this push. It’s debatable whether these new left-wing norms would be illiberal or whether they would simply infuse liberalism with a new morality to replace the old Protestant consensus. It’s arguable whether they would expand the space for previously marginalized voices more than they would restrict once-mainstream, now “phobic” points of view. But there’s no question that people who fall afoul of the emergent norms are more exposed to cancellation than they would have been 10 or 20 years ago. 10. If you oppose left-wing cancel culture, appeals to liberalism and free speech aren’t enough. I said earlier that debates about cancellations are also inevitably debates about liberalism and its limits. But to defend a liberal position in these arguments you need more than just a defense of free speech in the abstract; you need to defend free speech for the sake of some important, true idea. General principles are well and good, but if you can’t champion controversial ideas on their own merits, no merely procedural argument for granting them a platform will sustain itself against a passionate, morally confident attack. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 15 So liberals or centrists who fear the left-wing zeal for cancellation need a counterargument that doesn’t rest on right-to-be-wrong principles alone. They need to identify the places where they think the new left-wing norms aren’t merely too censorious but simply wrong, and fight the battle there, on substance as well as liberal principle. Otherwise their battle for free speech is only likely to win them the privilege of having their own ideas canceled last of all. █ Selections from On Liberty John Stuart Mill CHAPTER Il: OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION THE time, it is to be hoped, is gone by when any defence would be necessary of the "liberty of the press" as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government. No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear. This aspect of the question, besides, has been so often and so triumphantly enforced by preceding writers, that it needs not be specially insisted on in this place. Though the law of England, on the subject of the press, is as servile to this day as it was in the time of the Tudors, there is little danger of its being actually put in force against political discussion, except during some temporary panic, when fear of insurrection drives ministers and judges from their propriety; and, speaking generally, it is not, in constitutional countries, to be apprehended that the government, whether completely responsible to the people or not, will often attempt to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public. Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 16 If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. . We have now recognized the necessity to the mental wellbeing of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate. First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience. Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit to take notice of those who say, that the free expression of all opinions should be permitted, on CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 17 condition that the manner be temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent. But this, though an important consideration in a practical point of view, merges in a more fundamental objection. Undoubtedly the manner of asserting an opinion, even though it be a true one, may be very objectionable, and may justly incur severe censure. But the principal offences of the kind are such as it is mostly impossible, unless by accidental self-betrayal, to bring home to conviction. The gravest of them is, to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion. But all this, even to the most aggravated degree, is so continually done in perfect good faith, by persons who are not considered, and in many other respects may not deserve to be considered, ignorant or incompetent, that it is rarely possible on adequate grounds conscientiously to stamp the misrepresentation as morally culpable; and still less could law presume to interfere with this kind of controversial misconduct. With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely, invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever mischief arises from their use, is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived byany opinion from this mode of asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions. The worst offence of this kind which can be committed by a polemic, is to stigmatize those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men. To calumny of this sort, those who hold any unpopular opinion are peculiarly exposed, because they are in general few and uninfluential, and nobody but CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 18 themselves feels much interest in seeing justice done them; but this weapon is, from the nature of the case, denied to those who attack a prevailing opinion: they can neither use it with safety to themselves, nor if they could, would it do anything but recoil on their own cause. In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them. For the interest, therefore, of truth and justice, it is far more important to restrain this employment of vituperative language than the other; and, for example, if it were necessary to choose, there would be much more need to discourage offensive attacks on infidelity, than on religion. It is, however, obvious that law and authority have no business with restraining either, while opinion ought, in every instance, to determine its verdict by the circumstances of the individual case; condemning every one, on whichever side of the argument he places himself, in whose mode of advocacy either want of candor, or malignity, bigotry or intolerance of feeling manifest themselves, but not inferring these vices from the side which a person takes, though it be the contrary side of the question to our own; and giving merited honor to every one, whatever opinion he may hold, who has calmness to see and honesty to state what his opponents and their opinions really are, exaggerating nothing to their discredit, keeping nothing back which tells, or can be supposed to tell, in their favor. This is the real morality of public discussion; and if often violated, I am happy to think that there are many controversialists who to a great extent observe it, and a still greater number who conscientiously strive towards it. █ A Letter on Justice and Open Debate Ackerman, et al. | Harper’s | Jul 7, 2020 Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 19 commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right- wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides. The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement. This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 20 any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us. █ Free Speech Is the Basis of a True Education A university should not be a sanctuary for comfort but rather a crucible for confronting ideas. Robert J. Zimmer Free speech is at risk at the very institution where it should be assured: the university. Invited speakers are disinvited because a segment of a university community deems them offensive, while other orators are shouted down for similar reasons. Demands are made to eliminate readings that might make some students uncomfortable. Individuals are forced to apologize for expressing views that conflict with prevailing perceptions. In many cases, these efforts have been supported by university administrators. Yet what is the value of a university education without encountering, reflecting on and debating ideas that differ from the ones that students brought with them to college? The purpose of a university education is to provide the critical pathway by which students can fulfill their potential, change the trajectory of their families, and build healthier and more inclusive societies. Students learn not only through the acquisition of specific knowledge, but also through the attainment of intellectual skills that serve them their entire life. Students come to appreciate context, trade-offs and data. They master how to recognize complexity, to argue effectively for their positions and to reconsider and challenge their own beliefs. Students discover, too, that seemingly straightforward phenomena can have complicated cultural, historical and situational contexts that are critical to understanding their meaning. They realize that actions inevitably have multiple implications and that many decisions involve not simply choosing between “good” CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 21 or “bad” but evaluating a set of consequences and uncertainties, both desired and undesired. Students grasp the complexity of collecting, analyzing, interpreting and deriving meaning from evidence of multiple forms. They learn to imagine alternatives, to test their hypotheses and to question the accepted wisdom. A good education gives students the intellectual skills and approaches essential to success in much of human endeavor. One word summarizes the process by which universities impart these skills: questioning. Productive and informed questioning involves challenging assumptions, arguments and conclusions. It calls for multiple and diverse perspectives and listening to the views of others. It requires understanding the power and limitations of arguments. More fundamentally, the process of questioning demands an ability to rethink one’s own assumptions, often the most difficult task of all. Essential to this process is an environment that promotes free expression and the open exchange of ideas, ensuring that difficult questions are asked and that diverse and challenging perspectives are considered. This underscores the importance of diversity among students, faculty and visitors—diversity of background, belief and experience. Without this, students’ experience becomes a weak imitation of a true education, and the value of that education is seriously diminished. Free expression and the unfettered exchange of ideas do not always come naturally. Many people value the right to express their own ideas but are less committed to granting that right to others. Over the years, universities have come under attack from a range of groups, both external and internal, that demand the silencing of speakers, faculty, students and visitors. The attack is sometimes driven by a desire of an individual or group not to have its authority questioned. Other times it derives from a group’s moral certainty that its particular values, beliefs or approaches are the only correct ones and that others should adhere to the group’s views. Some assert that universities should be refuges from intellectual discomfort and that their own discomfort with conflicting and challenging views should override the value of free and open discourse. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 22 We have seen efforts to suppress discussion of Charles Darwin’s work, to insist upon particular political perspectives during the McCarthy era, to impose exclusionary acts of racial and religious discrimination, and to demand compliance with various forms of “moral” behavior. The silencing being advocated today is equally as problematic. Every attempt to legitimize silencing creates justification for others to restrain speech that they do not like in the future. Universities should be clear about their core educational mission—to provide students with the most enriching education possible. We cannot shortchange our students. This means that questioning and challenge must flourish. Universities cannot be viewed as a sanctuary for comfort but rather as a crucible for confronting ideas and thereby learning to make informed judgments in complex environments. Having one’s assumptions challenged and experiencing the discomfort that sometimes accompanies this process are intrinsic parts of an excellent education. Only then will students develop the skills necessary to build their own futures and contribute to society. █ So you’re being held accountable? That’s not ‘cancel culture.’ Margaret Sullivan | Washington Post | Jan 31, 2021 According to the Washington Examiner’s Eddie Scarry, nothing less than a “social justice mob” descended on Politico after it gave a guest-editing slot to right-wing flamethrower Ben Shapiro. Scarry mocked those, including many of Politico’s employees, who thought Shapiro never should have been put in charge of the site’s popular Playbook newsletter — even for a day. Such objections are an effort to silence conservative voices, Scarry claimed in another piece: Liberal journalists “believe one side of the political spectrum to be legitimate, and the other should be given as few opportunities to have their opinions heard as possible.” In other words, it’s all a part of “cancel culture” — the catchphrase for how the masses supposedly gang up to silence provocative voices. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 23 I happen to think that the Politico staffers were right to oppose their news organization granting its imprimatur to someone with Shapiro’s history of performative bigotry. But Scarry is entitled to his opinion. So are the objectors at Politico. And so is Shapiro, who tweeted this in 2010: “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.” And who offered this view in 2019, after a Democratic presidential candidate proposed that colleges opposed to gay marriage lose their tax-exempt status: “Beto O’Rourke does not get to raise my child. And if he tries, I will meet him at the door with a gun.” Yes, in America, all these people get to talk. Because of the First Amendment, the government won’t shut them down. That doesn’t mean they’re immune to other forms of accountability, though. When Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri joined the Republican Sedition Caucus and supported overturning the presidential election a few weeks ago, Simon & Schuster decided it didn’t want to publish his book anymore. Likewise, Twitter decided to permanently suspend President Donald Trump after he used the platform to spread damaging lies about the election and to fire up those who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6. There’s been plenty of criticism about these decisions, not one of which had anything to do with the First Amendment, which forbids the government — not Twitter or any other private entity — from shutting down speech except in the most dangerous cases. But you’d never know it from all the bad-faith squealing, mostly from the right. Night after night, Fox News offers prime-time viewers its “leftist-assault-on- speech” show. Hawley, who needed only a few days to find a new publisher for his book, subsequently blasted the “muzzling of America” in an opinion piece in the widely read New York Post. Have any of these people been silenced? Hardly. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 24 As Parker Molloy of Media Matters put it: “Despite getting a spot on the front page of the fourth-largest newspaper in the U.S., coverage across the entire Fox News lineup, a new book deal, an audience of more than half a million followers on Twitter, and a lengthy list of credits on IMDb, Hawley would like you to believe that he is a man without a voice.” And then there’s Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who ranted that the congressional efforts to hold Trump accountable for his role in the attempted insurrection at the Capitol are somehow sins against free expression: “Impeachment is the zenith of cancel culture,” he tweeted, as if “cancel culture” were to blame for a constitutional remedy that dates back to the country’s founding. I talked with a leading First Amendment lawyer and scholar, Jameel Jaffer, about all of this last week. Jaffer thinks a lot of these complaints are misguided. They spring, he said, from a misunderstanding (I would call it an intentional misunderstanding) of what the First Amendment is all about. “The point of the First Amendment is to take these kinds of debates out of the hands of the government and put them in the hands of private citizens,” said Jaffer, a Columbia University law professor and director of the Knight First Amendment Institute. It’s not subverting the First Amendment, therefore, to criticize a politician or a cable news host or a right-wing provocateur. “That’s the whole point of the First Amendment,” he said. Nor is it a subversion of free-speech values for news organizations to make editing decisions or for social media platforms to make and enforce rules. Twitter’s decision to permanently suspend Trump, though, gives Jaffer pause. Given the outsize power of the tech platforms as speech gatekeepers and information distributors, he prefers to err on the side of letting people have their say. (When their say turns into dangerous incitement, he agrees it goes too far.) These nuanced views don’t get much airtime in the outrage factories of cable news and talk radio. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 25 “It’s important we should tolerate diverse views,” Jaffer said. “We benefit from a public square that includes ideas that make us uncomfortable.” Late last week, progressive groups published an open letter asking news organizations to stop amplifying politicians who won’t publicly concede that the 2020 presidential election was legitimate. “Every American is entitled to freedom of speech, but they are not entitled to appear on prestigious television programs or news outlets to spread demonstrable falsehoods that have already incited a murderous insurrection, and remain at the heart of an ongoing national security threat,” the letter said. Do these politicians run the risk of being “canceled”? I doubt it. They’ll find a way to get their messages out, just as Hawley is doing with such success. It would help if journalists pushed back more effectively. CNN’s Pamela Brown gave a master class in her devastating interview with Madison Cawthorn, a Republican congressman from North Carolina. By the end, he had no defense left for his election denialism. But, even if that sort of pushback becomes the norm, news organizations should be wary of handing these charlatans a megaphone. You can call that cancel culture if you want. I call it responsibility. The good news is that, in America, we get to argue about it. █ In Defense of Cancel Culture Let’s not cancel Gen Z. Elizabeth Rose | Medium | Nov 20, 2020 Cancel culture, while created by Gen Z, got its reputation from older generations. As Gen Zers on social media began “cancelling” high profile names like J.K. Rowling, Lea Michele, Vanessa Hudgens, Jimmy Fallon, and Ellen Degeneres, to name a few, for racist, transphobia, and otherwise toxic behavior, a fear arose among celebrities and public figures that one step out of line would lose them their notoriety. But many have been quick to speak out on the adverse effects of Cancel Culture, even former President Barack Obama. The major criticism is that shaming people into silence and conformity reduces the freedom of discourse which is not CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 26 only valued, but essential, for a functioning democracy. And even when the people doing the silencing believe they are doing so in the name of social goodness, it still is unjustified. In the now infamous letter published in Harper’s Magazine titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” a number of well-respected people added their name as a signatory. The Harper’s letter, without saying the words “cancel culture,” spoke to the ills of silencing minority opinion and the negative effects on democracy where there isn’t “open debate and toleration of differences.” It should come as no surprise that a bunch of writers signed onto a letter calling for more freedom of expression and less limitation on speech. However, no matter how well-intentioned the letter may have been, it misses the mark. The backlash from the letter ranged from calling the authors whiny to misinformed to elitist. And the criticisms were not without merit. Cancel culture, as defined by those who oppose it, is the silencing of minority opinion through a process of public shaming. When someone is “cancelled” they often post on social media with hashtags like #CancelJKRowling, #CancelEllen, or #JimmyFallonIsOverParty in response to news which the commenter perceives as negative about that person. J.K. Rowling for example, the once beloved Harry Potter author, has become one of the faces of cancel culture. In early June, Rowling began a series of tweets explaining her thoughts on what it means to be female. According to Rowling, menstruating is reserved for females, and not trans men. Her remarks sparked a storm on Twitter with people calling for Rowling to apologize, calling her transphobic, and calling for her cancellation. Rowling however doubled down on her remarks and has not yet changed her tune. She was also notably one of the signatories to the Harper’s letter. Other celebrities suffered a similar fate. Allegations about the toxic work environment at The Ellen DeGeneres Show got her cancelled. Tasteless, out of touch comments on the coronavirus pandemic got Vanessa Hudgens cancelled. Jimmy Fallon got cancelled after a video resurfaced where he posed in Blackface. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 27 But here’s the thing — critics of cancel culture frame its harms as a free speech problem. And surely, there are circumstances where cancel culture does lend itself to limited speech. But for all the condemnations on cancel culture as an un- America speech suppressing monster, I would argue that cancel culture is incredibly American. Cancel culture is essentially a boycott. Its refusing to participate or support those that promote racist, homophobic, sexist, transphobic, or otherwise ignorant behavior. Protest is at the heart of this country and it shouldn’t be limited in the name of making already powerful people feel safer to spew ideas that are not tolerable in today’s society. Because exposure by millions is so easy now with social media, celebrities, rich, powerful, connected, and beautiful, can no longer get away with disrespecting human dignity. They are not being held to a higher standard for being a public figure, they are being held to the bare minimum. As with anything, there are certainly lines. Too much of any good thing can turn poor. Public discourse is important to democracy. We should listen to those that disagree with us and engage in fruitful discussion. Cancelling isn’t painted with a broad brush, but it does shame some of the worst offenses. And turning off the fandom and revere for those that who haven’t returned the respect their fans have endlessly given them is not an unreasonable consequence to sexual harassment or homophobia, or any other worldview which renders someone less than human. It also should be noted that while public figures feel shame from being cancelled, they are hardly ever actually cancelled. Ellen Degeneres still has a TV show. J.K. Rowling still has 14 million Twitter followers. Even further, when a celebrity apologizes, the public is incredibly receptive. Jimmy Fallon issued a public apology on Twitter after his SNL video in Blackface resurfaced. Fallon’s show, where he is quite literally paid to talk about culture and politics, went on get the highest ratings in July, even after years of trailing behind Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 28 Cancel culture, for all the time it has been accused to stifling debate, to me, seems like it sparks it. If you look to the replies of public figures being cancelled, there are often more defenders of the behavior at issue than there are cancellers. Cancel culture has encouraged a discussion on what is tolerable and intolerable in healthy discussion and so far, there hasn’t been any real luck at actually removing someone from the public conversation. Nor has cancel culture yet, at least in my opinion, gone over the line of limiting discourse. Its jurisdiction has remained with the -isms that have been deemed a social ill far before Gen Z was even born. Perhaps the critics of cancel culture are often the same people who are so used to shaping public discourse. The seemingly powerful, usually white, people who easily garner attention and simply aren’t used to having their narratives questioned so publicly and widespread. But if dialogue and public debate are good for society, young voices expressing disapproval should not be excluded from the discussion. █ Conservatives have a ‘cancel culture’ of their own Max Boot | Washington Post | Jul 10, 2020 For as long as I can remember, conservatives have been denouncing the intolerance of the left. I was decrying “political correctness” as a student columnist at the University of California at Berkeley 30 years ago. Now the catchphrase is “cancel culture.” In his Mount Rushmore speech last week, President Trump decried a “new far-left fascism” that is “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.” It’s true that some leftists try to repress viewpoints they find offensive. A group of intellectual luminaries has even faced a backlash for releasing an open letter decrying this trend. But here’s the thing. The right has little standing to complain about the left’s cancel culture, because it has its own cancel culture that is just as pervasive and might be even more powerful. Trump’s hypocrisy is glaring. As my fellow Post columnist Catherine Rampell pointed out, he is trying to intimidate critical media organizations, stop the publication of books that he doesn’t like, and purge the executive branch of CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 29 anyone who disagrees with him. To cite but one egregious example: Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was fired from the National Security Council and now has been forced into early retirement, without a peep of protest from Republicans, because he testified truthfully about Trump’s impeachable conduct. The rest of the conservative movement can be just as intolerant of dissent. I learned this the hard way when I was the op-ed editor of the Wall Street Journal from 1997 to 2002. As I recount in my book “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right,” I was nearly fired for trying to run an op-ed critical of supply-side economics by Paul Krugman, a future Nobel laureate in economics. The editorial-page philosophy was that it would run one liberal column a week; if readers wanted more, they could turn to the New York Times. In more recent years, I have been dismayed to see conservative organizations purging Never Trumpers. There are practically no Trump critics left at Fox News save for Juan Williams,whose liberal views probably have little resonance with its conservative audience. Never Trump conservatives such as Steve Hayes, George F. Will and Bill Kristol are long gone at the network. Fox’s prime-time programming is wall-to-wall Trump idolatry. Something similar happened at National Review. The conservative magazine ran a cover article in January 2016 “Against Trump,” but it has since become noisily pro-Trump. When it does gingerly criticize Trump, it typically asserts that his opponents are way worse. Two of its leading Trump skeptics— David French and Jonah Goldberg —decamped to a new website called the Dispatch. Another new website, the Bulwark, was started by refugees from the Weekly Standard, which had been the most anti-Trump conservative publication until it was shuttered at the end of 2018 by its owner, a major Republican donor named Philip Anschutz. These are hardly isolated examples. Sol Stern, a former fellow at the Manhattan Institute and longtime contributor to its influential magazine, City Journal, has just published an essay in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas recounting how these New York-based entities were Trumpified. (The Manhattan Institute’s director of communications declined to comment on Stern’s article.) Initially, City Journal, like other conservative organs, was quite critical of the reality TV star. But once it became clear Trump was going to be the Republican nominee, criticism of him all but vanished from its pages. When Stern pitched an CL&L | 2021 Winter | Kessler | Freedom of Expression and "Cancel Culture" | for Feb 9 | Page 30 article about “Trump’s hate-filled campaign rallies,” he was told, “We’re steering clear of that now.” The pressure to toe the Trump line only intensified after his election, because, Stern writes, the Manhattan Institute’s major supporters include Trump donors such as Rebekah Mercer and Paul Singer. Stern resigned in protest in October 2017. He hoped that his letter of resignation would spark an “internal conversation about City Journal’s political direction in the Trump era,” but, he writes, it never happened. “The historical validation of Trump thus became our magazine’s default position. For a journal of ideas, this was a dereliction of duty.” Not even Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the novel coronavirus has altered City Journal’s approach. While the magazine has blasted New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s performance as a “daily exercise in justification, accountability denial and self-aggrandizement,” it has hardly mentioned Trump’s scandalous role. Stern notes: “Only one piece, written by an outside contributor, cited the President’s slow response to the crisis. Yet even that minor criticism was rendered moot when the writer falsely claimed that Trump’s performance was no worse than that of any other world leader.” All organizations have the right to tell their audiences what they want to hear. But when it comes to a diversity of opinions, the right doesn’t practice what it preaches. It (rightly) demands conservative representation in universities, corporations and mainstream media organizations, but it shuns liberal views in its own sphere of control — which now extends to the entire federal government. █