It’s really annoying when people trivialize cancel culture. Look at this guy, for instance. The only thing that happened to him is that some people disagreed with his views and others didn’t find them interesting. That’s not cancellation. It’s life. He’s trivializing a truly terrible thing because he wants to make himself sound more interesting.
9 responses to “Fake Cancellation”
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For once I have to disagree with your views: I find them uncharacteristically uncharitable at best, self-righteous at worst. After all, hair-splitting definitions of what constitutes “cancel culture” do not help, AT THIS PRECISE MOMENT.
This young man has lost long-held friendships, a source of income, future employment in many areas and is being treated as a pariah at university. I think it’s bad enough and I don’t see any self-aggrandizing in the article.
Every time you are punished by the Woke as a consequence of your publicly expressed views, IT IS an instance of cancel culture.
I believe you might want to reconsider this.
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I’ve read the article as well, and I have to agree with Avi. It wasn’t simply a matter of people “disagreeing and finding his views uninteresting”. He lost friends, collegues, and his job, along with opportunities. If his opinions weren’t silenced, then they were vilified by the local media and the people he worked for.
Sounds like cancel culture to me. You don’t have to be famous to experience it. I think the overall point he was making was the reason WHY more people… ordinary people… are reluctant to speak out against the mentality of the mindless, woke masses is because of the fear of what happened to him, could happen to them as well.
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Sarah Braasch wasn’t famous. She was actually very left-wing. But now she lives in penury, with no chance of being hired in spite of her bunch of prestigious degrees. She can’t get published anywhere to defend herself. Three years in, and her name is still so toxic that nobody even on the right will touch her with a 10-foot pole. You absolutely don’t have to be famous to be cancelled. But words have meaning. “Cancelled” means you don’t get to speak again, and this guy clearly has no problem getting his views published and widely disseminated.
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And just after I posted my comment:
https://twitter.com/landryst/status/1435196332130672645?s=19
Once we go in the direction of “both sides do it,” we lose the most important point, which is that the left has an absolutely outsize cultural power. It’s a unique phenomenon, not “part of human nature.”
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“Every time you are punished by the Woke as a consequence of your publicly expressed views, IT IS an instance of cancel culture.”
I don’t think so. From what I understood from the article, many people disagreed with the man all at once, and adjusted their relationship with him accordingly. The reason it seemed severe wasn’t any particular unfairness, but rather the magnitude of the response in total.
That is different to so-called “cancelling”, which is where many people don’t just disagree with a person or adjust their relationship with them, but target them and the people around them so that they are denied employment, denied access to basic services, have pressure applied to people around them so as to deny social contact & connection etc.
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I posted my comment before I saw Just George’s, and it’s precisely this. I absolutely recognize people’s right to stop hanging out with me because they don’t like what I have to say about anything. But there’s an enormous difference between this and if my published scholarship gets erased.
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The problem that I have with what this young man is doing is that the Left is weaponizing this kind of stories against us. There are many people on the Left who claim they’ve been cancelled and that it’s a “both sides” phenomenon.
The Left has an unprecedented power to erase people from public life,erase published scholarship and art. It’s unprecedented because it’s not dependent on which party is in office. You can’t vote against it or address it politically at all. If what happened to this guy is cancel culture, we need a different word for what is being done to people whose life work has been erased, who are driven to suicide, who can never get employed again.
How many people on the left can share identical stories to this guy’s? I’m guessing a lot. But does this mean that cancel culture is a bipartisan phenomenon? Absolutely not.
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Avi, I agree with you as well. Just because he was young and not super established before being cancelled, he was, for all the reasons you listed,
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He didn’t get cancelled though. He writes for the globe and mail, the New York post, etc etc. He has a booming career for a young kid. A delta between his narrative and reality. He wrote on a hot topic to get the attention and clearly it’s working if so many people are taking it at face value. A great storyteller!
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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