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The second wave of “cancel culture”

How the concept has evolved to mean different things to different people.

by Aja Romano

“Cancel culture,” as a concept, feels inescapable. The phrase is all over the news, tossed around in casual social media conversation; it’s been linked to everything from free speech debates to Mr. Potato Head .

It sometimes seems all-encompassing, as if all forms of contemporary discourse must now lead, exhaustingly and endlessly, either to an attempt to “cancel” anyone whose opinions cause controversy or to accusations of cancel culture in action, however unwarranted.

In the rhetorical furor, a new phenomenon has emerged: the weaponization of cancel culture by the right.

Across the US, conservative politicians have launched legislation seeking to do the very thing they seem to be afraid of: Cancel supposedly left-wing businesses, organizations, and institutions; see, for example, national GOP figures threatening to punish Major League Baseball for standing against a Georgia voting restrictions law by removing MLB’s federal antitrust exemption.

Meanwhile, Fox News has stoked outrage and alarmism over cancel culture, including trying to incite Gen X to take action against the nebulous problem. Tucker Carlson, one of the network’s most prominent personalities, has emphatically embraced the anti-cancel culture discourse, claiming liberals are trying to cancel everything from Space Jam to the Fourth of July .

The idea of canceling began as a tool for marginalized communities to assert their values against public figures who retained power and authority even after committing wrongdoing — but in its current form, we see how warped and imbalanced the power dynamics of the conversation really are.

All along, debate about cancel culture has obscured its roots in a quest to attain some form of meaningful accountability for public figures who are typically answerable to no one. But after centuries of ideological debate turning over questions of free speech, censorship, and, in recent decades, “political correctness,” it was perhaps inevitable that the mainstreaming of cancel culture would obscure the original concerns that canceling was meant to address. Now it’s yet another hyperbolic phase of the larger culture war.

The core concern of cancel culture — accountability — remains as crucial a topic as ever. But increasingly, the cancel culture debate has become about how we communicate within a binary, right versus wrong framework. And a central question is not whether we can hold one another accountable, but how we can ever forgive.

Cancel culture has evolved rapidly to mean very different things to different people

It’s only been about six years since the concept of “cancel culture” began trickling into the mainstream. The phrase has long circulated within Black culture, perhaps paying homage to Nile Rodgers’s 1981 single “Your Love Is Cancelled.” As I wrote in my earlier explainer on the origins of cancel culture , the concept of canceling a whole person originated in the 1991 film New Jack City and percolated for years before finally emerging online among Black Twitter in 2014 thanks to an episode of Love and Hip-Hop: New York. Since then, the term has undergone massive shifts in meaning and function.

Early on, it most frequently popped up on social media, as people attempted to collectively “cancel,” or boycott, celebrities they found problematic. As a term with roots in Black culture, it has some resonance with Black empowerment movements, as far back as the civil rights boycotts of the 1950s and ’60s . This original usage also promotes the idea that Black people should be empowered to reject cultural figures or works that spread harmful ideas. As Anne Charity Hudley, the chair of linguistics of African America at the University of California Santa Barbara, told me in 2019 , “When you see people canceling Kanye, canceling other people, it’s a collective way of saying, ‘We elevated your social status, your economic prowess, [and] we’re not going to pay attention to you in the way that we once did. ... ‘I may have no power, but the power I have is to [ignore] you.’”

As the logic behind wanting to “cancel” specific messages and behaviors caught on, many members of the public, as well as the media, conflated it with adjacent trends involving public shaming, callouts, and other forms of public backlash . (The media sometimes refers to all of these ideas collectively as “ outrage culture .”) But while cancel culture overlaps and aligns with many related ideas, it’s also always been inextricably linked to calls for accountability.

As a concept, cancel culture entered the mainstream alongside hashtag-oriented social justice movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo — giant social waves that were effective in shifting longstanding narratives about victims and criminals, and in bringing about actual prosecutions in cases like those of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein . It is also frequently used interchangeably with “woke” political rhetoric , an idea that is itself tied to the 2014 rise of the Black Lives Matter protests. In similar ways, both “wokeness” and “canceling” are tied to collectivized demands for more accountability from social systems that have long failed marginalized people and communities.

But over the past few years, many right-wing conservatives, as well as liberals who object to more strident progressive rhetoric, have developed the view that “cancel culture” is a form of harassment intended to silence anyone who sets a foot out of line under the nebulous tenets of “woke” politics . So the idea now represents a vast assortment of objectives and can hold wildly different connotations, depending on whom you’re talking to.

• “Wokeness is a problem and we all know it”

Taken in good faith, the concept of “canceling” a person is really about questions of accountability — about how to navigate a social and public sphere in which celebrities, politicians, and other public figures who say or do bad things continue to have significant platforms and influence. In fact, actor LeVar Burton recently suggested the entire idea should be recast as “consequence culture.”

“I think it’s misnamed,” Burton told the hosts of The View . “I think we have a consequence culture. And that consequences are finally encompassing everybody in the society, whereas they haven’t been ever in this country.”

Within the realm of good faith, the larger conversation around these questions can then expand to contain nuanced considerations of what the consequences of public misbehavior should be, how and when to rehabilitate the reputation of someone who’s been “canceled,” and who gets to decide those things.

Taken in bad faith, however, “cancel culture” becomes an omniscient and dangerous specter: a woke, online social justice mob that’s ready to rise up and attack anyone, even other progressives, at the merest sign of dissent. And it’s this — the fear of a nebulous mob of cancel-happy rabble-rousers — that conservatives have used to their political advantage.

Conservatives are using fear of cancel culture as a cudgel

Critics of cancel culture typically portray whoever is doing the canceling as wielding power against innocent victims of their wrath. From 2015 on, a variety of news outlets, whether through opinion articles or general reporting , have often framed cancel culture as “ mob rule .”

In 2019, the New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu observed just how frequently some media outlets have compared cancel culture to violent political uprisings, ranging from ethnocide to torture under dictatorial regimes. Such an exaggerated framework has allowed conservative media to depict cancel culture as an urgent societal issue. Fox News pundits, for example, have made cancel culture a focal part of their coverage . In one recent survey , people who voted Republican were more than twice as likely to know what “cancel culture” was, compared with Democrats and other voters, even though in the current dominant understanding of cancel culture, Democrats are usually the ones doing the canceling.

“The conceit that the conservative right has gotten so many people to adopt , beyond divorcing the phrase from its origins in Black queer communities, is an obfuscation of the power relations of the stakeholders involved,” journalist Shamira Ibrahim told Vox in an email. “It got transformed into a moral panic akin to being able to irrevocably ruin the powerful with just the press of a keystroke, when it in actuality doesn’t wield nearly as much power as implied by the most elite.”

You wouldn’t know that to listen to right-wing lawmakers and media figures who have latched onto an apocalyptic scenario in which the person or subject who’s being criticized is in danger of being censored, left jobless, or somehow erased from history — usually because of a perceived left-wing mob.

This is a fear that the right has weaponized. At the 2020 Republican National Convention , at least 11 GOP speakers — about a third of those who took the stage during the high-profile event — addressed cancel culture as a concerning political phenomenon. President Donald Trump himself declared that “The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it.” One delegate resolution at the RNC specifically targeted cancel culture , describing a trend toward “erasing history, encouraging lawlessness, muting citizens, and violating free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and speech.”

Ibrahim pointed out that in addition to re-waging the war on political correctness that dominated the 1990s by repackaging it as a war on cancel culture, right-wing conservatives have also “attempted to launch the same rhetorical battles” across numerous fronts, attempting to rebrand the same calls for accountability and consequences as “woke brigade, digital lynch mobs, outrage culture and call-out culture.” Indeed, it’s because of the collective organizational power that online spaces provide to marginalized communities, she argued, that anti-cancel culture rhetoric focuses on demonizing them.

• The “free speech debate” isn’t really about free speech

Social media is “one of the few spaces that exists for collective feedback and where organizing movements that threaten [conservatives’] social standing have begun,” Ibrahim said, “thus compelling them to invert it into a philosophical argument that doesn’t affect just them, but potentially has destructive effects on censorship for even the working-class individual.”

This potential has nearly become reality through recent forms of Republican-driven legislation around the country. The first wave involved overt censorship , with lawmakers pushing to ban texts like the New York Times’s 1619 Project from educational usage at publicly funded schools and universities. Such censorship could seriously curtail free speech at these institutions — an ironic example of the broader kind of censorship that is seemingly a core fear about cancel culture.

A recent wave of legislation has been directed at corporations as a form of punishment for crossing Republicans. After both Delta Air Lines and Major League Baseball spoke out against Georgia lawmakers’ passage of a restrictive voting rights bill , Republican lawmakers tried to target the companies, tying their public statements to cancel culture. State lawmakers tried and failed to pass a bill stripping Delta of a tax exemption . And some national GOP figures have threatened to punish MLB by removing its exemption from federal antitrust laws. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that “corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.”

But for all the hysteria and the actual crackdown attempts lawmakers have enacted, even conservatives know that most of the hand-wringing over cancellation is performative. CNN’s AJ Willingham pointed out how easily anti-cancel culture zeal can break down, noting that although the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was called “America Uncanceled,” the organization wound up removing a scheduled speaker who had expressed anti-Semitic viewpoints. And Fox News fired a writer last year after he was found to have a history of making racist, homophobic, and sexist comments online.

These moves suggest that though they may decry “woke” hysteria, conservatives also sometimes want consequences for extremism and other harmful behavior — at least when the shaming might fall on them as well.

“This dissonance reveals cancel culture for what it is,” Willingham wrote. “Accountability for one’s actions.”

CPAC’s swift levying of consequences in the case of a potentially anti-Semitic speaker is revealing on a number of levels, not only because it gives away the lie beneath concerns that “cancel culture” is something profoundly new and dangerous, but also because the conference actually had the power to take action and hold the speaker accountable. Typically, the apocryphal “social justice mob” has no such ability. Actually canceling a whole person is much harder to do than opponents of cancel culture might make it sound — nearly impossible, in fact.

Very few “canceled” public figures suffer significant career setbacks

It’s true that some celebrities have effectively been canceled, in the sense that their actions have resulted in major consequences, including job losses and major reputational declines, if not a complete end to their careers.

Consider Harvey Weinstein , Bill Cosby , R. Kelly , and Kevin Spacey , who faced allegations of rape and sexual assault that became impossible to ignore, and who were charged with crimes for their offenses. They have all effectively been “canceled” — Weinstein and Cosby because they’re now convicted criminals, Kelly because he’s in prison awaiting trial , and Spacey because while all charges against him to date have been dropped, he’s too tainted to hire.

Along with Roseanne Barr, who lost her hit TV show after a racist tweet , and Louis C.K., who saw major professional setbacks after he admitted to years of sexual misconduct against female colleagues, their offenses were serious enough to irreparably damage their careers, alongside a push to lessen their cultural influence.

But usually, to effectively cancel a public figure is much more difficult. In typical cases where “cancel culture” is applied to a famous person who does something that incurs criticism, that person rarely faces serious long-term consequences. During the past year alone, a number of individuals and institutions have faced public backlash for troubling behavior or statements — and a number of them thus far have either weathered the storm or else departed their jobs or restructured their operations of their own volition.

For example, beloved talk show host Ellen DeGeneres has come under fire in recent years for a number of reasons, from palling around with George W. Bush to accusing the actress Dakota Johnson of not inviting her to a party to, most seriously, allegedly fostering an abusive and toxic workplace . The toxic workplace allegations had an undeniable impact on DeGeneres’s ratings, with The Ellen DeGeneres Show losing over 40 percent of its viewership in the 2020–’21 TV season. But DeGeneres has not literally been canceled; her daytime talk show has been confirmed for a 19th season, and she continues to host other TV series like HBO Max’s Ellen’s Next Great Designer .

Another TV host recently felt similar heat but has so far retained his job: In February, The Bachelor franchise underwent a reckoning due to a long history of racial insensitivity and lack of diversity, culminating in the announcement that longtime host Chris Harrison would be “ stepping aside for a period of time.” But while Harrison won’t be hosting the upcoming season of The Bachelorette , ABC still lists him as the franchise host, and some franchise alums have come forward to defend him . (It is unclear whether Harrison will return as a host in the future, though he has said he plans to do so and has been working with race educators and engaging in a personal accountability program of “counsel, not cancel.”)

In many cases, instead of costing someone their career, the allegation of having been “canceled” instead bolsters sympathy for the offender, summoning a host of support from both right-wing media and the public. In March 2021, concerns that Dr. Seuss was being “canceled” over a decision by the late author’s publisher to stop printing a small selection of works containing racist imagery led to a run on Seuss’s books that landed him on bestseller lists. And although J.K. Rowling sparked massive outrage and calls to boycott all things Harry Potter after she aired transphobic views in a 2020 manifesto, sales of the Harry Potter books increased tremendously in her home country of Great Britain.

A few months later, 58 British public figures including playwright Tom Stoppard signed an open letter supporting Rowling’s views and calling her the target of “an insidious, authoritarian and misogynistic trend in social media.” And in December, the New York Times not only reviewed the author’s latest title — a new children’s book called The Ickabog — but praised the story’s “moral rectitude,” with critic Sarah Lyall summing up, “It made me weep with joy.” It was an instant bestseller .

In light of these contradictions, it’s tempting to declare that the idea of “canceling” someone has already lost whatever meaning it once had. But for many detractors, the “real” impact of cancel culture isn’t about famous people anyway.

Rather, they worry, “cancel culture” and the polarizing rhetoric it enables really impacts the non-famous members of society who suffer its ostensible effects — and that, even more broadly, it may be threatening our ability to relate to each other at all.

The debate around cancel culture began as a search for accountability. It may ultimately be about encouraging empathy.

It’s not only right-wing conservatives who are wary of cancel culture. In 2019, former President Barack Obama decried cancel culture and “woke” politics, framing the phenomenon as people “be[ing] as judgmental as possible about other people” and adding, “That’s not activism.”

At a recent panel devoted to making a nonpartisan “ Case Against Cancel Culture ,” former ACLU president Nadine Strossen expressed great concern over cancel culture’s chilling effect on the non-famous. “I constantly encounter students who are so fearful of being subjected to the Twitter mob that they are engaging in self-censorship,” she said. Strossen cited as one such chilling effect the isolated instances of students whose college admissions had been rescinded on the basis of racist social media posts.

In his recent book Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture , human rights lawyer and free speech advocate Dan Kovalik argues that cancel culture is basically a giant self-own, a product of progressive semantics that causes the left to cannibalize itself.

“Unfortunately, too many on the left, wielding the cudgel of ‘cancel culture,’ have decided that certain forms of censorship and speech and idea suppression are positive things that will advance social justice,” Kovalik writes . “I fear that those who take this view are in for a rude awakening.”

Kovalik’s worries are partly grounded in a desire to preserve free speech and condemn censorship. But they’re also grounded in empathy. As America’s ideological divide widens, our patience with opposing viewpoints seems to be waning in favor of a type of society-wide “cancel and move on” approach, even though studies suggest that approach does nothing to change hearts and minds. Kovalik points to a survey published in 2020 that found that in 700 interactions, “deep listening” — including “respectful, non-judgmental conversations” — was 102 times more effective than brief interactions in a canvassing campaign for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Across the political spectrum, wariness toward the idea of “cancel culture” has increased — but outside of right-wing political spheres, that wariness isn’t so centered on the hyper-specific threat of losing one’s job or career due to public backlash. Rather, the term “cancel culture” functions as shorthand for an entire mode of polarized, aggressive social engagement.

Journalist (and Vox contributor) Zeeshan Aleem has argued that contemporary social media engenders a mode of communication he calls “disinterpretation,” in which many participants are motivated to join the conversation not because they want to promote communication, or even to engage with the original opinion, but because they seek to intentionally distort the discourse.

In this type of interaction, as Aleem observed in a recent Substack post, “Commentators are constantly being characterized as believing things they don’t believe, and entire intellectual positions are stigmatized based on vague associations with ideas that they don’t have any substantive affiliation with.” The goal of such willful misinterpretation, he argued, is conformity — to be seen as aligned with the “correct” ideological standpoint in a world where stepping out of alignment results in swift backlash, ridicule, and cancellation.

Such an antagonistic approach “effectively treats public debate as a battlefield,” he wrote. He continued:

It’s illustrative of a climate in which nothing is untouched by polarization, in which everything is a proxy for some broader orientation which must be sorted into the bin of good/bad, socially aware/problematic, savvy/out of touch, my team/the enemy. ... We’re tilting toward a universe in which all discourse is subordinate to activism; everything is a narrative, and if you don’t stay on message then you’re contributing to the other team on any given issue. What this does is eliminate the possibility of public ambiguity, ambivalence, idiosyncrasy, self-interrogation.

The problem with this style of communication is that in a world where every argument gets flattened into a binary under which every opinion and every person who publicly shares their thoughts must be either praised or canceled, few people are morally righteous enough to challenge that binary without their own motives and biases then being called into question. The question becomes, as Aleem reframed it for me: “How does someone avoid the reality that their claims of being disinterpreted will be disinterpreted?”

“When people demand good-faith engagement, it can often be dismissed as a distraction tactic or whining about being called out,” he explained, noting that some responses to his original Twitter thread on the subject assumed he must be complaining about just such a callout.

Other complications can arise, such as when the people who are protesting against this type of bad-faith discourse are also criticized for problematic statements or behavior , or perceived as having too much privilege to wholly understand the situation. Remember, the origins of cancel culture are rooted in giving marginalized members of society the ability to seek accountability and change, especially from people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, power, and privilege.

“[W]hat people do when they invoke dog whistles like ‘cancel culture’ and ‘culture wars,’” Danielle Butler wrote for the Root in 2018, “is illustrate their discomfort with the kinds of people who now have a voice and their audacity to direct it towards figures with more visibility and power.”

But far too often, people who call for accountability on social media seem to slide quickly into wanting to administer punishment instead. In some cases, this process really does play out with a mob mentality, one that seems bent on inflicting pain and hurt while allowing no room for growth and change, showing no mercy, and offering no real forgiveness — let alone allowing for the possibility that the mob itself might be entirely unjustified.

See, for example, trans writer Isabel Fall, who wrote a short story in 2020 that angered many readers with its depiction of gender dysphoria through the lens of militaristic warfare. (The story has since become a finalist for a Hugo Award.) Because Fall published under a pseudonym, people who disliked the story assumed she must be transphobic rather than a trans woman wrestling with her own dysphoria. Fall was harassed, doxed, forcibly outed, and driven offline . These types of “cancellations” can happen without consideration for the person being canceled, even when that person apologizes — or, as in Fall’s case, even when they had little if anything to be sorry about.

The conflation of antagonized social media debates with the more serious aims to make powerful people face consequences is part of the problem. “I think the messy and turbulent evolution of speech norms online influences people’s perception of what’s called cancel culture,” Aleem said. He added that he’s grown “resistant to using the term [cancel culture] because it’s become so hard to pin down.”

“People connect boycotts with de-platforming speakers on college campuses,” he observed, “with social media harassment, with people being fired abruptly for breaching a taboo in a viral video.” The result is an environment where social media is a double-edged sword: “One could argue,” Aleem said, “that there’s now public input on issues [that wasn’t available] before, and that’s good for civil society, but that the vehicle through which that input comes produces some civically unhealthy ways of expression.”

Prevailing confusion about cancel culture hasn’t stopped it from becoming culturally and politically entrenched

If the conversation around cancel culture is unhealthy, then one can argue that the social systems cancel culture is trying to target are even more unhealthy — and that, for many people, is the bottom line.

The concept of canceling someone was created by communities of people who’ve never had much power to begin with. When people in those communities attempt to demand accountability by canceling someone, the odds are still stacked against them. They’re still the ones without the social, political, or professional power to compel someone into meaningful atonement, but they can at least be vocal by calling for a collective boycott.

The push by right-wing lawmakers and pundits to use the concept as a tool to vilify the left, liberals, and the powerless upends the original logic of cancel culture, Ibrahim told me. “It is being used to obscure marginalized voices by inverting the victim and the offender, and disingenuously affording disproportionate impact to the reach of a single voice — which has historically long been silenced — to now being the silencer of cis, male, and wealthy individuals,” she said.

And that approach is both expanding and growing more visible. What’s more, it is a divide not just between ideologies, but also between tactical approaches in navigating those ideological differences and dealing with wrongdoing.

“It effectuates a slippery-slope argument by taking a rhetorical scenario and pushing it to really absurdist levels, and furthermore asking people to suspend their implicit understanding of social constructs of power and class,” Ibrahim said. “It mutates into, ‘If I get canceled, then anyone can get canceled.’” She pointed out that usually, the supposedly “canceled” individual suffers no real long-term harm — “particularly when you give additional time for a person to regroup from a scandal. The media cycle iterates quicker than ever in present day.”

She suggested that perhaps the best approach to combating the escalation of cancel culture hysteria into a political weapon is to refuse to let those with power shape the way the conversation plays out.

“I think our remit, if anything, is to challenge that reframing and ask people to define the stakes of what material quality of life and liberty was actually lost,” she said.

In other words, the way cancel culture is discussed in the media might make it seem like something to fear and avoid at all costs, an apocalyptic event that will destroy countless lives and livelihoods, but in most cases, it’s probably not. That’s not to suggest that no one will ever be held accountable, or that powerful people won’t continue to be asked to answer for their transgressions. But the greater worry is still that people with too much power might use it for bad ends.

At its best, cancel culture has been about rectifying power imbalances and redistributing power to those who have little of it. Instead, it now seems that the concept may have become a weapon for people in power to use against those it was intended to help.

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How Cancel Culture Became Politicized — Just Like Political Correctness

Ari Shapiro

Alejandra Marquez Janse

Noah Caldwell

Patrick Jarenwattananon

"The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it," then-President Donald Trump said during a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention. It was remarkably similar to a sentiment expressed by another Republican president about political correctness nearly 30 years earlier. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption

"The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it," then-President Donald Trump said during a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention. It was remarkably similar to a sentiment expressed by another Republican president about political correctness nearly 30 years earlier.

When former President Donald Trump announced his lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter and Google this month, he used a word that has become a familiar signal in modern politics.

"We're demanding an end to the shadow-banning, a stop to the silencing and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing and canceling that you know so well," Trump said in a speech.

Donald Trump Sues Facebook, YouTube And Twitter For Alleged Censorship

That term, "canceling," has become central to the present-day debate over the consequences of speech and who gets to exact them. It has ascended from minor skirmishes on Twitter to the highest office in the country, and it actually mirrors a cultural conversation that started three decades ago.

"This is a power struggle of different groups or forces in society, I think, at its most basic," says Nicole Holliday, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. "And this is the same case with political correctness that used to get boiled down to, well, 'Do you have a right to be offended if it means I don't have the right to say something?' "

The idea of being "politically correct," having the most morally upstanding opinion on complicated subjects and the least offensive language with which to articulate it, gained popularity in the 1990s before people on the outside weaponized it against the community it came from — just like the idea of "canceling" someone today.

"I do think that 'cancel' in particular is something that was invented sort of by young people, and it actually just kind of means boycott, right? It means 'Do not support this thing,' " Holliday says.

Now, she says, "conservatives have picked it up not to just mean boycott, but rather to say: Our value system is under threat by these people who want to [de-]monetize or de-platform us because we have unpopular opinions."

But it's not just conservatives figures who think cancel culture has gone too far. The fear of being "canceled" has caused some everyday people to be more aware of — and at times, concerned about — what they say and post online.

So how did an effort to hold people accountable for their actions become politicized and get so out of control? To understand the uproar over cancel culture, it may help to examine the past.

How an in-joke on the left became a right-wing weapon

Ruth Perry has seen the long arc of these kinds of debates. She's a professor emeritus of literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked for almost four decades and founded the women's studies department in 1984.

Back in her early career, Perry says, she ran with a crowd of idealists.

"We cared about the Earth, we cared about ecology, we cared about treating animals correctly," she says. "We cared about sexism, we cared about white supremacy — all these things."

Perry says her peers would use the phrase "politically correct" to tease each other over whether their actions lined up with their ideals.

"Somebody would say, 'Would it be politically correct if we had a hamburger?' — somebody who was a vegetarian would say that. Or somebody who was a feminist might say, 'It may not be politically correct, but I think he's really hot,' [about] some sexist movie star or something," says Perry.

Code Switch

'politically correct': the phrase has gone from wisdom to weapon.

"Politically correct" was a kind of in-joke among American leftists — something you called a fellow leftist when you thought the person was being self-righteous. "The term was always used ironically," Perry says, "always calling attention to possible dogmatism."

Then, right-wing think tanks and conservatives started to use the term as a form of attack in both the media and academia.

"It felt like, 'Oh, my God, they're using this against us,' " Perry says. "And they're acting as if this term really was a kind of litmus test for political correctness, which it never had been."

A search of newspapers and magazines in the archive Nexis shows just how rapidly the term expanded beyond its original scene. In 1989, the phrase "politically correct" appeared fewer than 250 times in print. By 1994, the archive shows more than 10,000 hits. The idea was everywhere: from comedy shows like Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect to cartoons like Beavis and Butt-Head and even current events shows like Firing Line on PBS .

Where there's outrage, there's economic opportunity

This national obsession didn't just bubble up organically.

"It is an industry," John Wilson, author of the 1995 book The Myth of Political Correctness , says. "There are all these right-wing foundations and books that were published that made a lot of money promoting this idea."

He adds that the word "myth" in the title of his book is important to understanding how it became a phenomenon.

"A myth is not a falsehood: It doesn't mean it's a lie. It doesn't mean everything is fabricated," he says. "It means that it's a story. And so what happened in the '90s is, people, with political correctness, they took certain — sometimes true — anecdotes and they created a web, a story out of them, a myth that there was this vast repression of conservative voices on college campuses."

Wilson says there were grains of truth to the conservative argument — isolated examples of conflicts and protests, often on college campuses, and real cases of people getting punished or fired — but that those isolated cases got magnified into a sweeping national narrative that the right used to claim conservatives were being silenced. And by claiming victimization, Wilson says, conservatives were able to use the term "political correctness" as a bludgeon to hammer the left, a lot like the way the phrase "cancel culture" is used today.

When Republicans Attack 'Cancel Culture,' What Does It Mean?

Then, like now, local debates that might have stayed largely unknown beyond college newspapers suddenly became national news.

For example, in 1988, NPR and several other news organizations reported on a fight over Stanford University's freshman requirements. The name of the course at the center of the controversy was "Western Culture," which the students wanted replaced with a more multicultural class, Wilson says. People like Education Secretary William Bennett — a Republican — took the student protests as a broader attack.

"Right from the beginning, this was an assault on Western culture and Western civilization," he said in a 1988 PBS interview.

By 1991, this panic had reached all the way to the president of the United States.

President George H.W. Bush waves to a crowd of over 60,000 at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., on May 4, 1991, as he arrives to deliver the University of Michigan's commencement speech. Greg Gibson/Associated Press hide caption

President George H.W. Bush waves to a crowd of over 60,000 at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., on May 4, 1991, as he arrives to deliver the University of Michigan's commencement speech.

"We find free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses," said then-President George H.W. Bush in his commencement address at the University of Michigan in 1991. "The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land."

Bush went on: "The disputants treat sheer force — getting their foes punished or expelled, for instance — as a substitute for the power of ideas."

Another Republican president, Donald Trump, who denounced political correctness during his 2016 presidential campaign, made the same argument against cancel culture almost 30 years later at the 2020 Republican National Convention.

"The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it," Trump said during a speech.

Discussion about public cancellations increased in the years leading up to the 2020 election, and that points to something else that these two battles in the culture wars share.

"There tend to be these flare-ups or panics about political correctness in moments of institutional transformation or instability," historian Moira Weigel says, "and I think it tends to be a way that certain groups claim authority in a changing public sphere."

In those political correctness wars of the '90s, college campuses were becoming more diverse, and Weigel says something similar is taking place right now.

"It usually happens in response to movements for racial and gender and sexuality justice, and I think it's no accident that it's with the rise of BLM [Black Lives Matter] that you see it come back again as a big media theme," she says.

Co-opting cancel culture's origins

Before the entire country started to weigh in on a single person's actions, "canceling" started out on a much smaller scale.

Meredith Clark, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, says "cancel culture" builds on a process of accountability that has unfolded in Black communities for years. But, she takes issue with the description of "canceling" as a part of our broader culture.

"Canceling is what comes out of Black discourse — it's what comes out of Black queer discourse — but the assignment of 'culture' to that makes it a label that's big enough to be slapped on anyone and anything," she says. "And that is where the weaponization of what is otherwise accountability really takes off."

Clark thinks one reason that cancel culture has become such a hot national topic is people in powerful positions are unaccustomed to having to answer to marginalized people who, through social media, have greater access to them than ever.

"That's what it's all about," Clark says. "If this had remained something that just stuck within Black communities, within Latinx communities, then this wouldn't really be a story."

"But because it has crossed over," she continues, "now this becomes newsworthy, and it becomes something that is positioned as something that every everyday person should fear."

How social media amplified dialogue and flattened real accountability

Undoubtedly, the biggest difference between discussions of political correctness in the '90s and cancel culture today is the way social media creates access to both public and private individuals and puts their dialogue on equal footing.

Jon Ronson has been studying that transition for a decade and wrote about the way private individuals have been disproportionately punished for minor transgressions on social media in his 2015 book So You've Been Publicly Shamed. He thinks the issue with cancel culture is not so much one of right versus left, but with the idea that private individuals should be judged in the same way as public figures.

"The term 'cancel culture' has become this ridiculously catchall term where a private individual who did nothing much wrong, whose life was very heavily impacted by an overzealous social media shaming, is suddenly put into the same basket as a provocateur newspaper columnist," Ronson says.

Clark's studies illuminate a similar problem. She says that when you look at the small percentage of the U.S. population that is on Twitter — 42% of adults between 18 and 29 and only 27% of adults between 30 and 49, as of February 2021 — you understand how out of proportion the narrative of cancel culture is.

"Given the tiny, tiny portion of the American population in particular that uses Twitter, we're not really talking about a lot of people who are clamoring to cancel others," she says. "It sounds loud because it gets amplified. The Twitter commentary gets amplified by mainstream media; it gets picked up in discussions [with people] that otherwise would not have been privy to what was happening online."

Ronson thinks one way to alleviate the debate over cancel culture is to better understand how powerful social media — and our actions on it — can be.

"This is a very new weapon that we have. On Twitter, we're like children crawling towards guns," he says. As with any weapon, the best advice for navigating social media may be to proceed with caution and think before you shoot.

"I just think it's up to every individual on social media to be curious and patient. ... It's absurd to think that you know everything about somebody just because of one poorly worded tweet, and we are judging people that way," Ronson says.

Ronson says he remembers growing up in a culture of racism, misogyny and homophobia in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and '80s and how the idea of political correctness was used to address those issues. In the cases of both political correctness and cancel culture, he thinks some degree of correction is necessary, but what we're witnessing may be overshooting the mark.

"We're living in this very binary world," he says, "and in this world, people on the right are saying, 'You know, we are being silenced by a woke mob,' and people on the left are saying, 'It's not happening — we're just holding people accountable.' "

The truth, Ronson says, "is somewhere in the middle."

Mia Venkat, Noah Caldwell and Patrick Jarenwattananon produced and edited this story for broadcast. Alejandra Marquez Janse adapted it for the web.

Correction July 26, 2021

An earlier version of this story misspelled John Wilson's first name as Jon.

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The Real Reason Cancel Culture Is So Contentious

People on both sides of the debate are being too vague about what they favor and what they oppose.

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The majority of Americans who insist that “cancel culture” is a problem and the minority who counter that it is a fraud, a myth, or a moral panic are too often talking past one another.

One faction invokes the term cancel culture as shorthand for a range of complaints: for instance, that figures such as the political analyst David Shor and Emmanuel Cafferty , a California utility-company worker, lost their jobs after innocent acts that provoked unreasonable offense in others; that universities have unjustly punished hundreds of scholars for protected speech in recent years; or that so many Americans are self-censoring that deliberative democracy is threatened .

Another faction dismisses complaints about cancel culture and reframes the status quo as “ accountability culture .” This shorthand encompasses what many regard as long-overdue consequences for figures such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, two entertainment-industry giants credibly accused by multiple women of sexual assault, and the former NBA owner Donald Sterling, who was pushed out of the league after recordings of his racist comments surfaced.

Using any one term to frame such varied controversies hides the actual lines of disagreement. People who complain about “cancel culture” should always clarify what they oppose. They should be told: Be more specific, unless you’re literally saying that no one should ever be fired or stigmatized for anything they say or do. Likewise, people who laud “accountability culture” or dismiss cancel culture as a myth should be told: Be more specific about what you consider fair punishment, unless you’re literally saying that everyone fired or stigmatized for speech was treated justly.

Conor Friedersdorf: The threat to free speech, beyond ‘cancel culture’

Before going any further, I’ll lay my cards on the table. Although I dislike the term cancel culture because of its vagueness and potential for misinterpretation, I tend to think that “cancel culture” is a problem, by which I mean:

• Like former President Barack Obama, I fret about a puritanical streak in U.S. politics that condemns others too often and leaves too little room for forgiving them.
• In my view, Margaret Atwood, Cornel West, Deirdre McCloskey, and my colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams—among many other authors who signed the controversial 2020 Harper’s Magazine letter on free expression—were right to lament waning “norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”
• Like the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, I suspect that speech taboos on university campuses are undermining teaching and scholarship.
• And like the New York Times editorial board , I worry that some Americans are withdrawing from public discourse because they so frequently see others personally attacked, capriciously punished, or unjustly shamed by digital mobs who reject liberal speech values.

Inevitably, fair societies impose social sanctions on some bad behaviors. But fair societies also levy such sanctions in ways that the average citizen understands and accepts. They frown on arbitrary or excessive sanctions. And they reserve the most extreme extralegal punishments, such as public shaming, shunning, or depriving people of their livelihood, for extreme cases. If everyone were more specific, people who come down on opposite sides of the abstract, 30,000-foot debate over cancel culture might find some agreement about concrete cases.

To illustrate how greater specificity could keep the two sides of the debate from talking past each other, consider a 2021 Mother Jones article with the headline “ Roxane Gay Says Cancel Culture Does Not Exist .” Indeed, that’s precisely what Gay, a best-selling feminist author, tells her interviewer: Cancel culture, she says, “is this boogeyman that people have come up with to explain away bad behavior and when their faves experience consequences. I like to think of it as consequence culture, where when you make a mistake—and we all do, by the way—there should be consequences.”

Yet in the next breath, Gay seems to acknowledge that punishments are not being meted out fairly: “The problem is that we haven’t figured out what consequences should be,” she says. “So it’s all or nothing. Either there are no consequences, or people lose their jobs, or other sort of sweeping grand gestures that don’t actually solve the problem at hand.”

The interviewer’s next question was about the podcast Reply All , which had reported on allegations of unjust workplace dynamics at the magazine Bon Appétit but canceled the series before it was finished, because similar accusations arose against Reply All ’s own host. “I think it’s a mistake,” Gay declared. “I understand that the reporting is not finished on the final two episodes. But this is not the Mona Lisa. Somebody can finish these stories. I think the Bon Appétit story is interesting. And it’s typical. And it deserves to be told.”

As it turns out, Gay and I agree that a journalistic institution imposed a wrongheaded “consequence.” Its decision makers solved no problems while stymieing a valid inquiry into a worthy subject.

That’s more common ground than one would expect from the headline of the Mother Jones article. In the same spirit, I agree that, absent a rigorous definition of cancel culture , bad actors can exploit any ambiguity to deflect legitimate criticism of their conduct.

“Why should we care about having a serious discussion about defining cancel culture?” asks the attorney Ken White, who is deeply skeptical of the term. “We should because simply complaining about it in the abstract, without attempts to define it, without actionable responses, and without taking the rights of ‘cancellers’ doesn’t ease the culture war. It inflames it.” He’s right.

Read: How capitalism drives cancel culture

That said, the most incisive critics of cancel culture have specifically defined when a line is crossed, as they see it, from vigorous public disagreement with someone’s views to misguided attempts to stifle their expression. The free-speech activist Greg Lukianoff defines cancel culture as “the measurable uptick, since roughly 2014, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is—or would be —protected by the First Amendment.” In the higher-education sector, which Lukianoff tracks closely, he and Komi T. German note :

Since 2015, we documented 563 attempts (345 from the left, 202 from the right, 16 from neither) to get scholars canceled. Two thirds (362 incidents; 64 percent) of these cancellation attempts were successful, resulting in some form of professional sanction leveled at the scholar, including over one-fifth (117 incidents; 21 percent) resulting in termination … In 2001, the idea of one tenured professor being fired for protected speech seemed impossible, yet since 2015 there have been 30.

The author Jonathan Rauch offers a list of cancel-culture tells , which include “Are people denouncing you to your employer, your professional groups or your social connections?” “Is the tone of the discourse ad hominem, repetitive, ritualistic, posturing, accusatory, outraged?” “Are [campaigners] claiming that allowing you to be heard is violence against them or makes them unsafe?” The writer Wesley Yang has published videos , tweets , and essays fleshing out his theory that “cancel culture” is how activists pursue “the politicization of everyday life, the rule of didacticism in art, and the installation through coercive means of a dysfunctional new moral system by a tiny and unaccountable elite.”

Have any of the critics who dismiss cancel-culture concerns made a commensurate attempt to flesh out which punitive social norms are desirable, to define “accountability,” or to specify when it is warranted?

Americans will never achieve consensus about exactly which behaviors are beyond the pale—or what should happen to those who violate accepted norms. But even contested yet clearly understood rules (like the comedian George Carlin’s famous seven words you couldn’t say on TV ) are better, if adopted provisionally by institutions or consistently adhered to in public discourse, than an alternative in which taboo lines are so murky that all manner of adjacent speech is chilled and many people refrain from speaking publicly at all for fear of unwittingly transgressing.

In some cases, the standards are kept vague because more specific ones would be indefensible. If you want to know which faction is abusing its relative power in a given sphere of society, ask who sees no problem with opaque taboos versus who is worried that they will unduly stifle speech.

In states solidly controlled by Republicans, for example, populist-right legislators want to punish certain categories of speech related to race or sex, likely chilling some expression that they could not persuade majorities to ban specifically, and progressive educators are noticing that vague and malleable standards guarantee such speech-dampening excesses. At Ivy League universities, progressive faculty members and DEI administrators are the ones pushing to punish certain kinds of speech related to race or sex, in many cases launching investigations into poorly defined transgressions, and centrist liberals and conservatives are the ones pointing out the danger of vague and malleable standards.

When any faction with power fails to clarify which statements and behaviors it would punish (as opposed to merely criticize) if given the chance, its members might like the fact that they are chilling the speech of their culture-war antagonists. A dearth of clarity is hugely useful for wielding social control. It leaves everyone guessing. But a self-governing people shouldn’t have to guess at what speech is forbidden and what’s allowed.

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How Americans feel about ‘cancel culture’ and offensive speech in 6 charts

Americans have long debated the boundaries of free speech, from what is and isn’t protected by the First Amendment to discussions about “political correctness” and, more recently, “cancel culture.” The internet has amplified these debates and fostered new questions about tone and tenor in recent years. Here’s a look at how adults in the United States see these and related issues, based on Pew Research Center surveys.

This Pew Research Center analysis looks at how Americans view the tenor of discourse, both online and off. The findings used here come from three surveys the Center conducted in fall 2020. Sample sizes, field dates and methodological information for each survey are accessible through the links in this analysis.

In a September 2020 survey, 44% of Americans said they’d heard at least a fair amount about the phrase “cancel culture,” including 22% who had heard a great deal about it. A majority of Americans (56%) said they’d heard nothing or not too much about it, including 38% – the largest share – who had heard nothing at all about the phrase.

Familiarity with the term cancel culture varied by age, gender and education level, but not political party affiliation, according to the same survey.

Younger adults were more likely to have heard about cancel culture than their older counterparts. Roughly two-thirds (64%) of adults under 30 said they’d heard a great deal or fair amount about cancel culture, compared with 46% of those ages 30 to 49 and 34% of those 50 and older.

Men were more likely than women to be familiar with the phrase, as were those who have a bachelor’s or advanced degree when compared with those who have lower levels of formal education.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were about as likely as Republicans and GOP leaners to say they had heard at least a fair amount about cancel culture (46% vs. 44%). But there were more pronounced differences within each party when taking ideology into account. About six-in-ten liberal Democrats (59%) said they had heard at least a fair amount about cancel culture, compared with roughly a third of conservative and moderate Democrats (34%). Similarly, around half of conservative Republicans (49%) had heard of the term, compared with around a third of moderate and liberal Republicans (36%).

Americans were most likely to mention accountability when describing what the phrase cancel culture means to them. As part of the fall 2020 survey, the Center asked U.S. adults who had heard a fair amount or a great deal about the term to explain in their own words what it meant to them. Around half (49%) said it describes actions people take to hold others accountable.

Smaller shares described cancel culture as a form of censorship – such as a restriction on free speech or as history being erased – or as mean-spirited attacks used to cause others harm (14% and 12%, respectively).

About a third of conservative Republicans who had heard of the phrase (36%) described it as actions taken to hold people accountable, compared with roughly half or more of moderate or liberal Republicans (51%), conservative or moderate Democrats (54%) and liberal Democrats (59%).

Conservative Republicans who had heard of the term were also more likely to see cancel culture as a form of censorship: 26% described it as censorship, compared with 15% of moderate or liberal Republicans and roughly one-in-ten or fewer Democrats, regardless of ideology.

In the September 2020 survey, Americans said they believed calling out others on social media is more likely to hold people accountable than punish people who don’t deserve it. Overall, 58% of adults said that in general, when people publicly call others out on social media for posting content that might be considered offensive, they are more likely to hold people accountable . In comparison, 38% said this kind of action is more likely to punish people who don’t deserve it.

Views on this question differed sharply by political party. Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to say that this type of action holds people accountable (75% vs. 39%). In contrast, 56% of Republicans – but just 22% of Democrats – said this generally punishes people who don’t deserve it.

In a separate report using data from the same September 2020 survey, 55% of Americans said many people take offensive content they see online too seriously , while a smaller share (42%) said offensive content online is too often excused as not a big deal.

Americans’ attitudes again differed widely by political party. Roughly six-in-ten Democrats (59%) said offensive content online is too often excused as not a big deal, while just a quarter of Republicans agreed – a 34 percentage point gap. And while 72% of Republicans said many people take offensive content they see online too seriously, about four-in-ten Democrats (39%) said the same.

In a four-country survey conducted in the fall of 2020, Americans were the most likely to say that people today are too easily offended . A majority of Americans (57%) said people today are too easily offended by what others say, while four-in-ten said people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others, according to the survey of adults in the U.S., Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

In contrast, respondents in the three European countries surveyed were more closely divided over whether people today are too easily offended or whether people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others.

Opinions on this topic were connected to ideological leanings in three of the four countries surveyed, with the largest gap among U.S. adults. Around two-thirds of Americans on the ideological left (65%) said people should be careful to avoid offending others, compared with about one-in-four on the ideological right – a gap of 42 percentage points. The left-right difference was 17 points in the UK and 15 points in Germany. There was no significant difference between the left and the right in France.

In the U.S., the ideological divide was closely related to political party affiliation: Six-in-ten Democrats said people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others, while only 17% of Republicans said the same.

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Katherine Schaeffer is a research analyst at Pew Research Center .

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Cancel Culture — Understanding “Cancel Culture”: Exploring its Origins, Impact

Understanding "Cancel Culture": Exploring Its Origins, Impact

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Confessions of the Canceled: The Psychology of Cancel Culture

• Academic Questions

In a recent talk I gave at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, I discussed my experience with cancel culture, the techniques it employs, its intellectual background, and its political impact. At the time, I briefly touched on the psychology and social psychology of cancelation. My intention in this essay is to use my own experience with cancelation to take a deeper look at the psychology of cancel culture.

One of the most recurrent themes in cancelation is the effort by the cancelers, and their allies, to obtain a statement of guilt or apology from the target as a means of holding the victim “accountable.” What is also surprisingly recurrent is the target’s eventual willingness to provide such a statement, even though the target may not believe the alleged harm requires an apology. In this regard, the statement or apology is similar to false confessions elicited from suspects in the criminal law context. And as we would expect, the psychology behind false confessions is broadly applicable to the cancelation scenario.

Before considering the types of false confessions and their implications, I will provide some background on my own cancelation as a case study.

A Book Review: Case Study in Cancelation

My cancelation began the day the Alberta government appointed me Chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC). Between my appointment on May 25, 2022, and my termination on September 15 of the same year, a small but persistent and aggressive coterie of leftist academics, politicians, and activists fervently sought to deplatform me.

The most aggressive and organized attacks came in early July 2022 with the focus on a book review I had penned in 2009, one item in a fairly large body of published work produced over the years. The book itself was written by renowned historian of the contemporary Middle East, Efraim Karsh, and was published by Yale University Press. Karsh highlighted the historical and political penchant for Islam to manifest itself politically in the imperial caliphate. Unlike many Middle East historians who emphasize colonialism’s role in the region, Karsh took a broader historical approach that saw the Muslim world on its own terms recognizing Islam’s agency as a political and often militaristic religion.

While there was no comment on my review in 2009, once the opposition Alberta New Democratic Party (NDP) and their allies, including the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) got a hold of it, the accusations flew. The NDP accused my review of being racist, Islamophobic and hate speech. At one point, their “Justice Critic,” Irfan Sabir, who had never so much as opened Karsh’s book, condemned it as racist in a series of unhinged tweets.

The allegations were absurd and a thorough misreading of the text as other academics, including Karsh himself, would confirm. But in the woke world of today it was enough to scare the weak provincial government as they called on me to meet with the NCCM. Though I did not apologize, I did make a statement attempting to mollify my critics and agreed to meet with other members of the Muslim community. But after a series of events, including instructions from a government “emissary” instructing me not to meet with certain members of the Muslim community, the NCCM called for my resignation. The Alberta Government blinked, and I was fired.

A Taxonomy of False Confessions

My cancelation raises a number of questions. The most important for our purposes is: Why did I agree to draft a statement while still refusing to provide the apology that the NCCM wanted as a sign of my contrition?

As noted, the process of obtaining an apology is highly comparable to the false confession that I will discuss here. To describe the types of false confession and the interrogation techniques used to obtain them, I am relying on the research of Dr. Saul Kassin, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.

In his work, Kassin identifies three types of false confession. The first, Voluntary False Confessions, are prompted by the internal needs of the confessor. Often attributed to underlying psychological or psychiatric disorders, or from a desire to protect the true perpetrator. These types of confessions rarely have an impact on a criminal proceeding and are usually easy to spot by investigators. Similarly, they have little relevance to the statement or apology in the cancelation scenario.

However, the second and third varieties of false confession, which can prejudice criminal cases, are directly applicable to cancelation. The second and third types Kassin identifies as the Compliant False Confession and the Persuaded (or Internalized) False Confession. The common element between these forms of false confession is that they are obtained through external pressure, usually an investigator or police officer. The difference between the second and third forms of confession is whether the confessor comes to believe in his guilt.

In the case of a Compliant False Confession, the confessor is subjected to a demanding and relentless interrogation. Depending on the country’s criminal system, suggestions can be made to the confessor that misrepresent evidence or events. Additionally, threats can be used or implied as can promises of leniency or termination of the interrogation if a confession is provided. The confessor reaches a breaking point, and even though he knows he is innocent, he will provide a confession, often believing that additional evidence will ultimately exonerate him. The key point here is that the confessor provides the statement while still believing and knowing he is innocent.

Persuaded False Confessions, by contrast, involve an innocent party initially insisting on his innocence but, after stressful interrogation, coming to doubt that innocence by internalizing a sense of unjustified guilt. As Kassin has noted, this third category is counter-intuitive and therefore required some theorization to come up with the psychology to explain it.

Persuaded False Confessions typically involve a vulnerable confessor open to manipulation due to a variety of factors: youth, mental health, sleep deprivation, recent trauma, etc. Often, evidence is controlled or misrepresented by the interrogator to confuse the confessor into a state of cognitive dissonance. While the confessor is initially certain of his innocence, the distortion of evidence causes the vulnerable confessor to begin to doubt his own understanding of events.

A key aspect of the confessor’s cognitive dissonance is that he begins to use fragmentary language as his doubt about his innocence grows. The disconnect between his own understanding, which he increasingly sees as subjective and untrustworthy, and the apparently objective evidence provided to him by the interrogator, cries out for resolution in the confessor’s mind. This eventually leads to a full-blown confession of guilt complete with the confessor fabricating memories of actions he never committed.

From a legal standpoint, this sort of confession becomes difficult to counter in court as judges, juries, and the media generally cannot differentiate between a false confession and the truth. Typically, the legal system accepts the false confession as true, even insisting on its viability after contradictory evidence undermines the false confession.

In terms of the techniques used to obtain a false confession, Kassin emphasizes American interrogation approaches that involve two elements, though these are used in many other nations as well. First comes the refusal by the interrogator to accept the confessor’s initial denial of innocence, effectively branding the confessor a liar. Second is the minimization technique which Kassin finds in every instance of false confessions elicited under interrogation. This involves downplaying the alleged seriousness of the offense by deflecting the blame from the confessor through externalization. This can include telling the confessor that, though he committed the offence, he is really a good person who was provoked by external circumstances, that there is a valid explanation for his actions, and that all of these externalities will mitigate against his guilt if he just confesses. As Kassin notes, the confessor interprets minimization as leniency, believing that a confession will extract him from the interrogation with little consequence.

Finally, Kassin notes another psychological mechanism that often comes into play with false confessions: the faith most individuals have in the system to protect the innocent. In his research, Kassin looked at accused individuals who waived their Miranda rights in the United States. These are the rights that allow an accused to remain silent. As he found, those who provided false confessions waived these rights far more often than those who were truly guilty. Kassin suggests two reasons for this. Firstly, research has found that most people, especially those who are not prone to criminal behavior, believe in a just world. They believe that, even though they have confessed, the inherent justice of the legal system and future evidence will confirm their innocence.

Secondly, false confessors rely on what Kassin calls “the illusion of transparency.” In other words, the false confessor waives Miranda rights because he believes that telling the truth and lying are transparent to interrogators; that telling the truth will be seen as such and his innocence will be obvious. Both beliefs have the psychological effect of comforting the false confessor but often end up working against him.

Confessions and Cancelation

In many respects, the false confession scenario is applicable to the statement or apology demanded of the cancelation target. In terms of the interrogation element, this differs to the extent that the false confessor is under the immediate stress of an investigator’s private questioning, while the cancelation target is generally subject to a more diffuse and public attack.

To the extent that there is no immediate interrogator, the cancelation target does not have the relentless pressure of questioning. However, this also means that it is far more difficult for the target to assuage his attackers as they arise from a variety of sources and use social media that rapidly expands the field of interrogators. Additionally, pressure can come from employers and even allies to show contrition for allegedly offensive words. In short, the psychological pressure to make a statement or apology is broader and presents many more angles of attack against the target. In this context, the presumed best vehicle to attempt to quell the multiple sources of anger is the public statement or apology, with the preferred approach being the latter.

In my own situation, I was faced with a request to meet with the NCCM by my employer, the Alberta government. That this was certainly for their own benefit was clear, but as my employer, I trusted, probably incorrectly, that they would not put me in the firing line. At the same time, the ubiquitous demand for an apology, as well as my resignation, came from the NDP’s Irfan Sabir and as is generally the case, it was expressed on social media, not in a more private forum, such as a letter to the cabinet minister responsible for my hiring. The goal was obviously to ensure maximum pressure on me. Additionally, a small number of bloggers and academics affiliated with the NDP also attacked my qualifications and sought my removal. Most of these individuals employed a tactic that reflects the interrogation techniques used on the confessor. They misrepresented facts about my past work, about my political affiliations and about the book review I had written. Cribbing specific lines taken out of context from the review, along with the persistent effort to question the academic nature of the review and the book author’s credentials, an effort was made to convince the public, if not me, that I was guilty of Islamophobia and racism.

But given that this was clearly a politically driven effort, the calls by the NDP and their allies mostly fell on deaf ears, even in the media. However, as with the false confessor, I was subjected to a similar form of interrogation through my government-arranged meeting with the NCCM. I initially met with NCCM representatives on July 6 and July 7 by Zoom. During the first meeting, I was asked to explain what I had written and the conversation was amicable but frosty. I was requested to provide a statement with an apology to the Muslim community in Alberta. The meeting engaged many of the tactics used to procure a false confession. In my own mind, I was confident that there was nothing offensive about my book review, a view also conveyed to me by the Alberta government. The review dealt entirely with politics in Muslim-majority countries and was primarily historical. At no point did I reference Muslims as minorities in other countries. Though I wrote nothing to support violence against Muslims, the NCCM explicitly raised the issue of attacks on black Muslim women in Canada more than a decade after my review’s publication, as though my writing somehow made me complicit in this violence. This closely mirrors efforts by interrogators to convince confessors, despite their own clear belief and the facts, that they were somehow guilty of an offense.

Ultimately, I refused to provide an apology, but I did pen a statement suggesting I had refined my views based on recent scholarship. I informed the NCCM on July 7 during our second meeting that I would not apologize. At this stage, two things should be considered. Firstly, why did I provide the statement? As with many false confessors, I believed that being fully honest and being truthful would win the day. And in part I believed this because the NCCM used minimization to convince me that a statement would go some distance to satisfying the Muslim community. Secondly, the NCCM, unable to obtain their apology, turned their request against me. In their own statement released on July 7, the NCCM stated that they and the Muslim community would not currently accept an apology. This clearly misrepresented our discussions. I had refused an apology, but in order to control the narrative, the NCCM upped the stakes by giving the impression that I had offered one. By doing so, they attempted to retain control of the situation. My statement was rendered useless as the NCCM and I were locked in an open-ended commitment to engage with the Muslim community in order to obtain their forgiveness on the basis of an apology I was never willing to provide. In this sense, even though I did not provide an apology or confession, the statement I had written and believed the NCCM would honor, was turned into a weapon against me. This closely reflects the minimization tactics used against the false confessor and relies on the belief that the world is essentially good and that truth-telling is transparent.

As my situation played out, the NCCM went quiet for a few weeks. What they perhaps did not expect was that I would resist the attribution of guilt against me and engage legal counsel who would serve Notices of Defamation on two bloggers and a media outlet. When the NCCM contacted me again in late August 2022 to set up meetings with the Muslim community, I informed them of potential legal action, but confirmed that it was not directed against them.

But a few weeks after this conversation, the NCCM, having recruited a number of Muslim community groups, some of them not independent, made a public statement calling for my termination, citing primarily the alleged fact that I was threatening my critics with a defamation lawsuit. Though this was approved by a senior government official, I was summarily fired. The NCCM, unable to obtain the required apology and without any action directed against them, were still able to control the situation to my eventual detriment.

In my scenario, I provided a statement, but unlike false confessors, I did not apologize. Though many of the interrogation tactics used to obtain a false confession were used against me, I did not go so far as to willingly implicate myself. Or so it would seem.

In general, cancelation targets do acquiesce to the pressure tactics and provide an apology. This happened recently in another Canadian case where British Columbia NDP cabinet minister Selina Robinson apologized for her statement calling the territory on which Israel currently sits a “crappy piece of land” before the agricultural developments undertaken by the Israeli state. Robinson was accused of Islamophobia and racism and promptly apologized. But as with my situation, Robinson was ultimately terminated, and again the request for her demotion came from the NCCM, employing the same ritualized tactics they used against me. In effect, whether one provides simply a statement or an apology, the cancelation tactics tend to win out.

Of note here is the significant similarity to the false confession, especially as regards outcome. With both Ms. Robinson and myself, a coerced statement or apology was provided, as the false confessor does with the confession, believing that it would adequately address the situation. And as with the confessor, our statement/apology did nothing to protect us. We both ended up without a job.

What is also similar between Ms. Robinson and my situation is that we are now both resisting the efforts against us, even if belatedly. Ms. Robinson, who was the only Jewish member of the British Columbia cabinet, has resigned from the NDP caucus citing antisemitism in the caucus and a double standard as regards her apology compared to those made by colleagues who had insulted the Jewish community but retained their cabinet roles.

I have similarly fought back through a wrongful dismissal lawsuit, by writing and speaking about my cancelation, and through a complaint against various politicians lodged with a provincial administrative body that cannot be named due to statutory restrictions. And as if on cue, the respondents to my complaint have used my original statement against me as evidence of something akin to an apology justifying their own public attacks on me.

The similarities with the false confession, both as Compliant Confession and Persuaded Confession, have a great deal to teach us about the psychology of apologies in the cancelation context. The dynamics and techniques used against a cancelation target, as well as the psychological machinations the target endures, are highly comparable to the procurement of the false confession. As with the false confession, our political communities have an interest in preventing the proliferation of the cancelation statement/apology. A key part of combating cancelation is understanding the psychology that entices the cancelation target to provide a statement or apology where one has done nothing or very little to cause offense.

Collin May is a lawyer in Calgary, Alberta; an adjunct lecturer in community health sciences with the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary; and an author of a number of academic reviews and articles.

Photo by  Shalone Cason  on  Unsplash

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By Ally Lessard

The idea of cancelling someone has been around for decades, being used in songs, TV and movies alike. It was brought to Twitter by the Black community to bring attention to racial disparities. That is where cancel culture made its way to the online world. 

I believe it is safe to say that cancel culture has its place in society. Dictionary.com calls it, “ the popular practice of withdrawing support for ( cancelling ) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive.” Cancel culture is similar to public shaming, except that it’s online. 

Cancel culture allocates room for new societal norms to be put in place. It provides a space for people fed up with abusers facing little to no repercussions for their wrongdoings to take action against them. However, cancel culture has a specific toxic trait that is not often mentioned. Cancel culture places the abuser in the limelight by bringing attention to them and not to those directly affected by their actions. Cancel culture is meant to cut attention to the person who is being exposed, but often it just brings more exposure (whether good or bad) to them. 

The #MeToo movement, which was introduced in 2006 by Tarana Burk, is a way to change the stigma around sexual assault and survivors. Cancel culture quickly became a term associated with the movement and was heavily implemented to publicly shame abusers. However, this was never supposed to be the case. While cancel culture has aided in the movement, it has also placed the attention from survivors to the abusers. The act of slandering the perpetrators took the forefront while consoling and advocating for victims took the back. 

Online, we are often quick to judge and jump on “hate trains”. Cancel culture perpetuates that by allowing people to sit behind their keyboards and essentially cyberbully individuals. By doing that, little progress is made. We may have socially cancelled them, but how do we make sure their actions are never repeated? 

Black Lives Matter, a movement sparked in 2013 after the murdering of Trayvon Martin, is also wrestling with cancel culture. One of the co-founders, Patrisse Khan-Cullors stated that “people don’t understand that [social activist] organizing isn’t going online and cussing people out or going to a protest and calling something out.” The basis of cancel culture is slandering individuals online, but it doesn’t work when such a serious matter is at stake. 

We need to be taking actions rather than using virtual words. We have seen what physical responses can do this summer when between 15 to 26 million Americans marched to demand justice for the killing of George Floyd. Cancel culture has to walk hand in hand with physical activism. 

As long as cancel culture continues to inspire people to take action, then it is beneficial to society progressing. We can use cancel culture in a way that stops perpetrators from ever committing their crimes, and furthermore not allowing the type of behavior to ever happen again. 

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Cancel culture: a force for good or a threat to free speech?

Discussion about cancel culture has become heated, but who is really in the right? Is it a useful tool for social justice or a form of censorship? We speak to activists, psychologists and authors to find a way forward

Let’s begin with what cancel culture is and what it isn’t, because it has come to mean a great deal of different things to different people. To some, it poses a grave danger to free speech. To some, it is a new take on ‘political correctness gone mad’ and a method used by the intolerant left to enforce a puritanical censure.

To others, it’s just a way of saying that someone has done something they perceive to be offensive and therefore has lost their respect. It is not a new phenomenon – free speech has always had consequences, especially when that speech has the potential for harm. High-profile figures have been challenged and publicly criticised for apparent wrongdoings by the media for decades, celebrities who have acted in opposition with a company’s values have been dropped and politicians regularly pillory their opponents. Today, it can be viewed as a way of defending the weak against higher powers. Rightly or wrongly, cancel culture gives the marginalised an amplified voice and a way to challenge damaging narratives promoted by the status quo.

Its purest definition is the boycotting of a person or organisation because of an objectionable comment or act. It is the withdrawal of support, be it no longer watching films that the offending person has starred in or books that they have written. The cancellation is akin to voiding a contract, severing ties with someone or something that you might have previously been a fan of.

Free speech has always had consequences, especially when that speech has the potential for harm

What it isn’t is call-out culture, which is highlighting a mistake, condemning it if it’s harmful and asking them to do better so that the individual doesn’t make the same error again. Both are linked to public shaming, and both have been used as a way of achieving social justice. Both have become extremely divisive over the past six months, reaching a crescendo last week over comments made by JK Rowling about the trans community. She, along with over 150 academics, writers and authors, penned a public letter condemning cancel culture (thought to be an escalation of call-out culture) on the basis that it threatens the right to free speech, “the lifeblood of a liberal society”, arguing that it promotes an “intolerance of opposing views [and] a vogue for public shaming and ostracism”. It’s a fascinating line to take – to argue that something endangers free speech by telling others that they don’t have the right to theirs.

The debate is rampant. Others argue that our right to free speech doesn’t make you entitled to hate speech. The trans activist Munroe Bergdorf says, “cancel culture is not the same as being held accountable for your actions”. The journalist and author Owen Jones argued on Twitter that “All too often, ‘cancel culture’ becomes a means for very rich and very powerful people to pretend they are victims when people respond to very controversial things they have used their huge public platform to say”. The situation has become heated indeed.

There are many pitfalls of cancel culture if we take it to mean boycotting a person and expunging them from society. “When does ‘cancelling’ cross over with bullying?” asks the psychologist, lecturer and author Dr Audrey Tang. “The number of Lea Michele’s co-workers who spoke up about her poor behaviour may have been making a point, which Lea Michele addressed, but I refer to the tragic suicide of Caroline Flack. What outcome do those calling for change actually want? Unfortunately, when we say anything, we simply do not know how others will react.”

“Psychologically, cancel culture carries echoes of Melanie Klein’s ‘Splitting Theory,’” says the psychotherapist Lucy Beresford. “This is where small children separate the world into good or bad, and can’t integrate or tolerate the two sides of someone or something. For example, when a parent stops them having ice-cream between meals, they are ‘all bad’ and the child will be furious, whereas when they kiss the child goodnight, they are now ‘all good’ and the child is content. As we grow up, ideally, we are able to hold in our hearts the idea that someone can have different views from us and still be a good or decent person. Cancel culture doesn’t allow for the same kind of nuance.”

One of the potential issues with cancel culture is how it taps into feelings of shame, which rarely helps or propels an individual to learn and make positive changes. Essentially, it renders cancel culture ineffective when it comes to social justice, which is its goal. The research professor Brené Brown, who has spent two decades studying vulnerability, shame and empathy, says that shame is rarely productive.

We think we can shame people into being better, but that’s not true

“We think that shaming is a great moral compass, that we can shame people into being better, but that’s not true,” says Brown in a recent episode of her Unlocking Us podcast . “Here’s a great example that comes up a lot when I’m talking about parenting. You have a kid who tells a lie, so you shame that child, and say, ‘You’re a liar.’ Shame corrodes the part of us that thinks that we can be different. If I’m a liar, if that’s who I am, how do I ever change? How do I ever make a different decision? This is versus ‘You’re a good person and you told a lie, and that behaviour is not OK in this family.’ Everyone needs a platform of self-worth from which to see change.”

Shame is different to guilt, which can prompt positive behaviour. “When we see people apologising, making amends and changing their behaviour, that is always around guilt,” says Brown. “Guilt, the whole ‘I am bad’, is not easy. It creates psychological pain, ‘I have done something that is inconsistent or incongruous with my values or who I want to be.’ When we apologise or make amends for something we’ve done and change our behaviour, guilt is the driving force. It’s a positive, socially adaptive experience.”

The activist and author Jenna Arnold, who was one of the key organisers of the history-making Washington Women’s March in March 2017, agrees that cancel culture is unproductive on the basis that the shame associated with being wrong deters people from moving forward. “It doesn’t leave space for redemption, and while this isn’t an opportunity to pardon those who have caused harm, it is worth the exercise of watching the very important role humility and responsibility can and need to take in a world that is trying to right its way.”

The idea of pushing someone out - because they have said or done something perceived to be offensive - leaves no room for growth or learning. Matt Haig describes cancel culture as “anti-progress because it is anti-change”. “Cancelling people pushes them away and makes them more likely to find spaces where bad views are the norm,” he says. “Obviously, if someone has been convicted of, say, violence or sexual assault then they need to be punished, but cancel culture isn’t that. Cancel culture, as I see it, involves the shutting down of different perspectives and treating people like mere disposable artefacts in the cultural economy.”

Cancel culture involves the shutting down of different perspectives and treating people as disposable

If the purpose of cancel culture is a method to achieve justice for marginalised groups or people, then its influence isn’t as great as we’ve been led to believe. Of individuals who have been ‘cancelled’ over recent years, many are still working and enjoying relative success. Many have not seen long-term boycotts – R Kelly still makes music, Woody Allen still shoots films and Louis CK still performs.

The problem with cancel culture is that it has become too broad, and near meaningless. R Kelly was cancelled over decades of sexual-assault allegations, yet so too was Jodie Comer for dating a Republican. There is no proportion. It is used in so many different contexts, both heavy and light, that it oversimplifies, and loses its weight because it allows those who have engaged in dangerous and/or harmful rhetoric and behaviour to ride on the backlash.

“When something becomes ‘fashionable’ it can lose meaning,” says Dr Tang. “For example, when the debate around Dominic Cummings’ lockdown behaviour was a social-media trend, the calls were to resign, but why not a hefty fine? Why not a suspension? In the workplace ‘you’re fired’ is not the only option. We should not allow the complexity of the human brain to be reduced to a hashtag.”

In the eyes of cancel culture, people are reduced to good or bad with no room for anything in-between. “The process is like air-brushing someone or something out,” says Beresford, “It doesn’t allow for the possibility that two sides could ever agree, or learn from each other, or could persuade each other of their arguments – or even agree to disagree.”

Being told you’re wrong is not the same as being cancelled

That’s not to say that individuals should not be held accountable when they air a questionable view or do something wrong. Call-out culture is just that, the idea that we can challenge someone’s opinion or action without deleting them, therefore leaving them with room to grow and learn. “Being called out has made me a better person,” said Jameela Jamil on Instagram. “Not being cancelled has enabled me to be accountable, learn from my mistakes, and go on to share those lessons with others and do good with my privilege. Most of us have the potential to do that.”

When we decide to call someone out, we must resist a combative approach if we want to have the best chance of helping that person see the issues with what they may said or done. Most of us respond to criticism with defensiveness. Dr Tang says the best results come from talking to someone privately and also to challenge without accusation.

“Ask a question first to generate explanation. For example, ‘When you said x what did you mean by that?’” advises Dr Tang. “It doesn’t have to be nasty, nor humiliating. In fact, the more diplomatic you are, the more likely you are to effect a change of mind and that is after all, what you want. A subtle private message to see if they acted in error is more likely to influence than having a go. The latter only results in defensiveness that neither party wants fundamentally. The debate often turns on wanting to win rather than any form of learning.”

Instead of calling people out, we must start calling them in

Jenna Arnold says we must use forms of restorative justice that don’t make people feel threatened and therefore less likely to want to change. She wants to evolve our concept of call-out culture, instead arguing for ‘call-in culture’.

“My aim is to provide practical tools to use as we start listening with open hearts to others and inviting them to listen to us in the same manner — as, instead of calling people out, we start calling them in,” she says. “We must put aside the urge to win — or maybe just redefine what winning means. We’re not stirring the pot with the goal of a neat resolution or a concrete answer; rather, we want to start uncomfortable conversations for the sake of urgently needed exploration. This can be hard to fully internalise. Yet this hard work is the most essential antidote to the polarisation widening the rifts in society and within ourselves."

By calling each other in, rather than out, when it comes to debate, we take into account the fundamental human desire for acceptance and to be part of a collective.

“Human beings yearn for community,” she says. “We are longing to belong to something bigger than ourselves. Inviting people into the conversation — calling each other ‘in’ versus calling each other ‘out’ — is key to our survival. But that doesn’t only need to happen in the wake of an awkward statement, bumper sticker or post-election conversation. We need to share ideas and seek out the perspectives of others in our communities, throughout our lives. We’re no longer allowed to go back to sleep, no matter who is in the White House or how fair the world suddenly becomes. Being a citizen is active, hard, constant work.”

We live in a society where it’s easier than ever to have our voices heard – social media was designed for it. What we must do now is listen, regardless of which side we fall on. The free-speech argument is two-fold – progress will not be achieved through silencing either party, whether that’s ‘cancelling’ someone, or by dismissing one’s right to criticise. Being told you’re wrong is not the same as being deleted. It’s time to listen, process and move forward.

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Is Cancel Culture Effective?

Fall 2020  |  By Nicole Dudenhoefer ’17 |  Illustrations by Matt Chase

Mob mentality. A modern social justice practice. An impediment to free speech. A platform for marginalized voices. Call it what you will. Cancel culture is a concept so hotly debated that it remains in limbo, much like many individuals’ attitudes toward it.

The one common theme everyone seems to agree on is that cancel culture involves taking a public stance against an individual or institution for actions considered objectionable or offensive. But is it an effective way to hold those in positions accountable, or is it punishment without a chance for redemption?

In July, when Harper’s Magazine published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” — a critique on cancel culture without directly naming it — it was met with immediate backlash. The letter was initially signed by 153 notable individuals, including J.K. Rowling — who has recently faced calls for cancellation due to social media comments considered transphobic by some. For Mel Stanfill, UCF assistant professor of texts and technology , the letter is an example of how cancel culture can be a complicated practice.

“I think cancel culture can reflect awareness that people are not willing to accept things that they used to accept or have not been able to resist in the past, but in some ways it’s a moral panic,” says Stanfill, who is also an assistant professor of English . “The Harper’s letter was a bunch of really rich and famous people writing in a national magazine about how they’ve been silenced — yet they still get access to this forum. So it highlights the fact that [cancel culture is] this fear over something that is not actually real. So if we’re going to talk about cancel culture, we can’t talk about it in isolation, we have to put it in context.”

By Nicole Daniels

Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.

When you hear the terms “canceled” or “cancel culture,” what comes to mind?

According to Dictionary.com, “ cancel culture refers to the popular practice of withdrawing support for ( canceling ) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive.”

But these days, the phenomenon can apply to personal relationships, too. Have you had an experience with canceling someone — whether a friend or family member, a celebrity, or someone in your school community — or being canceled yourself? Would you say that cancel culture is prevalent at your school?

In the 2019 Style article “ Tales From the Teenage Cancel Culture ,” Sanam Yar and Jonah Engel Bromwich share six stories of cancel culture from high school and college students.

In one, a teenager grapples with what she sees as a classmate’s problematic music choices:

A few weeks ago, Neelam, a high school senior, was sitting in class at her Catholic school in Chicago. After her teacher left the room, a classmate began playing “Bump N’ Grind,” an R. Kelly song. Neelam, 17, had recently watched the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” with her mother. She said it had been “emotional to take in as a black woman.” Neelam asked the boy and his cluster of friends to stop playing the track, but he shrugged off the request. “‘It’s just a song,’” she said he replied. “‘We understand he’s in jail and known for being a pedophile, but I still like his music.’” She was appalled. They were in a class about social justice. They had spent the afternoon talking about Catholicism, the common good and morality. The song continued to play. That classmate, who is white, had done things in the past that Neelam described as problematic, like casually using racist slurs — not name-calling — among friends. After class, she decided he was “canceled,” at least to her. Her decision didn’t stay private; she told a friend that week that she had canceled him. She told her mother too. She said that this meant she would avoid speaking or engaging with him in the future, that she didn’t care to hear what he had to say, because he wouldn’t change his mind and was beyond reason. “When it comes to cancel culture , it’s a way to take away someone’s power and call out the individual for being problematic in a situation,” Neelam said. “I don’t think it’s being sensitive. I think it’s just having a sense of being observant and aware of what’s going on around you.”

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Cancel Culture: A Persuasive Speech Essay

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Cancel culture is a phenomenon of modern society that has arisen thanks to the development of social media. Social media allows the audience to instantly react to the words of users and make decisions about their moral correctness. Ng notes that cancel culture “demonstrates how content circulation via digital platforms facilitates fast, large-scale responses to acts deemed problematic” (625). However, this phenomenon does not imply a thorough, comprehensive assessment of the statements but rather hasty judgments. Thus, cancel culture is a dangerous practice for modern society, which can lead to the promotion of certain ideological views.

Cancel culture is controversial as it violates free speech. Pew Research Center notes that 58% of Americans view this phenomenon as holding people accountable for their words rather than punishing (Vogels et al.). However, diversity of opinion is the basis of any discussion and debate that has existed throughout human history. In this situation, the culture of abolition rather determines public opinion at a certain point in time by dictating a correct and false position. Thus, the pluralism of opinions is destroyed, which makes it possible to ensure the ideological balance of society.

It is also important that cancel culture causes both reputational and psychological harm to organizations and individuals. In particular, many brands have fallen victim to this phenomenon from the controversial agenda regarding the Black Lives Matter Movement (Thomas). However, this effect makes it possible to draw attention to previously marginalized groups, in this case through a kind of oppression (Ng 623). In modern society, such ideological pressure to advance a certain agenda is unacceptable. Moreover, targeted brands have suffered significant reputational and financial losses due to these incidents, which is a step beyond the social and political field.

Thus, cancel culture can be seen as strengthening the accountability of members of society for the expressed opinion. However, in this situation, it is difficult to determine who sets the boundaries of the morally correct and false. It is necessary to maintain freedom of speech to preserve the diversity of opinion, and cancel culture leads to the elevation of one agenda and the oppression of another. In a modern society that focuses on humanistic values ​​and rights, this phenomenon is dangerous.

Works Cited

Thomas, Zoe. “What is the Cost of ‘Cancel Culture’?” BBC News , 2020, Web.

Ng, Eve. “No Grand Pronouncements Here…: Reflections on Cancel Culture and Digital Media Participation.” Television & New Media , vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 621-627.

Vogels, Emily A., et al. “Americans and ‘Cancel Culture’: Where Some See Calls for Accountability, Others See Censorship, Punishment.” Pew Research Center , 2021, Web.

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Bibliography

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Friday essay: We all live in the world of Ayn Rand, egomaniac godmother of libertarianism. Can fiction help us navigate it?

Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney

Disclosure statement

Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Sydney provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Love her or loathe her, Ayn Rand is an undeniably influential figure. Her contemporary admirers range from celebrities – Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Rob Lowe – to politicians, including Donald Trump. Cultural commentator Lisa Duggan has called her “the ultimate mean girl”.

Rand was implacably opposed to all forms of altruism, social welfare programs and governmental oversight. She also harboured a lifelong hatred of communism. She was “one of the first American writers to celebrate the creative possibilities of modern capitalism and to emphasize the economic value of independent thought,” according to intellectual biographer Jennifer Burns .

And while Rand founded a philosophical movement, Objectivism, which privileged the “concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life”, her ideas are not the key to her influence. Her “blockbuster” novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), lie “at the heart of her incalculable impact,” as Duggan writes.

Trump has said of The Fountainhead: “That book relates to … everything.” He told a journalist in 2016 that its depiction of the tyranny of groupthink reflects “what is happening here”.

The attitude of John Galt, hero of Rand’s best known book, Atlas Shrugged, is best summed up by his famous credo: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” Of course, this has since become a rallying cry for libertarian politicians and thinkers.

Atlas Shrugged attracted largely negative reviews on publication: Time called its philosophy “ludicrously naïve” and the Atlantic Monthly said it “might be mildly described as execrable claptrap”. But for Gregory Salmieri, co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to Ayn Rand (2016), the Russian-born American philosopher is “one of the most important intellectual voices in our culture”.

Rand’s celebration of egotism and rapacious capitalism remains resonant today. But there’s another way she resonates with today’s culture, too. In the McCarthy-era witch trials of the 1950s, she denounced supposed communist sympathisers , participating in the very kind of public shaming that is often identified with cancel culture.

Rand’s enthusiastic participation in these public show trials may seem surprising at first glance, especially as it appears to conflict with her reputation as a libertarian champion of free speech and individual rights.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised. Even the loudest advocates of free expression sometimes engage in silencing others. Think, for example, of self-proclaimed free-speech absolutist (and Rand fan) Elon Musk’s tendency to suspend journalists from X when they publish articles he doesn’t agree with.

This inherent contradiction – where defenders of individual liberty may also attempt to suppress opposing voices – continues to resonate in today’s political and cultural landscape, as a glance at the online swamp formerly known as Twitter demonstrates.

Cancel culture: battle or moral panic?

“Cancel culture has upended lives, ruined careers, undermined companies, hindered the production of knowledge, destroyed trust in institutions, and plunged us into an ever-worsening culture war,” argue researchers Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott in The Cancelling of the American Mind (2023). They believe cancel culture is “part of a dysfunctional way members of our society have learned to argue and battle for power, status, and dominance”.

Adrian Daub, author of the new book The Cancel Culture Panic (2024) disagrees. He sees the anxiety over cancel culture as a form of moral or ideological panic – one that distorts societal shifts by selectively focusing on certain examples, while conveniently overlooking others.

He says it keeps us from finding solutions to real problems by distorting “real problems like a carnival mirror – problems of labor and job security, problems of our semi-digital public space, problems of accountability and surveillance”.

These complex, often bitterly oppositional debates have long since spilled over from the academy into popular culture.

The many creative works that explore cancel culture differ in approach and tone. But they all focus on the dynamics of cultural conflict – and the often unpredictable consequences of public shaming in an increasingly censorious age.

We see this in recent films like Todd Field’s Tár (2022), where accusations of misconduct lead to a famous conductor’s public downfall, and Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario (2023), where an ordinary professor becomes a viral sensation, only to have his fame curdle as his public image unravels.

Cancel culture is also central to two recent satirical novels that explore the trials and tribulations of cancel culture: Australian Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn and American author Lionel Shriver’s Mania , both released locally this year.

The shadow of Ayn Rand, with her philosophy of uncompromising individualism and rampant egotism, looms large over both these books.

We’re all pretending not to be selfish

People often revisit and reinterpret works by controversial authors from the past, trying to find “redeeming qualities” despite their problematic views.

Freiman, whose first novel, Inappropriation (2018), was longlisted for the Miles Franklin, is curious why this kind of reappraisal hasn’t happened for Rand – whose books continue to sell by the bucketload.

Rand’s work is “worth exploring”, as she says, because “we are all pretending not to be selfish, individualistic, slightly narcissistic people”.

I feel like nobody’s tried to do that because we’re still living in the nightmare of the capitalist world that she envisaged.

Freiman centres The Book of Ayn, her second novel, on an unreliable narrator, Anna, who becomes obsessed with Ayn Rand after being “cancelled”.

Yet the author is candid in her criticism of Rand’s overstuffed fictions.

They are vehicles for her ideology, and they’re not well-written. So to me, when I see an Ayn Rand book on someone’s shelf […] I think, “Oh, this person doesn’t know a good book.”

Anna begins the novel (which was published in the US, by a US publisher, long before it was released in Australia), acknowledging she is a contrarian. The label has also been applied to Freiman herself, who told the Australian earlier this year that the framing of Inappropriation, a satire of identity politics, carefully avoided the novel’s subject. “They were afraid to say it was a satire of identity politics […] because they were afraid of cancel culture, ironically.”

While The Book of Ayn did not initially get an Australian release, it was prominently featured in US literary and cultural outlets, including the New York Times , the New Yorker and The Daily Show – and Freiman was a guest at this year’s Brisbane Writers Festival .

In The Book of Ayn, Anna says:

Maybe the verboten felt more alive; maybe it just got me more attention. Maybe they were the same thing. Whichever it was, the culture had now changed.

After nearly 40 years of self-declared bad behaviour, Anna lands herself in hot water after publishing a satire on America’s opioid crisis, castigated by the New York Times as irredeemably “classist”. Anna, who has been living rent-free in a swanky Madison Avenue pied-à-terre, admits (to the reader, at least) she knew she was courting controversy:

I’d known that scatological humor was now banned from descriptions of the rural poor; that you were no longer allowed to write about the working class if you’d gone to a Manhattan prep school; that “Mountain Dew” was an unacceptable punch line. But there were so many new rules – all set by college students paying two hundred thousand dollars for their humanism.

The New York Times labels Anna a narcissist. This shocks and confuses her: she had always assumed “narcissists were very attractive people who couldn’t admit when they were wrong, and I possessed neither of those qualities”.

Bruised and bewildered, she starts to burn her remaining social bridges. Having been turfed out of a female genital mutilation awareness luncheon for expressing the opinion that the clitoris is actually “privileged”, she randomly bumps into an Ayn Rand walking tour huddled on the corner of Lexington Avenue. The group is “looking up at a telephone pole where a hawk was tearing into the body of a bloody pigeon”.

Intrigued, Anna follows this group of “quiet, stoic people who appeared to believe that the planet was actually cooling” into a nearby Starbucks. She asks them about Rand, about whom she knows next to nothing, bar

that she was the godmother of American libertarianism who had written two very long, didactic novels. I had always considered her the gateway drug for bad husbands to quit their jobs and start online stock trading.

Growing giddy on heresy

Returning home, Anna reads up on the founder of Objectivism . She finds herself inexorably drawn to Rand’s idiosyncratic take on life, the world, and everything in it:

She said that selfishness was a form of care; that self-responsibility was the ultimate freedom. Her ideas had the uncanny chime of paradox. The dizzy zing of the counterintuitive. She wasn’t funny but I enjoyed her thoughts like I enjoyed jokes. Like anything audacious; true because it’s wrong.

Growing giddy on her “new heresy,” Anna sets off on an increasingly bizarre – and very funny – journey of self discovery, age-inappropriate romance, and re-cancellation. Her adventure culminates in an “ego suicide” workshop on the Greek island of Lesvos, the experience of which leaves her anxious that the only thing she’s now capable of writing is Eat, Pray, Love as “narrated by Humbert Humbert ”.

Freiman has no problem acknowledging Rand “was basically the worst person I could write a book about, which really appealed to me”. By the same token, she appreciates that

it is the conflict between selfishness and altruism that is Ayn Rand’s whole philosophy that I feel is kind of distilled in the artistic temperament, in the artist’s personality […] And narcissism plays into that really beautifully and is also funny.

This nuanced take on things is, I think, characteristic of Freiman’s writing in general. It informs her take on the politics of cancel culture, which she refuses to see in purely negative terms. For instance, it can, as Freiman affirms, help to shift the cultural needle and, occasionally, move us towards new forms of “enlightenment” – provided we are at least willing to hear each other out.

Freiman is emphatic on this point. She is searching for something “deeper than just a kind of knee-jerk, reactive response”. She is, moreover, “always looking for the person who everyone else disagrees with and trying to see the place that I might agree with them”.

This, in turn, chimes with her understanding of the power of satire as a genre. Freiman maintains that when it comes to satire,

self-exposure is just part of the deal. You get energy from a type of writing that’s very close to opining, and so you have to accept the brunt of your readers’ disagreement.

A satire, she believes, is “a kind of argument, though not – in the best cases – one that seeks to drive home a definitive point”. She acknowledges that ideas are ultimately replaced by human complexity – something that unfolds, by degrees, in The Book of Ayn. “But obviously, it’s a risky time to be a satirist.”

“The thing I’m trying to do is to say something that feels true to me,” Freiman insists , “and if that means that I’m going to offend a few people, then that’s OK.”

Provocative. Empathetic. Risky. These are three reasons why, if you’ve yet to do so, you should really spend some time getting to know Lexi Freiman and The Book of Ayn.

‘Mindless’ herd behaviour?

Self-described iconoclast Lionel Shriver has been, at her own estimate, the target of multiple attempted cancellations – including one in Australia in 2016, after she delivered a speech on Fiction and Identity Politics at the Brisbane Writers Festival while wearing a sombrero.

Her speech prompted some affronted audience members to storm out – and sparked worldwide media debate , including accusations of promoting racial supremacy .

Shriver’s argument essentially boiled down to the belief that “the last thing fiction writers need is restrictions on what belongs to us”. Her attendant idea that “writers have to preserve the right to wear many hats” was literally illustrated by her headwear.

In a subsequent interview with Time , she said:

The whole notion of re-enfencing ourselves into little groups, first off, encourages pigeonholing. It means that we don’t read books about people who are different; we just read books about people who are just like us.

She continued: “we all the more think of each other in terms of membership of a collective”. Shriver has reservations about collectives and collective behaviour. In her collected essays , she writes:

Herd behaviour is by nature mindless. Parties to modern excommunication never seem to make measured decisions on the merits for themselves […] but race blindly to join the stampede.

What if calling someone stupid was illegal?

These ideas reverberate throughout Mania, a dystopian novel that riffs on George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). It is set in an alternative version of the 2010s, against a backdrop of heightened societal sensitivity to mental ability. Its cover tagline is: “what if calling someone stupid was illegal?”

The novel tells the tale of Pearson Converse, a untenured English academic and contrarian living in a quiet college town in Pennsylvania with her partner Wade, who works as a tree surgeon, and their three children.

Mania opens with a phone call from school. Pearson’s eldest, the intellectually precocious Darwin, has been accused of bullying: he “ridiculed one of his classmates” and “employed language we consider unacceptable in a supportive environment, and which I will not repeat”. Darwin has been caught using the term “dummy”, now considered a reprehensible slur – and is suspended for it.

In 2010, in Shriver’s fictional universe, the improbably named Carswell Dreyfus-Boxford published a “game-changing, era-defining” book, titled “The Calumny of IQ: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight”.

“At best,” Pearson recalls somewhat dismissively,

the ambitious got through the set-piece introduction of forty pages, full of heartrending anecdotes of capable young people whose self-esteem was crushed by an early diagnosis of subpar intelligence.

Despite being “widely ridiculed” upon initial publication, The Calumny of IQ quickly started to gain traction in certain circles. Though the “cerebral elite” at first “lampooned the notion that stupidity is a fiction as exceptionally stupid”, their “sharpest tacks”, the novel tells us, “jumped on the fashionable bandwagon first”.

Thus, the Mental Parity movement was born. As the critic Laura Miller observes , this imaginary ideology “not only borrows from the left’s obsession with egalitarianism, safetyism and language hygiene but also draws on the right’s mistrust of expertise and credentialism”. She points out that the novel’s critique “could have bipartisan appeal if it weren’t so patently absurd”.

Signs supporting “cognitive neutrality” pop up on suburban lawns. The New York Times crossword suddenly disappears. Everything begins to unravel.

The suspiciously articulate Barack Obama is one of the first public casualties. “Never having gotten the memo about suppressing that silver tongue,” Pearson laments, “he still deliberately rubbed the popular nose in his own articulacy”. Declaring him an electoral liability, the Democrats stage an internal coup and unceremoniously oust him from the White House.

They replace him with “the impressively unimpressive” Joe Biden, whose “delectably leaden” oratorical style proves a hit with voters captivated by “cognitive egalitarianism”.

This decision brings disastrous consequences – most notably, paving the way for the 2016 election of Donald Trump (who runs as a Democrat). “Whatever you think of his policies,” Pearson notes, “the big galoot has radically transformed the template for high office in the United States”.

From this point on, we read, it is a given that in order for a political figure to be considered a presidential contender,

he or she will necessarily be badly educated, uninformed, poorly spoken, crass, oblivious to the rest the world, unattractive and preferably fat, unsolicitous of advice from the more experienced, suspicious of expertise, inclined to violate constitutional due process if only from perfect ignorance of the Constitution, self-regarding without justification, and boastful about what once would have been perceived as his or her shortcomings.

Pearson testifies to America’s steady and systematic decline, including imploding healthcare (“wrong doses of anaesthetic and infections from inadequate care”) and education. International students turn their backs on American universities, leaving the sector financially exposed. Domestic students start reporting their teachers for acts of “cognitive bigotry” and similar ideological transgressions.

Much to her horror (if not surprise), the nonconformist Pearson finds herself the subject of scrutiny from her own students. In one of her creative writing classes, Pearson rants about the rank hypocrisy of it all:

Are you people really so stupid that you believe this claptrap about “everyone being as smart as everyone else,” or are you cynically playing along with a lie that you know is a lie?

She calls the US “a laughingstock!” and warns: “China and Russia think we’re retards , And they’re right!”

Complexity vs point-scoring

Pearson’s diatribe, which leads to her cancellation, is emblematic of Mania as a whole. Harangues of this sort, which quickly become tiresome, dilute the novel’s satirical impact. It brings to mind the overwrought rhetorical flourishes of Ayn Rand’s prose. Indeed, this intemperate passage could almost have been lifted verbatim from the pages of Atlas Shrugged.

Rand’s hero, John Galt, an egotistical scientist and inventor, is given to lengthy, impassioned speeches about the virtue of selfishness , the dangers of collectivism, and the innate superiority of the elite. As Lexi Freiman says, you have to be “a bit into” what Rand’s saying “to plow through 1,000 pages”. She calls it “belabored […] relentless and exhausting” and of course, “didactic”.

Freiman is spot on here. And as I write, I can’t help but think of my own experience with Shriver’s Mania. As with Rand, Shriver’s prose is weighed down by a barrage of ideological rants that overwhelm the story, sacrificing nuance and narrative in favour of blunt, often exhausting polemics. To be perfectly honest, it left me questioning who the novel was intended for.

Pearson’s rhetoric does not align exactly with Galt’s unfettered enthusiasm for laissez-faire capitalism. But her outrage at a world that increasingly prizes “uncredentialed mediocrity” and enforces “cognitive equality” echoes what we can describe as a peculiarly Randian disdain for anything that undermines individual brilliance or suppresses intellectual achievement.

Shriver, who makes no bones about her libertarian sensibility, has claimed she doesn’t “sit around reading Ayn Rand novels”. However, with its consistent embrace of individualist ideals and critiques of collectivism, I find, as do others , the parallels between Shriver’s recent work and Rand’s infamous novels hard to ignore.

While Freiman is alive to the complexities and contradictions of cancel culture, Shriver seems intent on delivering a straightforward ideological message, which renders her work, much like Rand’s, a relentless – and ultimately fruitless – exercise in polemical point-scoring.

One of these writers proffers a useful critique of our present predicament and narcissistic tendencies, and gestures towards a more nuanced understanding of our shared societal challenges.

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• |  September 20, 2024
• By Faith Greene
• -  September 20, 2024

– workshops, dance production to be held

UNIQUE Arts Entertainment will be executing Kaya! – a three-day Caribbean culture exchange between Guyana and Suriname. The exchange began on Thursday and ends on Saturday.

Kelton Jennings, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Unique Arts recently told the Buzz that this year, his group visited Suriname to celebrate Suriname’s emancipation, which was held on July 1, 2024.

Simultaneously he said, “We celebrated 15 years of Unique Arts, of dance and music. This has been in existence from 2009 to the 1st of July, 2024. We decided to do an exchange. This is the third year we are doing it, but this is bigger, where we took over 50 persons from Guyana to Suriname and we did a production and workshops, which is Kaya.”

Jennings pointed out that there were 100 persons involved in Kaya between Suriname and Guyana.

On Wednesday, approximately 60 persons came from Suriname to participate in the Guyana leg.

“We are doing it in schools as a theatre arts programme for young dancers because the persons that are coming from Suriname, they are young, talented people that are from a school for young talent. They just major in the arts. They will be coming over to celebrate and to do a production that I choreographed.

“And some of the pieces they are doing on their own, which is a cultural piece from their country, but mostly everything that relates to Kaya, I choreographed and costumed. They are coming to present it here at St. Rose’s and at Queen’s College on the 20th, which is this Friday (today),” Jennings highlighted.

Jennings explained that the St. Rose’s High School and Queen’s College are the only two schools in this programme, because of the short period of time that the Suriname group will be in Guyana.

He stated that these schools were selected because they are schools that do theatre arts.

“These are schools that I was involved with at some period of time through Mashramani competitions and I am attached to Queen’s College right now. I teach at the afternoon club…the dance club at Queen’s College so I selected Queen’s College and St. Rose’s due to the fact that we don’t have much time when they get here. Just three days, two shows and two workshops,” he explained.

According to Jennings, the 60-member cast comprises mostly children.

The workshops will be open to the public; however, the production is just for the two abovementioned schools.

He remarked that next year, they will try to do it bigger and better. “We will have them in the country for a week. We can visit different regions to execute this production,” Jennings expressed.

Things got underway on Thursday night with a workshop for drummers at the Queen’s College auditorium. This was opened to members of the public.

Today, there will be a Caribbean culture exchange dance production from 10:00 hrs to 11:00 hrs at the St. Rose’s High School, and then from 14:00hrs to 15:00hrs at the Queen’s College auditorium. This production is closed to the public at both schools.

On Saturday, there will be a dance workshop from 10:00hrs to 14:00 hrs at the Queen’s College auditorium and members of the public are invited to attend.

Anyone who wants to learn more about the exchange programme or make a contribution in any form, can contact Jennings on 619-6195.

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• | 2024-09-20

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