Cancel culture often involves mobs getting a person fired or de-platformed because he or she expresses a view that the intolerant consider beyond the bounds of permissible dissent.
Democratic pollster David Shor, for instance, was fired for noting that violent protests often undermine their own cause politically. Marquette University fired a professor because he said a student should be allowed to express his opposition to gay marriage.
Often, cancel culture is simply a mob pretending to find something racist or bigoted, even though it isn’t, just because it is looking for any excuse to punish the supposed offender.
Ilya Shapiro’s plight at Georgetown University provides one such example. Shapiro believed that Sri Srinivasan was obviously the most qualified person to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Thus, President Joe Biden’s stated policy of excluding all Asian Americans from consideration meant that Biden was determined to choose a less qualified candidate, in Shapiro’s view.
Shapiro may have worded his tweets on this matter poorly, and people might have disagreed with his premise that Srinivasan is the best or whether representation on the court matters. But anyone who took half a minute to consider the tweets knew they weren’t racist — especially after he explained himself. People who hated Shapiro already, and people who like getting conservative scalps in an effort to intimidate conservatives out of poking their heads above ground, pretended to find Shapiro’s comments racist. They’re still trying to get Shapiro fired.
In Shapiro’s case, there was at least a bit of ambiguity because his tweet was poorly worded. In the case of Amber Athey, there is no ambiguity. Athey, a conservative commentator, made a joke about Kamala Harris’s brown outfit at the State of the Union. Although criticism of the outfit was all over social media, a bunch of people who had it in for Athey pretended to find it racist. No honest person could think it was racist, though.
The opportunistic Twitter mob besieged her employer, the Washington, D.C., radio station WMAL. WMAL pretended to agree and fired her in order to keep the mob at bay.
If you pay attention to cancel culture, you will find other cases like this. Sometimes it’s about inartful comments. Sometimes it’s simply a joke. But what matters to the cancel mobs is not whether there’s any real offense — it is whether it can cause pain by pretending there is.
Again, always go back to journalist Spencer Ackerman’s infamous leaked JournoList email from the days of the Obama campaign. “Take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists,” wrote Ackerman about Obama’s critics. “Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.”
That’s what’s really going on here, every single day. Never forget it.
