It's Not Cancel Culture. It's Much Worse.
We're not looking at hypocrisy, but accelerating authoritarianism.
"We are in the cancel culture part of the tragedy cycle."
This is the declaration of Adam Goldstein, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) writing at his organization's website.
In the piece, dated September 12th, he chronicles almost three dozen incidents of individuals being sanctioned, suspended, or terminated for public remarks following the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk.
The vast majority of these incidents concern schools, colleges, and universities. The examples exhibit a pattern of public outrage which gets the attention of a public official who then calls for sanction, followed by the sanction being administered by another public entity.
As a typical example, Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn called for the firing of a Cumberland University professor on September 11th, the day after Kirk's death. On September 12th, the professor was dismissed, along with a member of the university staff.
Goldstein says that this is a cycle of "…the cancel culture machine. It goes like this: A tragedy happens. Someone reacts by celebrating that tragedy for whatever reason. Then the social media mob comes to demand this person be fired, expelled, or otherwise punished for their views."
I'm appreciative of Goldstein's work to compile, publicize, and criticize these actions, but I have an important point of disagreement. Most of these are not incidents of cancel culture.
It's censorship.
The problem is not about "social media mobs" making demands, but on the public officials in power following through and punishing those views.
Whatever anyone thinks about people saying things on social media, all of it (providing it doesn't run afoul of the law) is a form of protected speech. Some may decry the effect of that speech, but this doesn't make it not speech. Charlie Kirk's Professor Watchlist was a documented vector of threats and harassment directed toward college faculty, but the website itself is too an example of speech, even when the website called for professors to be fired.
The public discussion about these issues has been unfortunately muddled for years, including by FIRE President Greg Lukianoff, who, along with his Coddling the American Mind co-author Jonathan Haidt, invented a psychological pathology they called “safetyism” in order to delegitimize student speech they believed to be “illiberal.”
The “cancel culture” narrative had much the same effect, by categorizing contentious speech where people were advocating for particular outcomes - without having the power to directly enact those outcomes - as something akin to censorship. Whatever one thinks of the phenomenon as a whole, or individual examples of it, it was never censorship.
United States senators calling for firings and then college presidents complying, on the other hand, is straight-up censorship.
These distinctions very much matter in this moment because it is clear that numerous government officials are interested in using the response to Kirk's death as a pretext to crack down on speech they don't approve of. The United States State Department is "warning" immigrants not to "mock" Kirk's death. Vice President J.D. Vance announced a Trump administration intention to punish any groups they unilaterally decide “support violence against conservatives.”
Legal remedies to illegal firings are also no longer guaranteed in a system where politicians are willing to use the weight of their office to crush dissent. At Clemson, one employee was fired and two faculty members were removed from teaching duties after complaints originating with the Clemson College Republicans surfaced. The South Carolina attorney general, Republican Alan Wilson issued an opinion holding Clemson harmless if they fired the employees claiming, without evidence, the speech was tantamount to threats.
Other state legislators overtly threatened the school’s state funding should they fail to act.
Coercion, intimidation.
Representative Clay Higgins declared that he is "going to use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk."
The same Clay Higgins sponsored the "Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act" in 2023 in which he said, "The American people have the right to speak their truths, and federal bureaucrats should not be dictating what is or isn’t true. We must continue to uphold the First Amendment as our founding fathers intended."
In 2021, Marsha Blackburn, who called for the firing the Cumberland University professor introduced an anti-cancel culture resolution declaring, "Cancel culture is a barrier to a free marketplace of ideas and remains antithetical to the preservation and perpetuation of global democracy."
It is tempting to nail Blackburn and Higgins as hypocrites, but again, this mistakes the underlying aim of the larger political project for surface-level features. Blackburn and Higgins were against "cancel culture" because they did not approve of the potential consequences for speech with which they agreed. They are now calling for sanctions against speech and speakers with which they disagree. In both cases, they are using their power to promote speech with which they approve and discount that with which they don't approve.
The major difference is that instruments of the state are acting on these calls to sanction, suspend, and fire people.
Like I said, censorship.
The only thing that's changed is the locus of power and a presidential administration that is more than willing to use the instruments of the state to intimidate and silence the opposition.
This isn't cancel culture; it's authoritarianism.
As I say, I'm appreciative of FIRE's attention to these incidents, but the facts of what's going on show the limits of trying to adjudicate freedoms – including academic freedom – entirely through the lens of free speech. If we're going to preserve our freedoms, I think it's important that at the very least, we use the most accurate descriptive language we can.
FIRE’s Goldstein is wrong. We aren’t in the “cancel culture” part of the cycle.
We’re in the retaliation, censorship, coercion, authoritarianism part of the cycle, and the wheels are turning ever faster.
—
The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
It's hilarious how the trolls here are going on about the supposed threat of communism or Maoism or whatever.
It might be nice to have a bit less Milton Friedman in this borked up mess we call the US right now, where every single industry is ruled by an oppressive monopoly, and some people are so mad about the lousy economy and the sorry state of their lousy lives that they're looking to scapegoat minorities, immigrants, and anyone on the left.
I am of the opinion that you are more worried about the power you possess being taken away than you are of "free speech." I think that you are also worried that the power of persuasion has been usurped by people and you feel threatened by the shifting landscape.
You are also throwing out claims of "suppressing free speech" when the rug is being pulled out under you and your bully pulpit. For too long, liberals and cultural Marxists had the sanctuary status of hiding in academia and using this is as your "conversion center" to try to build the army of like-minded leftists. In other words, your authoritarianism is under threat when you are feeling the heat of being "called on the carpet." You are worried now that the democrat process is working by electing those who have had enough of your incessant baloney calling you out and putting an end to it.
But where were you when this happened?
On May 31, 2020, as protests had erupted across the U.S. in the wake of the murder of Floyd by Minneapolis police officers days earlier, former Kings player Marcus Cousins asked Napear his take on Black Lives Matter, the movement that challenges police brutality against Black people.
Napear's reply that "all lives matter" is a slogan that may appear racially neutral, but is widely perceived as a conservative repudiation of the Black Lives Matter focus on the disproportionate number of Black people who are killed by law enforcement in the U.S.
https://www.courthousenews.com/radio-host-fired-for-tweeting-all-lives-matter-can-pursue-retaliation-claim/
I will bet that you screamed in joy when people were being cancelled all around the world and made to hide their true thoughts. You had an extra skip in your step knowing that you were suppressing the free speech of others and that others had no choice but to noddingly agree with your views or be forever castigated as a "threat to democracy." Was this not authoritarianism at work? Was this not censorship? And was this not self-censorship of many faculty and students? All you had to do was deviate ONE angstrom from the leftist narrative and you too would have been "cancelled" by the Neo-Maoists.
Now that people are fighting back against the insanity of cultural Marxism (yes, you all took it way too far and were way too comfortable thinking that the rules did not apply to you but only applied to those you despise).
You see, this is all so simple: Richard Overy, in his book “The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia" (2004, Konecky & Konecky, Old Saybrook, CT) noted: "In each case (Hitler and Stalin) democracy was defined as the absence of political division and true representation of popular interests."
In this case, YOUR popular interests is what makes up democracy and that you determined that those who were not on your side as misfits, rubes, unenlightened conservatives while you claimed the elitist and the moral mountain top. You forced people to virtue signal your views. And any deviation from your thinking of popular interests was deemed a threat to democracy.
Your version of "academic freedom" is to "say whatever you want without facing any consequences" but by golly, those who use their academic freedom to offer a smidgen of nuance are to be denounced and to face dire consequences.
You Neo-Maoists had it to too good for too long and you did not think that the tables would turn on you. Before you condemn the hypocrisy of others, I would self-reflect on your own hypocrisy. And how one of your own leftists decided to suppress the speech of another person with a bullet. You all have been calling out conservatives and saying they are fascists, neo-Nazi's, and portraying those of us as "American Untermensch". So, I ask you this: who is the real fascist and threat to free speech? I would say it is you.