Cancel Culture

 

It was not a fascist leader but a society-wide culture of totalitarian intolerance that made me watch my words like a hawk for half a decade. It was fear of retaliation from the left that made me lay awake at night, terrified that a student might have misinterpreted something I said in class and initiated a cancellation campaign against me.

It was not a fascist leader but a leftwing culture of retribution—in the face of which tenured faculty and college administrators cowered—wielded by 18-year-olds that ended the career of a colleague of mine because she read out loud a word in an antiracist comic book. Yes, students, with the complicity of an entire college staffed with cowards whose fear was nonetheless rational, actually ended her career for reading an ANTIRACIST comic book.

It was not a fascist leader but a leftwing culture of fear that generated countless whispers among faculty in the halls of my college and others, every professor afraid to tell any but their most trusted colleagues, about how students had stood up in class to accuse them of "traumatizing" or "harming" them for teaching basic facts, or of failing to teach the subject from the now-mandatory ideological perspective of Afropessimism, or of teaching material, unobjectionable just the year before, that was inherently "white supremacist."

I know of physicians who lost important positions, were subjected to star chamber proceedings, and whose words were scrubbed from the internet merely for suggesting that socioeconomic conditions and not the phony construct of "implicit bias" were responsible for racial health disparities.

None of this repressiveness, this intolerance, this insistence that only a single view was acceptable on pain of cancelation—along with the fear that it all generated—was imposed by a fascist leader. It was imposed through the distributed channels of individual agents converging on an ideology and a set of practices to enforce it. It was imposed by all the individuals and institutions whose rationally self-interested fear made them who turned their eyes away, allowing it to happen and tacitly endorsing it. And I cannot but include myself in this indictment—all of us like Peter thrice denying the Jesus of our colleagues, friends, and family in order to save our own skins from the mob by falsifying ~every last one of our preferences.

There was an entire class of people who genuinely never felt a moment of fear of their neighbors, students, colleagues, or acquaintances, who sincerely never did notice episodes of retribution and cancelation such as I've described here. My theory is that these people's own ideology so mirrored that of the dominant social configuration that they simply never experienced a moment of friction. And it's not, for the most part, that they had previously arrived at "woke" ideology independently, and then merely recognized fellow travelers in other wokists. Rather, their minds were such as to instantly and uncritically conform themselves to whatever it was we were supposed to believe or endorse this week—from abolishing slave-patrol policing in America, to mass graves of Indians in Canada, to human biology having no bearing on a person's sex or gender. They were, and remain, in the grip of a mass delusion.

This is by and large the same class of people you will see commenting here and telling me that none of this ever happened or that I have fallen for a right-wing lie. Some of these people will make a faulty inference from this and assume that I am a hardcore right-winger. In a classic case of the whataboutism fallacy, they'll say, well, what about the Republicans?, and they'll accuse me of carrying water for a right wing that is supposedly far more repressive than any leftist or Democrat could ever aspire to be. Even dumber, they'll say that my supposed experience of intolerance is exactly what a bigot should expect. If I have views that were impossible to express on campus over the past years, that is just and good, for it entails that my views must have been beyond the pale, and no campus is obliged to platform or tolerate Nazis and their ilk. These inferences and accusations are all false. I can be angry about left-wing repressiveness and still be plenty alarmed by right-wing repressiveness, and indeed I am. I have spoken out on this platform against Florida's Stop WOKE Act, for example, and against the crushing of pro-Palestinian speech on some campuses, and just this morning I shared my well-grounded fear that Trump will end up invoking the Insurrection Act. But there is simply no equivalency between the impact on my "lived experience" of the daily, grinding paranoia and fear that the leftist culture of repression has created in me and that I have seen it create in countless students and colleagues, and my more abstract and theoretical concerns about a repressive right, that is in any event far more local (FL, TX, etc.), not nearly as global, as the society-wide leftist culture that I describe here. I will not be gaslit!