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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   42036 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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In the days following Charlie Kirk's murder, has seen a wave of employers being contacted regarding off-color remarks made by employees on social media about his passing. The debate is, does this constitute cancel culture, but by the right instead of the typical left? Some have argued that it is not the same thing, due to the disparaging comments being immediate, vs old comments dredged up in an attempt to cancel someone. There is a big difference between someone desecrating Charlie Kirk in an overt manner right after his passing, compared to a social media post made 10+ years ago against living targets that could be deemed as racist only under the most uncharitable light.

My take is, contacting an employer with the intent of getting someone fired for something not work-related or fired in the public interest as a 'concerned citizen', by definition, is cancel culture. Sure, one can argue that this is a different degree of cancelation, but it's the same principle. Someone posting a vile comment on his social media celebrating someone's death doesn’t necessarily affect his ability to do his job, like making sandwiches or whatever. Sure, if said individual confessed on social media to spitting in customers' sandwiches or making disparaging remarks about customers, go ahead and get his ass fired to protect the customers if no one else. But this is not like that. Consumers and other employees are not negatively affected by an employee holding a grudge against a dead podcaster.

To turn the tables, imagine if George Soros died and many of those same people wrote "good riddance" on their social media accounts, should this be grounds for cancelation? By the above logic, yes if you want to be morally consistent.

relevant tweet https://x.com/politicalmath/status/1967066826590028174

The debate is, does this constitute cancel culture, but by the right instead of the typical left?

Yes it does. And it is wrong. But before armistice is offered, the right is entitled to extract it's pound of flesh.

Didn't they already do that by getting that Home Depot cashier fired after the Trump shooting? How many pounds of flesh will it take before we're back to even and can start behaving in a civilized way?

  • -11

There's this great asymmetry that few seem to notice. The right gets to cancel in the immediate aftermath of one of theirs eating a bullet. The left gets to cancel all the time for a great many reasons. Personally, I'm happy that general norms of polite society still blanch at literally celebrating our murders in front of our families. For now.

I know these things are uncoordinated. But if you were the left, why the hell would you declare an armistice when this is the state of play? The only rule you have to abide is to not celebrate immediately after a righty is killed. And even then, many are morally too far gone to even follow that one rule.

The right can and has canceled people all the time, no assassinations required. A cursory inspection of FIRE's databases on campus speech will reveal no lack of incidents coming from the right (830 of 1760 incidents), and that is purely focused on campus speaking events.

The major asymmetry is that there are a significant number of people on the left who oppose cancellation as a matter of principle; their counterparts on the right are either fewer in number or vastly more passive. Right-wing opposition to cancellation is overwhelmingly centered on right-wingers getting canceled.

This surprised me, so I looked into the data a bit. The results are muddy but mildly interesting. THIS IS EXCLUSIVELY AN ANALYSIS OF FREE SPEECH INCIDENTS AT UNIVERSITIES, not firings etc. and not in the workplace or media.

  1. you're right, there's a pretty even split. Left 848, Right 830.
  2. a lot of these incidents are attempts. I thought that the left would be much more successful at actually cancelling people, which would be what we hear about, so I filtered out cancellation / disruption attempts and kept invitation revocations, event cancellations, etc. The results are tilted towards the left, but less so that I would expect: Left 434 to Right 319.
  3. the Left is much more likely to disrupt or attempt to disrupt events: Left 321: Right 40.
  4. filtering out disruption attempts and keeping only cancellation attempts gives you Left 217, Right 500. The right is about twice as likely to make a failed attempt at cancelling an event through the official system. This accounts for the majority of right-wing activity.
  5. FIRE's database contains various different type of events. The right is three times as likely to attempt to cancel an artwork, cinema showing or performance (Left 107, Right 335). To some extent this may be cofounding the results, as FIRE counts the cancellation of six different artworks in the same show as 6 cancellation attempts, equally for multi-film cinema performances. The left is twice as likely to cancel a speech (Left 602, 277).
  6. During peak woke years 2016-2024, the left was only responsible for about twice as many cancellations (Left 599, Right 305).

Broadly I would say that the number of attempts since 2000 are broadly equal. The manner is somewhat different: the Left are much more prone to disrupting events where the right tries to cancel through official channels. The left are more likely to cancel speech, the right are more likely to cancel art. The left tends to succeed more often, and has attempted to cancel more in the last decade, but not overwhelmingly so, which surprises me.

Caveat: I don't like the way that some of the data is gathered: counting the cancellation of Abortion Film Pts. 1, 2 and 3 as three separate cancellations seems dubious to me.

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