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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
Obviously cancel culture works both ways now. Not new. When Trump was first almost assassinated, you may remember a video of a Home Depot worker which always struck me. Lady is middle aged and working the front desk - actually already one of the most thankless positions, as a former employee there - and is confronted by a guy filming who looked up her social media on his own time before. She basically just asks him to leave. But still, fired. That one stuck in my memory because it felt like an especially low blow, not like someone more professional with more job security, but a true near-minimum wage worker.
But it was recently pointed out to me that the beginnings of what might be termed cancel culture (less individualized but still targeted pressure campaigns) were way earlier. Remember Christian groups trying to cancel different movies because of inappropriate content? Certain songs, company actions too. Actually plenty of moral crusades going back even farther. And the left of course had the apartheid boycott, Vietnam era protest against officials and companies supporting the war, or certain college speakers, stuff like that.
This makes me think that in some fashion it’s more about social media itself than any deliberate action by the left or right in particular. Somewhat supporting this is how when Twitter was left dominated? Lots of leftist cancelling. Now that X is right dominated? Lots of rightist cancelling.
So to me I really don’t think it makes sense to adopt a paradigm of “they did it first”, on neither side. I used to think otherwise, but the longer I see it go on all over, the more I suspect it’s a human nature meets new technology problem. It could be that social media becomes the new workplace in terms of banal corporate-speak and circumspection.
"Cancel culture" does not mean "moral crusade".
Wanting to ban a movie because the movie itself contains inappropriate content isn't cancel culture. It would have to be something like "wanting to ban an innocuous movie because it was produced by someone who used inappropriate content in a different movie".
This definition would exclude many, if not most, prominent examples of cancellation.
Such as?
Off the top of my head: Gina Carano (or Chuck Wendig :V), Louis CK, Bret Weinstein, and James Damore were all censured for things they said/did, not for tangential association with someone else.
The equivalent to "banning a movie for the contents of the movie itself", for people, is "firing someone from his job for things said in his role in his job"--writers publishing books that say bad things, politicians making speeches that say bad things, celebrities saying things during publicity for their films, professors teaching bad things in their class, etc. None of your examples are like that and thus are not excluded by my definition.
Damore posted things in a forum at his job, but posting there wasn't part of his job duties. (And even if it had been, he had been assured that he could speak freely.)
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