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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
As I see it, a big problem here is something that lawyer Youtuber "Legal Mindset" notes with his recent "don't report them to HR, report them to OSHA" video, this part of "cancel culture" is actually downstream from the law — corporations are legally required to take action. This, because OSHA rules require employers to maintain a "safe working environment," and various precedents hold that this includes when employee speech makes the workplace "unsafe." Indeed, as I understand it, much of the early waves of cancel culture were made possible by these legal rulings (sought by the Left). If celebrating murder, and making "do [insert name here] next" comments don't fall under "unsafe work" environment, then how can any other speech?
Now, you can argue that this is bad law that stifles free speech; and some on the left are now doing that… but most of those I'm seeing were fine with these laws stifling speech when it was being used the other direction, and only upset that it's being enforced bidirectionally. It reminds me of the complaints about the Trump admin using civil rights anti-discrimination law (written in a "colorblind" manner) against anti-white discrimination: that don't you know that, however it's written on paper, it's only actually supposed to be enforced one way, and how dare the Right do to us what we've been doing to them! (Like that historian I can't remember argued, "fascism" is when the right uses the left's methods against the left, as opposed to remaining Hlynka-esque "virtuous losers" dreaming of martyrdom.)
Your rules applied fairly > Your rules applied unfairly. Maybe after the left spends some time on the wrong end of the "cancel culture" weapon they've made, we might get some broader support for rolling back some of these laws in favor of broader workplace speech protections. But if the history of warfare (like chemical weapons in WWI) shows anything, it's that you don't get these sorts of "arms limitations treaties" until after the weapon gets used in both directions.
And until OSHA regulations around "unsafe work environments" are changed, corporations have to take action against these employees.
I am fairly sure that the EEOCs very expansive definition of "hostile workplace" does not apply in any way, shape, or form to OSHA's "safe working environment" -- that is, working next to someone who has repugnant views is not "unsafe" in OSHA parlance. OSHA is worried about missing railings, not bad politics.
Working next to a bigot who doesn't bigot in the office doesn't constitute a "hostile workplace" under EEOC rules either (although, absurdly, having a co-worker put a Gadsden Flag in their cubicle can do) - the problem is more subtle than that, and involves a combination of the inherent dangers of strong anti-discrimination laws and the spectacularly broken American civil justice system.
Fundamentally, the problem is that if a workplace discrimination lawsuit against a medium or large business gets past summary judgement, you are going to be settling it, probably for a six-figure sum of money, because the alternative is to let the plaintiff go on a fishing expedition at your expense for anything bigoted any employee anywhere in the organisation said or did in the last N years (where N is at the discretion of the judge, and can exceed the statute of limitations). And "this company knew they had racists on staff and didn't fire them" plus "one co-worker said a bad thing to me in the workplace once" is sufficient circumstantial evidence of a pattern of officially-tolerated peer-on-peer discrimination to get past summary judgement.
I don't know the mechanics of OSHA enforcement, but my guess would be a civil lawsuit over workplace safety that gets past summary judgement would require an injured employee and some plausible connection between the injury and the presence of people who shitpost ghoulishly about Charlie Kirk - that is a much less plausible outcome.
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