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Of course it's cancel culture. I can maybe, sort of get behind shaming some of the most egregious cases just like I could maybe get behind shaming some of the extreme cases the left highlighted during peak woke, but this type of thing always degenerates rapidly. That's exactly what's happening right now. There's a website serving as a MAGA doxxing database over this stuff, which supposedly only includes the worst examples, yet I'm finding cases like this one and this one. Posting stuff like "and the world kept spinning" is apparently a fire-worthy offense in MAGA's eyes.
Just pure MAGA hypocrisy. I can't believe I once saw the modern right as an ally in the fight for free speech.
Only if you they're looking tor excuses to not call it cancel culture, otherwise it's about as hypocritic as Ukrainians bombing Russian territory. Centrists that never spoke up against progressive cancel culture, but act outraged now, are much worse than this.
In some cases it's prudent to escalate to using the opponents' tactics to secure victory. Stuff like gerrymandering comes to mind, where unilateral disarmament is self-defeating.
This is not one of those cases. Cancel culture will blow up in MAGA's face eventually if they go down this road as hard as the Woke did.
So let's not go down this road as hard as the Woke did. Let's use Blue Tribe's unforced error to deal serious harm to their cadre and their institutions, without proceeding on to getting people fired over dongle jokes and OK gestures. It does not seem to me that this should be difficult to do.
We are arguing here over public celebration of a political murder. We are a long, long way from the road the Wokes started on.
48 hours into the new right-wing cancel culture, and already the demand for people "celebrating the murder of Charlie to Kirk" to cancel exceeds the supply. There are cancel mobs out for speech on the lines of "Of course Charlie Kirk shouldn't have been murdered but that doesn't change the fact that he was a racist/homophobe/other kind of bad person" and "I think this level of public mourning is excessive for a murdered podcast bro". And the official policy of the United States government is that "making light" of Kirk's murder is deportable - that is a much broader category of cancellable speech than "celebrating" it.
It is inherent to the nature of witch hunting that the demand for witches exceeds the supply, and accordingly that the definition of a witch is subject to scope creep. The type specimen here is 1950's anti-communism. Senator McCarthy's lawyer, an corrupt faggot by the name of Roy Cohn, sicced McCarthy on the US Army after they wouldn't give his catamite a cushy desk job. This led to the Army-McCarthy hearings and eventually blew up McCarthyism. After being driven out of public life, Cohn built a successful legal practice in NYC representing corrupt politicians, gangsters and real estate developers. One of his jobs was to negotiate the arrangement where Fred Trump paid off the mafia to ensure that there were no union problems on his construction projects. A young executive in the Trump organisation who was closely involved with the deal regards Cohn as an important mentor.
So I don't think a political movement led by Donald Trump is going to resist the natural tendency of cancel culture to spiral out of control until it starts eating its own. Based on public statements by Donald Trump and Steven Miller, I don't think they even want to.
You might be right, but at the moment you're freaking out over getting hit with a fraction of the force you were dishing out over a decade, so I don't know if you're qualified to gauge demand exceeding supply, or who is likely to spiral out of control.
I'm not in America so this isn't about me - I'm mostly worried about the damage to the system from another round of purges. McCarthyism was on track to break the system if it hadn't been stopped by the Army-McCarthy hearings. Wokestupid cancel culture didn't just unjustly end a few careers - it made a whole bunch of institutions dumber. It would in fact be a good thing if America had university social science departments that could do research in the social sciences, movie studios that could make good movies, or a left-wing political party that could nominate replacement-level candidates. (And that is just the institutions where the brain damage from wokestupid looks fatal.) If it does go full retard in the way such things usually do, MAGAtarded cancel culture will also break institutions - with the most immediately obvious candidate at this early stage being the armed forces.
Wokestupid cancel culture ended up harming the American left, America as a whole, and the American-led system that delivers peace and prosperity to billions of people. If MAGA choose to play three-tits-for-a-tat (and that is what the President of the United States and most of his core supporters in the country appear to want) and no pro-establishment right faction is able to stop them Army-McCarthy style then the clapback is going to do three times as much damage to America and the system as wokestupid did. And that is scary.
I'm trying to find a way to move the conversation forward and not dredge up the past, but when I hear stuff like this it's really hard. Like, how come you never mentioned all your worries about the system when every other anti-woke here was doing so? How come the spectre of McCarthyism didn't worry you enough to bring it up, when it was progressives doing it?
And is "I'm not in America" a good argument for you? Your country is literally arresting people for tweets, and you're worried about people getting fired an ocean away from you?
I’m not going to dox myself to make a point, but back when I was a politician I wrote under my real name in support of Jyllands-Posten posting the Danish cartoons, and against prosecuting David Irving for Holocaust denial. I cite Exiting the Vampire Castle more than anyone else on the Motte because I read it and agreed with it when it first came out in 2013. Real supporters of free speech exist, even if there are not many of us. I came to the Motte because I am one, and it was a rare example of (back then) a non-rightist space that hadn’t been completely taken over by wokestupid. I don’t think I have been particularly silent on this board about the destructive stupidity of wokestupid cancel culture, although I was lurking and not posting when it was at its worst.
Re. The international angle, various people in the US, most recently when explaining what Charlie Kirk was pushing back against, have talked about the climate of fear that wokestupid created in US universities and PMC workplaces. That mostly didn’t happen in the UK. The difference in attitude to mildly risky office banter was obvious when I worked in transatlantic teams. “I’ll tell HR you said that” remained the punchline of a joke in London banks throughout the Great Awokening. Some of this is cultural - the US is the only first world country which doesn’t have a social norm of “firing employees for out-of-work political speech is bad.” Some is legal - the specific way the US enforces anti-discrimination laws creates perverse incentives. But if non-leftist Americans are telling the truth about how bad things got, the practical limitation on the free speech of people who were not professional right-wing provocateurs was worse for you than it was for us. Fining people for teaching dogs the Roman salute is bad, but a lot more people want to make small donations to right-wing causes or say that there are only two sexes than teach the Roman salute to dogs. The UK courts have ruled explicitly that saying there are only two sexes is not a firing offence, and I’m not aware of a case where a British employer even tried to fire an employee over a normie-level political donation.
When I published, under my real name, a pamphlet that mentioned the word “nigger”, I was not worried about career-limiting consequences. I would not have done that in the US.
The nature of English-speaking PMC society is that some of the things I care about are produced by communities of interest which span the English-speaking world. Wokestupid cancel culture created fear, anger, hate, division, and above all retardation which broke things I care about - and not because of the specifics of what was cancelled. The backlash to wokestupid got us Brexit and the Trump tariffs, which also broke things I care about. Right-wing cancel culture will spread fear, anger, hate, division and retardation and break things I care about. And it will either provoke a backlash which brings Commie-adjacent leftists to power or succeed and empower the worst elements of the right - in either case I expect the long-term political consequences to include harmful economic policies which break things I care about.
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