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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
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?
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.
Where have these 'significant number of people' been in the last decade?
Maybe the cancellations aren't to their principled liking, but if they didn't like it, they didn't make a fuss about it. Certainly not to change policy, or have any material impact on what actually happened. Actions speak louder than words, and by the inaction of these supposedly principled liberals their revealed preferences are known. Indeed, they did so little, it amounts to the same if they didn't exist at all.
In the real world, it doesn't matter how highbrow and principled you are if you do nothing for them. If you sacrifice nothing for them. You're just a coward. And the beliefs of cowards can be casually dismissed without argument.
Providing basically all of the intellectual defense of free speech as a principle. Organization like FIRE, for instance, provide legal backing in First Amendment cases on a broad, non-ideological front despite being founded and run by liberals. The vast majority of signatories on the famous Harper's Letter are liberals or leftists. Few are conservative, and virtually none are associated with the populist Right that dominates the Republican establishment.
By contrast, right wing "free speech" defenders have mostly been massive hypocrites, e.g. Musk making a habit of suing critics or anti-BDS laws in Red states. Likewise, there are no real conservative equivalents to organizations like FIRE (or even the ACLU, despite its serious institutional decay) that make a point of standing up for free speech regardless of who the speaker is.
Can you be specific as to what you're expecting? If speaking out and providing legal support doesn't amount to anything, I'm not really sure what would count.
No conservatives signing a letter that includes a denouncement of the current leader of the conservatives doesn't tell you conservatives don't care about free speech. It tells you conservatives have kicked at that football one too many times, Lucy.
And now FIRE is progressive! I'm sure Greg Lukianoff will be surprised, considering the many attacks they have suffered from the left, being branded a front for conservative ideology because the only people they could source funding from were conservative.
And while I'm at it, the original FIRE database you link lists deplatforming attempts, which you call cancelling, but that is like calling attempted murder murder. Attempted cancellations are bad, yes, but of the successful attempts the left clearly dominates.
Not alone, no, though given that Donald Trump is consistently anti-free speech, you would think principled conservative defenders would be willing to speak out against him on that front. Combined with other factors, it's pretty suggestive that conservatives are not pro-free speech, just pro-conservative. In particular, they never extend the same sufferance or support they demand from others. You say the football has been yanked too many times, but there's no history of betrayed reciprocity here. Cancel Culture has always been a thing, but it didn't become a Thing until right-wingers started complaining about it.
I didn't say FIRE was progressive. One of the peculiar aspects of Free Speech discourse is that is primarily an intra-left debate between liberals and progressives, with the right contributing little beyond parroting liberal arguments and complaining that progressives are rude to them.
Greg Lukanioff, however, is openly and unambiguously a liberal, and more broadly, virtually every non-partisan civil liberties organization is staffed and supported by liberals. There's not really any conservative equivalent to FIRE or the EFF or ACLU.
If by 'clearly dominates' you mean a 50% vs 40% success rate, that would seem like an indictment of the theory of left-wing supremacy, given that this is supposed to be their home turf, where they enjoy material and institutional superiority.
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