Imagine a world in which no unpleasant statements were ever uttered. A world in which one could never be insulted or mocked. A world in which anyone who ever dared to offend us would be immediately silenced and confined to an oubliette.
Ever since the advent of social media, many have attempted to create a simulacrum of this utopia through online censorship. This has taken the form of Silicon Valley tech giants intervening to prohibit the expression of certain opinions, or users actively campaigning to have other users removed from platforms. Many have taken it further, using the internet to track down offending parties and complaining to their employers. This attempt to destroy people’s livelihoods and reputations for causing offence has become known colloquially as ‘cancel culture’.
Typically, this is a tactic of those who identify as Left-wing, but the authoritarian instinct is common throughout humanity and is therefore not tied to any one specific political group. This week, we have seen many campaigners on the Right attempting to cancel those who have made unpleasant comments about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the murder of Corey Comperatore. The less imaginative have repeated the identical joke – “Make America Aim Again” – while others have expressed what appears to be genuine irritation that the gunman missed his target.
Grim stuff, obviously, but hardly unexpected. For years, we have seen that those who style themselves as being on “the right side of history”, who apply hashtags such as #BeKind and #LoveWins to their online bios, are often the most ferocious and unrelenting bullies. Their confidence in their own compassion seems to bear an inverse relationship to their actual capacity for empathy. The guise of virtue is naturally appealing for sociopaths seeking a cover for their cruelty.
Elon Musk has been so inundated with complaints that he felt obliged to post the following:
For some, there have been real-world consequences. A few days ago, an employee at Home Depot (a home improvement retailer in the U.S.) was filmed at work by a man questioning her about a recent Facebook post regarding the assassination attempt. She had written: “To [sic] bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!” The video went viral and she was fired.
Many of us will find the sentiments that she had expressed contemptible. Her words do not come close to the threshold for incitement to violence, but they do express an ugly flippancy about the sanctity of human life. Is this sufficient reason to see her lose her livelihood? This is likely a worker on a minimum wage and not somebody who can afford to be unemployed, let alone endure the ongoing stigma of such a targeted online campaign. Why could her detractors not have responded with criticism, or blocked her account, or simply ignored her? There’s a very good reason why the singer Nick Cave described cancel culture as “mercy’s antithesis”.
While emotions are running high the need to lash out is understandable, but that does not make it justifiable. I take the view that companies have no business monitoring the legal social media activity of their employees, and nor should they capitulate to demands to see them fired if others take offence. One might counter this view by pointing out that there are certain jobs in which a respectable public profile is essential. It would never occur to me to post any kind of endorsement of violence on social media, but if I did I would not expect to be hosting my show on GB News this weekend. It would be an immediate violation of my contract, one that I had willingly signed. This would not be a free speech matter.
But the vast majority of jobs do not in any way involve maintaining a public profile, and it seems grossly unfair to penalise people for mistakes that would in usual circumstances be almost instantly forgotten. The complainants often rationalise their position by claiming that no company would wish to employ “that kind of person”, and so by revealing their true colours these people deserve to lose their jobs. But this is to reduce humanity to a Disneyfied narrative of Goodies and Baddies. It is simply not the case that good people say good things and bad people say bad things. It is perfectly possible that the woman fired from Home Depot might later have regretted her words, perhaps written unthinkingly in the heat of the moment. But even if she hadn’t, is public shaming really the answer?
All of those calling for cancellations this week might want to ask themselves a simple question. If all the private messages you had ever sent were suddenly uploaded online for all to see, would you be happy with that? Are you really so pure that no statement you have made in the past could be weaponised against you?
In one of the more high profile cases, Jack Black has announced the cancellation of his Tenacious D tour after fellow band member Kyle Glass made a joke about the assassination at a show in Sydney. While blowing out the candles of a birthday cake on stage, he made the wish: “Don’t miss Trump next time.” Black later wrote on Instagram that he “would never condone hate speech or encourage political violence in any form”. But can anyone honestly claim that this was the intention? It looks to me very much like a tasteless joke.
The expectation that human beings ought to be infallible is unrealistic and cruel. I do not approve of many of the comments I have seen about the violence of Saturday evening, but nor do I suppose that all of those making such comments are inherently evil. Even those who consistently and explicitly take joy in the suffering and deaths of their political opponents have the right to free speech. I do not ever wish to associate with such people, and so there is some benefit in their tendency to expose their sourness so willingly.
At heart, cancel culture is a form of revenge. Most people are rightly distressed by the spectacle of violence, and are resentful of those who appear to have no regard for human life, or are so wrapped up in their ideology that they have surrendered their basic empathy. The best response is criticism. There is nothing wrong with letting people know how we feel about them, particularly when they have behaved so badly. To leap directly to punishment and public shaming may make us feel better about ourselves, but its utility ends there. Either we are for cancel culture or we are against it. There is no middle ground.
Andrew Doyle is a writer, comedian and broadcaster who hosts the GB News show Free Speech Nation. He is the author of Free Speech and Why It Matters and The New Puritans. He created satirical Left-wing activist Titania McGrath, whose two books are Woke: A Guide to Social Justice and My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism. This article was first published on his Substack page. Subscribe here.
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