Opinion | Is It Time to Cancel Cancel Culture?

Today on The Argument, is it time to cancel, cancel culture?

Cancel culture — some people think that it’s a form of censorship that prevents them from saying what they really think for fear of Twitter coming after them, or worse, losing their job, or that it unfairly targets the books and movies that we grew up with. But skeptics say that’s not censorship. That’s just people facing the consequences of saying or doing something offensive. Get caught on videos threatening to call the cops on a Black man who’s out watching birds? Well, maybe you should lose your job. It’s called at-will employment, after all. I’m Jane Coaston, and yeah, it’s really scary to have people come after you and fling old tweets at you with the intent of hurting your career. I’ve had that happen. But as the idea of cancel culture expands. And let’s be clear, as cancel culture becomes a very profitable wedge issue, the phrase becomes more infuriating and easily manipulated. Last week, when Alexi McCammond and Teen Vogue parted ways over her racist tweets from 10 years ago, was she cancelled? When an anti-Semite got a speaking slot pulled from CPAC this year, a conference whose theme for 2021 was “America Uncancelled“, was he cancelled? When is it cancel culture, and when is it that you did a bad thing? And who decides? And why should you care? You should care, by the way.

My guests today have thought a lot about the subject of cancel culture. That’s because one of them, Will Wilkinson, was recently cancelled, though we’ll talk about whether he was technically cancelled. During the riots at the Capitol on January 6, he tweeted, quote, “If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence.” It was a reference to the chants of “Hang Mike Pence” by some of the rioters. Wilkinson thought his tweet was funny, but he was immediately besieged on Twitter and the conservative media. He lost his job as vice president of research at the Niskanen Center, a center right think tank here in DC. And his writing contract with The New York Times Opinion was put on hiatus. My other guest is Robby Soave a senior editor at Reason who was focused on cancel culture and who covered Will’s story in a piece called “Cancel Culture Comes for Will Wilkinson.”

Robby, hello.

Hello, how are you?

I am doing very well. Will, hello.

Hi, how’s it going, Jane?

It’s going quite well. Will, did you read Robby’s piece?

I did, yeah.

What did you think?

I definitely appreciated Robby defending me. After I was let go, there was a gigantic outpouring of support for me that was really overwhelming and incredibly touching. And a lot of it was coming from people who are really worked up about the idea of cancel culture, who saw me as a victim of it and wanted to express their sympathy and solidarity. And it is ironic that it’s on grounds that I don’t necessarily agree with 100% in general.

So let’s back up for a second. Robby, what is cancel culture?

I think it’s the climate that we live in now of being held accountable in a very severe and punitive way for things you’ve said or done maybe recently, but maybe in the distant past, that don’t totally reflect who you are as a person but come to define you and come to cause you to really suffer. I think often, it’s a problem that the incidents we end up discussing in the media, online, are the high profile cancellations or whatnot of famous comedians and actors and actresses when they get in trouble, which are often not the most sympathetic cases because these people are better positioned to weather the storm. There are people punished under cancel culture who are just random people, who maybe said or tweeted or snapped years and years ago, perhaps in their adolescence or their teenage years. The New York Times has written about some of these, right, of cases of past social media use coming back to haunt people and them suffering, firing, or not being able to go to the college they intended to go to anymore or social stigma, or sometimes harassment and death threats. This whole conversation borders just the general online harassment conversation. And that is a cultural phenomenon, and that’s what we’re describing. And yeah, I do think it’s bad. I think there’s something to it. Obviously, sometimes people deserve this, but a lot of times, they don’t. Or a lot of times, they deserved a, hey, you were wrong. That was bad. You should apologize. Not, and now your life is coming to an end.

Will, do you think Robby is right on the essential definition?

Well, I mean, there is a change, and the change is the nature of technology and communication. We didn’t have Twitter 20 years ago. We didn’t have Facebook 20 years ago. We didn’t have Instagram 20 years ago. And I think it totally is a real thing that happens that people will say something on social media, a posse that’s animated by outrage or bloodlust will assemble, and mob that person online. There’ll be a bunch of people who contact their employer, try to get them fired. The thing that’s oppressive to me is this sense of kind of omnipresent surveillance that life on social media platforms and in a world in which everybody is carrying a camera and a video recorder around in their pocket, we have this sense of siege or oppression, a loss of privacy from those technologies. And it makes people very sensitive about the possibility that something that they say might be taken out of context. And they might experience painful repercussions for it. So I think there is something kind of oppressive about that climate. I just don’t think it is the event or the phenomenon of people losing opportunities because of something they said. I think whether or not that’s good or bad just depends on whether or not they did or didn’t deserve it in that particular case. Did they violate a social norm that’s worth enforcing and upholding? And was whatever happened to them, was that proportional to their transgression, to the severity of their breach of norms, or was it an overreaction? It’s always a problem if punishments are not proportional to the crime.

So I’m for freedom of association. I’m a libertarian so they can fire anybody for whoever they want. I don’t care.

Right.

But I do think what is the job that just a person who’s kind of a kook is allowed to have? No job? They should be homeless? They should be poverty stricken? Obviously, you can go to the extreme, yes, virulent, awful Nazis. No one wants them to have jobs, although there’s a lot of people out in America, not who are Nazis, but who have kooky political ideas, the ideas that just kind of normal Americans have who are not in the professional ideas and takes having class. Their ideas are kind of awful on all sides of the political spectrum. And I’m worried that many of the phenomena Will just described that he also is concerned about, the ability to monitor people through social media or to record or keep a record of the dumb, wrong, vaguely offensive or kooky things everyone has said because everyone has always kind of had these problematic kooky views — not everyone but a lot of people — now we can hold them accountable for it. It would be more important, I think, to have some kind of separation between people and their bad political ideas, or to have some norm that you’re not going to be fired or expelled or whatever for having a really dumb political opinion, because everyone has really dumb political opinions. And what people get outraged about is pretty selective, but there’s always something that can outrage someone.

People did not start saying super offensive things in 2006. There’s kind of the idea of like, well, people weren’t offended by this back then. Yes, they were. People were offended by people saying terrible anti-Semitic or racist things. Is there something here where it’s in part that people who were aggrieved gaining power now and now being able to say, like, hey, that’s not a thing that we’re letting people say?

Yeah, I think that is a lot of it. And that’s part of my problem with the broad brush of cancel culture. I mean, there have been generations of efforts from people of historically subordinated and marginalized groups. They’ve been trying hard for a long time to get their rights recognized and their interests recognized. And once some of those basics were put in place, then the project kind of moved toward establishing some new norms of speech and public behavior that affords them the dignity and respect that’s owed to social and political equals. I mean, I think that’s a very worthy project. But any time you’re trying to change the norms, there’s always going to be conflict. It’s just inevitable. People get used to doing things one way. They don’t like to change, and they certainly don’t like to face sanctions for doing things that didn’t come with any consequences in the past. I think it’s harmful to conflate that worthy project, confusing the struggle for more respectful egalitarian norms with some sort of ideological project of socially enforced conformity, an assault on freedom of conscience and speech. I just don’t think that’s helpful. So I think it’s 100% the case that as groups gain economic and political power, as they start reaping the rewards of advances in equality, that people are going to use their new leverage, use their heft to change the culture. And I don’t think it’s tyrannical for people to do that.

But it’s often taken exactly the form of — I mean, tyranny is a kind of hyperbolic way to frame it, but of sanction and punishment. You can find examples of this, many of them on elite college campuses, where not most students, not most young people, not most people of color or trans people or gay people, but a small subset of activists on behalf of these issues, using the kind of changing cultural norms to punish sometimes other students, often their own professors, often their own very liberal far-left professors who have slightly different ideas about what words are supposed to be used. And that is happening in college classrooms all the time, where, again, not because it’s most people, not even most young people or most liberal people or most progressive activists, but a small number of very easily offended people now have tremendous power, not in our whole country, not in the government, but in small, elite circles, like Twitter to some degree. I find it very concerning.

So I want to note something, that there are moments that gain a lot of fanfare, but, one, they tend to take place at these very cherrypicked universities. Does that seem like bad faith, especially when there have been African-American professors who have been — when they’re talking about race and racism, they experience a version of what I would call cancel culture, where people demand their firing or demand that they lose tenure. But we’re not hearing about those specific cases.

Yeah, I mean, here in Iowa, the Republican majority legislature has introduced a bill to make it illegal for public schools and public universities to teach things out of the 1619 Project. I find that concerning. With the case about the universities, my focus is on trying to identify where the real problem is. It’s not to deny that there are real problems. But a lot of these problems in universities are, I think, a function of breakdowns of university administration, where they’ve become so risk averse that anybody can be violating some sort of administrative rule at any time, that that’s really easily weaponized. But I’m not sure that that specific problem is a problem with an over censorious climate of speech, just like I’m not sure that mobs on Twitter are a cultural problem that has to do with increasing intolerance of a diversity of views, so much as it has to do with the incentives that are built into the business models of these kind of platforms. Maybe there’s problems with the way these businesses are structured such that they are trying to sell our data in a way, trying to advertise to us in a way that makes them depend on engagement, makes it in their interest to incentivize polarization, a kind of bitter antagonism. I’m just not sure that that’s not the problem, as opposed to some diffuse cultural shift toward intolerance and hostility to people with opposing views.

Robby, you’ve said on Twitter, which is where all of this happens — it’s where the action is — that you helped to popularize the term “cancel culture” and the idea. It’s something you write about extensively. You do cable news hits talking about it. You’ve written a book in part on cancel culture taking place on college campuses. And you’re benefiting from cancel culture, in some ways. Do you think people would care about it if you didn’t write about it?

This is something you hear from a lot of people. Why do you care so much about x thing and not y thing? But then it becomes a little bit of like, well, just because I write about x thing doesn’t mean that’s the thing I care about most. I’m, for better or worse, a culture writer. And I’m interested in these things. I think they are important. And I try in my writing not to make broad generalizations like that this is the worst thing ever or that this is such a clear phenomenon that — because this is a difficult thing to quantify or qualify that we’re talking about. I did not choose the term “cancel culture” and probably wouldn’t if I could magically force everyone to talk about these issues because it is imprecise, and it is wielded in very unhelpful ways by many people, including Republican officials, who have described everything from the impeachment of Donald Trump and the revelations about things Marjorie Taylor Green has said in the past as cancel culture. I don’t consider those things to be cancel culture at all. And probably it’s important to say why, which is that those are political figures. Obviously, it has to be OK to hold political figures accountable for the things they’ve said in the past on political subjects, on policy topics on the news. That is the whole point of having a system of elected representative government. So, no, I do not think those individuals are canceled. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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Will made the point earlier that it seems as if it’s not elite college culture or cancel culture, it’s a risk averse bureaucracy that is the problem. It’s not cancel culture, it’s the fact that you have universities that are terrified of lawsuits. And I would say that in many instances, when it’s somebody getting fired from a job, that seems like a labor problem that has become twisted into a cultural problem. Millions of people get fired for all sorts of dumb reasons that are, unfortunately, not covered by, say, anti-discrimination law, but also not covered for any sort of reason because of at-will employment. Robby, you’re a libertarian. And so you obviously think that, as you said, that people can be fired for any reason.

Yeah, many of the incidents I’ve written about and some that we’ve discussed here, the ones that pertain to university campuses, it’s a little trickier than that because public universities are, to some degree, bound by the First Amendment. Many private universities make contractual guarantees of broad free speech and due process protections to both their employees and their students. So in some of these cases, I am actually picking a fight based on what I think was a rights violation for one of those reasons. In terms of general employment, yeah, I take your point. So this is something cancel culture when we complain about that often doesn’t have a great solution, certainly not a great legal or legislative solution because I don’t think probably even someone who is not a libertarian who would be more open to writing in nondiscrimination proposals or job protections or something, is probably going to struggle to craft a policy that protects people for speech. So why do I write about this? I think some of the double standards and the hypocrisies of this issue are appealing to a lot of people, but maybe to libertarians who get really worked up about different standards for things, or why, just in general, a lot of us come to libertarianism on the basis of, well, why is it wrong for the government to intervene in your private life, but not wrong for the government to have more regulations?

You mentioned this in your piece about Will where you call out two conservative publications, The Federalist and The Daily Caller. And you write that both The Federalist and The Daily Caller complain constantly about cancel culture, and they favorably cover people who criticize cancel culture, i.e. Rep. Jim Jordan. But when the time came to show the exact sort of mercy they would otherwise have called for had the subject been a victim of left-wing activists or the mainstream media, these elements of the right poured gasoline on this fire without any hesitation. Will, would you have wanted The Federalist and The Daily Caller to be saying, like, dang it, save Will Wilkinson?

Yeah, I mean, sure I would. In my case, I told the joke. Part of the problem was that it was a pretty good joke. It was definitely ill advised. But it was kind of cutting. But I think, especially because there was a previous tweet that put it into context, it was pretty obvious what I meant. But there was a huge tidal wave of backlash that I saw almost entirely in bad faith. It was opportunistic. I mean, there was this hedge fund guy from Palm Beach named Gabe who was, like, this guy should be fired, and tagging the Secret Service. And like, no. He was just clearly just going out for a scalp, right? But the experience of getting mobbed is terrible. It sucks, and when you know that people in complete bad faith are spamming your employer with hostile messages, it sucks. It’s incredibly stressful. For me, what the issue was was a certain kind of mobbing that Twitter certainly does facilitate, plus really opportunistic right-wing bad faith, which is why, of course, The Federalist and The Daily Caller and Fox News and The Washington Examiner didn’t write pieces like Robby wrote. Like, ha, ha, here’s cancel culture come to get Will Wilkinson. They’re just like, “good“.

Well, I should add members of those outlets both reached out to me on social media after I had written that piece. And what they claimed is that their pieces were not calling for Will to be fired or suffer any other consequence.

But I feel like that’s in bad faith, too. I read The Federalist piece about Will, and the implication I believe from the headline was that Will was literally calling for the vice president of the United States to be hanged. There is an element here of kind of like, well, do your thing, internet.

Exactly, that’s the function of those pieces. They can say, oh, we weren’t calling for anything. We’re just letting our very large audience know that this person said this thing that we know that you’re going to find completely outrageous. And by the way, here’s his Twitter handle. That’s really clearly what it is. And so, it’s really disingenuous to claim that they’re not participating in that process just because they have a kind of insincere, ersatz tone of journalistic detachment. That’s just part of the ruse. And I mean, there’s actually a pipeline. These publications — Twitter accounts will go trawling for these things. The right-wing media, Federalist, Daily Caller, all those places, will be looking out for these things. They’ll write articles about them that then kind of amplify whatever the effect was on social media. That kind of behavior is way more worrying to me than a bunch of kids at a college getting all up in arms because one of their professors said something that might be interpreted to be a little out of the mainstream of accepted discourse.

Well, I mean, that sounds like a failure of empathy on your part, right? It’s only wrong when it happens to your ideological cohort or your friends or the people you care about. I’m saying this happens to a lot of people on all sides of the ideological spectrum. Indeed it actually happens to a lot of people for nonideological reasons.

I don’t think it’s a failure of empathy. I think I’m pretty clear that I think that that kind of mobbing herd behavior overall might be pretty unhealthy, right? I’ve also said that if it is actually enforcing norms that are worth enforcing, then that’s not bad. But clearly, people aren’t going to agree about that, right? People aren’t going to agree about what the important norms are, right? That’s part of the reason why people are in different political factions. So I think there’s perfectly reasonable ways to see what some people are doing is completely justified and OK, because you think that the norms that they’re trying to uphold are really important and that it’s nice that there is this new technology that allows people who previously haven’t had a voice to combine their voices, their influence to make things happen in the world when they couldn’t do it before. That’s one of the nice things about social media. But it’s got a dark side as well. Bad people who are trying to maintain bad norms can also use it to attack people that are doing good stuff. The fact that we disagree about what’s good and bad is just part of life in a pluralistic democracy. And I don’t think it’s that helpful to put an umbrella that lumps all of these cases together because the issue that we ought to be debating is, who’s right about what’s good and what’s bad, what’s just and unjust, about what kinds of social sanctions are proportional or disproportionate and unfair. Or I think we should be tackling those things head on, rather than having a discussion about some diffuse phenomenon that nobody can quite put their finger on.

I want to talk about a couple of examples, and I want to think about a couple of people and think, were they cancelled? How? Should they have been held accountable for something? Did what they receive hold them accountable for something? And what are the differences between cancelling everyday people, randos you see in a video, and those with large platforms? So Robby, I’m going to ask you to actually explain the first example I have, which is Nick Sandmann and his fellow Covington Catholic students who were accused of confronting a Native American man after a video showed them standing face to face.

Yeah, this one is one that I don’t know if this will put me at odds with the other members of this conversation, but this is one where the right-wing counternarrative is 100% correct in that this group of Catholic school boys who were in Washington, DC for a conservative protest for the March for Life, they were captured on video that soon went viral that appeared to show them harassing this Native American activist, Nathan Phillips. And so there was thunderous condemnation of these private high school boys, who — and some of them had Trump hats on. And it was thunderous denunciation. And as I was turning to write something about this, more video footage had become available, about an hour or more of video footage, showing what had happened before, and indeed, what was going on even then. And I watched the whole thing. It becomes pretty clear that they are not the aggressors at all, that they were actually being harassed for a long time prior to the brief clip people saw by the Black Hebrew Israelites. They had been yelling at the boys, and the boys were not really doing anything wrong. And then they were doing what they said was a high school cheer, which might have been juvenile behavior in public, but they actually were not harassing anyone. And then this Native American man and his entourage approaches them. Then it gets confusing because they thought he’s drumming and chanting, that he’s joining in with them. For the most part, there might have been one or two boys who made a rude sort of anti-Native American gesture or cheer, but certainly not Nick Sandmann, who became the focal point of this video because he was standing in the man’s path and staring him down. The Native American man had come up to him. He said he was just trying to diffuse the situation, which perfectly fits with what the additional video footage saw. So basically, the initial impressions of this video were 100% wrong. Nick Sandmann initially became the poster child for sort of Trumpian spite for the other. And to be fair and to be clear, CNN and the Washington Post, others who got this wrong, did swiftly issue clarifying articles. They were wrong to the extent that they, in several cases, relied on eyewitness testimony from this Native American man, who truly did mislead the media about what had happened.

So Will, would you say that Nick Sandmann was cancelled?

I think I agree with Robby’s analysis of it. I think it’s really important to get your facts straight. And I think the media really screwed up by just running with the narrative that they didn’t validate. And that’s completely unfair to that kid, whatever you think about his politics. I think it was a screw-up by media that the social cost that those high school students were made to bear was unmerited and that the people who were responsible should apologize for it, right? This is actually what I’d like to do generally is just think about specific cases and just, like, what are the contours? What’s the lesson of this? And the lesson of this, I don’t think, is anything about cancel culture. It’s about how misleading video clips can be. It’s about how important it is that journalists do their basic job and make sure that they’re reporting the facts and not just running with somebody’s insinuation or favorite interpretation of events. Really, the whole thing, I think, has to do with the fact that the kids were wearing MAGA hats. And just our incredibly heated, polarized political atmosphere puts people on a hair trigger.

I went to Catholic High School in the Cincinnati area. Nick went to Covington Catholic. I’ve been yelled at by kids like that, and I think that for some of the people who were making all these statements, I think some of the tweets were just kind of like, I know that look. So much of this is about how our own lived experiences come into how we think about these instances. So for example, Amy Cooper who’s the white woman who called the police on a Black birdwatcher, and said, I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life, when a lot of people saw that, they were like, that’s something that’s been happening to me. What if that wasn’t on video? What if this guy winds up going to jail because this white woman says, there’s this man threatening me? And so, I think with all of these cases, what makes it so impossible to me is that we’re all coming with this with our own experiences. There are people who identify with Nick Sandmann, and there are the people who identify with the Native American activists. And that division seems almost insurmountable.

The Amy Cooper one is very interesting. This is the birdwatching incident where she’s walking her dog in Central Park, and she has this altercation with this man who’s a bird watcher. And then she threatens to call the police. If you arguably committed a crime, and you’re being cancelled for that, you can subtract negative 10 points for whether you’re a victim of cancel culture. Falsely calling the police is a crime. I think it should be a crime. I think it’s arguably what she did. And interestingly enough, her victim here, the other guy, who also was named Cooper, ironically, he actually showed a lot of mercy and was not interested in participating in any prosecution of her, which I think is very admirable and I have a lot of respect for. Because even though she absolutely was in the wrong, did a lot of wrong things so I would not describe her as a victim of cancel culture, there comes a point where after the 80 millionth harassing comment, where I’m like, OK, I do feel a little bit sorry for her at some point. You know what I mean? Even when people who deserve it, there comes a point where it’s like, man, it’s just not fun to see people in that way.

Yeah, that’s what I mean about proportionality. I think that it’s really, really important.

I want to be clear here that she did — falsely accusing someone of this crime. She then lost her job. She got yelled at on the internet a whole lot. And people now know her as the lady who did this. That scarlet letter is very difficult to get rid of, but should she have lost her job because of this?

I think, again, it’s a crime to falsely call the police. So in this case, I’m not sure I would say that it would be wrong for her to have lost her job. But again, proportionality is a — she could also suffer repercussions. She might never be able to get a job again. Any time her name is ever referenced, this will be the first thing that comes up on Google. There are some things that are even worse than just losing the job you currently have.

Yeah, I mean, but that’s the thing about reputation. It’s important. Your reputation is important, which is why you shouldn’t do things that will harm your reputation. The severity of the breach of civility and norms there was that she could have gotten the guy killed. Right? That’s what made people so mad.

Yeah, that was kind of the underlying, especially at the time when this happened, there was an underlying, like, we know what could happen if I call the police. There is an underlying understanding there. But I want to actually pivot because you talked about reputation. And then I want to pivot to talking about famous people. Because I think, Robby, you have a different calculus for cancellation here, and I want to use the example of Roseanne Barr, who had a very popular show in the 1990s that I watched a great deal of. So they did a reboot of her show, and then she literally is cancelled from the show. They eventually redo the show, but without her. And it’s because she tweeted a lot of racist things, including Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby, VJ, referencing former Obama staffer Valerie Jarrett. And after she got fired, there was a whole conversation about political correctness. But you don’t have a right to have a television show. If you have a television show, that’s pretty astounding and amazing. And you should probably try not to screw that up. Is there a way, Robby, especially — was Roseanne cancelled? And If you’re going to tweet racist stuff and say that George Soros was a Nazi, which she also tweeted a lot about, is there a way to seek an apology or the recognition of a wrong or something that doesn’t constitute cancel culture?

Yeah, she’s a actress and a character and has said crazy things for decades. And now she says things that are Trumpian and crazy in one direction and racist. But to me, it’s a little, is this applied evenly? Don’t we forgive all sorts of celebrities for saying crazy, obnoxious things all the time? Why was Roseanne picked on? These are some of the thoughts that occured to me as I watched this happen, even though I don’t — I’m not actually even a fan of the show, so I was not missing her absence. But it feels a little bit selective to me, which is often the case with these things. It can be justified and selective.

This gets at one of the things that bothers me. I think one of the reasons that the idea has gotten wind behind it is that it is useful as a cudgel. The reason that the idea is so popular on the right and is just not so popular on the left is because I think to a large extent, it reflects resentment or discomfort with the fact that the gatekeepers of many of our most important institutions have politics that they don’t like. The people who run Hollywood, the people who run the universities, these people have — they could hand out the opportunities, they can take them away, and they are people with overwhelmingly liberal politics. And it’s kind of ironic, right, because in the way that libertarians, in the way that the conservatives tends to be rah, rah, pro-freedom of association, right, what we’re seeing is a worry about diffuse structural discrimination against conservatives because liberals hold so many of the keys to influence and power. They’re finally kind of getting the idea that structure matters and that whether or not you feel free depends on whether or not the opportunities are going to be open to you. It’s an interesting question why all these places are overwhelmingly liberal because I don’t think it’s a function of discrimination. I think it’s mostly an interesting function of self-selection. But I think that’s the worry, and that’s where what I see is the kind of moral panic on the right about cancel culture. I think that’s where it’s coming from, that people who are the base of the Republican Party — non-urban, white Christians who, for the entire history of our country, have been the culturally, politically, economically dominant group — feel like their control of the culture and the economy and the polity is slipping. And they see their kind of demographic slippage, which has real political consequences, they feel like that is amplified by their lack of representation in the organs of cultural influence. But part of the reason why these institutions exercise their cultural power in the way they do is because they are underrepresented politically. California is the most underrepresented state in the country. It has two senators for its 30 some million people. And so, it’s just never going to have proportional influence in the US Senate. But it owns Silicon Valley, it owns Disney. And if the political system isn’t going to give the people of California an outlet for the expression of their preferences, then they’re damn well going to use the institutions of influence power that they have to get representation. And conservatives are mad about that.

Well, I think one of the reasons the right has so taken up the mantle of cancel culture and tried to describe some of the situations that people on the right are facing as cancel culture is because people broadly know kind of what cancel culture is and are kind of broadly sympathetic to cases that they can think of. So this is an example of wanting to associate with a cause or associate with the victims of a cause in order to make yourself more sympathetic. Because it is sympathetic, what’s happened to a lot of those people. I’m worried about having new standards of what counts as acceptable behavior that are very, very, very hard to meet. Maybe it’s fine for the political elites, for people in policy ideas, who should be very precise with their language at all times, like me and Will and you. But it’s tough to expect everyone, especially people when they were a lot younger.

Thank you both so much for joining me today to talk about this issue.

No problem, thank you.

Thank you so much. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Will Wilkinson writes at ModelCitizen.substack.com. He is the former vise president for research at the Niskanen Center, and his contract with New York Times Opinion is currently on hiatus. Robby Soave is a senior editor at Reason, a libertarian magazine, and author of the forthcoming book, Tech Panic. Finally, if you’ve had enough of cancel culture, I am currently obsessed with the podcast, Welcome to Your Fantasy, which tells the unbelievably seedy back story of the Chippendale’s — you remember the male strippers with silver pants — and the men who danced there in the ‘80s. It’s a wild story full of backstabbing, drugs, excess, Brooke Shields’s birthday party, a lawsuit over racism, and murder.

The Argument is a production of New York Times Opinion. It’s produced by Phoebe Lett, Elisa Gutierrez, and Vishakha Darbha; edited by Alison Bruzek and Paula Szuchman; with original music and sound design by Isaac Jones; and fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Michelle Harris.