Cancel Culture Favors Cowards, Morons, and Hypocrites

Also, LibsOfTikTok is a piece of human debris

Recently, LibsOfTikTok got a random cashier fired from Home Depot for posting on FaceBook that she wished the person who shot at Trump had had better aim. LOTT has been a particularly nefarious, unprincipled, censorious moron for quite a long time, but this was a particularly grotesque display of hypocrisy for someone who claims to be staunchly opposed to cancel culture. Of course, in politics, people generally don’t have principles—they have things they pretend are their principles so they can accuse the other political party of wrongdoing.

You can try to get people fired when they say things you don’t like or you can have a principled position that people shouldn’t be fired for political speech, but you can’t do both.

This is, of course, not the first time LOTT has tried to get people canned for saying controversial things. Many of those who were most outraged about cancel culture were the quickest to try to get people fired and publicly shamed when they said controversial things about the Gaza war. Now, in LibsOfTikTok’s defense, she seems sufficiently unintelligent to not remember her principles more than three seconds after she says them—a bit like a goldfish (you have to be pretty moronic to get nuked by mild questioning from Taylor Lorenz). Others, however, should know better.

Cancel culture, has victims on both the left and the right. But more than it targets people of either political party, it targets people willing to display real courage and actually think controversial things, to risk being offensive, to break out of the managerial vague-speak that governs the norms of ordinary communication.

No one got canceled for supporting the Iraq war—it killed half a million people. No one gets canceled for calling for cutting the PEPFAR program, even though doing so would kill millions—even if a person did so without caring how many would die if it were cut, on the grounds that foreign policy should help Americans. No one gets canceled for paying for animal torture and murder. People get fired for saying things that sound offensive, that offend our ordinary sensibilities. But to really think, to be remotely interesting, you have to risk being offensive.

The worst evils don’t come from people saying things that sound diabolical. They come from banal paper pushers, from people unthinkingly supporting atrocities, atrocities that don’t sound bad, ones that can easily be defended by a competent debater. Those are only exposed by careful and rigorous thought. But careful and rigorous thought often involves offensive statements.

The greatest atrocity of our time is, as I’ve argued elsewhere, factory farming. But explaining why it’s so evil often requires making arguments that sound offensive—claiming that what people do ordinarily is a bit like torturing puppies in one’s basement, or claiming that animals have similar moral status to certain severely cognitively enfeebled humans. These things sound offensive, but happen to be true.

Cancel culture is just weaponized conformity. It encourages people to repeat the bland sorts of platitudes that sound good, that you’re supposed to say, whether or not they’re true. It punishes those who don’t toe the party line, who don’t say what you’re supposed to say, who are willing to risk being offensive.

Censorious cancel culture, whether pushed by the left or right, enforces mob justice. It doesn’t just result in people’s lives being ruined, it has a chilling effect. It makes people terrified to utter the wrong thing, constantly in jeopardy if they say anything offensive. It punishes those who are interesting and courageous enough to think for themselves, and enforces tedious conformity. It is not an ally of the left or the right, but the status quo and the banal. No one defending the mainstream view gets canceled in any except the most extreme echochambers.

Lots of people think Trump is a major threat to Democracy. The people saying that, of course, don’t get canceled. It’s only the people who are consistent in that belief, who think that because Trump seriously jeopardizes Democracy, his death would be fortunate, who get canceled. If you have the braindead, conformist position, that’s Trump’s a totalitarian monster who might totally wreck Democracy, but nonetheless, his death would be tragic, you are spared, but if you are consistent, your job is in serious jeopardy. The people supporting Trump’s death are a hell of a lot more thoughtful than those who cow their heads to the conformist position and the people willing to express that view publicly, even when doing so risks their jobs, are heroically courageous. Nonetheless, it’s only those who are consistent and courageous who are on the chopping block.

If you support factory farming, and don’t see anything wrong with the worst crime in history, your job will be intact. But if you argue factory farms are bad in the wrong way or say something too offensive, you risk being canceled. If you have the unbelievably inconsistent mainstream view, you’ll be fine, but if you try to make your beliefs consistent—either by claiming that animals don’t matter at all, or that because they do matter, the fact that most people pay to torture them means they’re doing something severely evil—you risk being canceled. Cancellations penalize those who are thoughtful and consistent while rewarding those who are sanctimonious and a slave to social pressure.

Now, perhaps if you’re an inconsistent tide pod eater like LOTT, you won’t be bothered by this. But if you care about truth and sense, about people figuring out what’s true rather than what sounds good, you must stand against cancel culture quite consistently. It is, after all, a tax on being thoughtful, consistent, and interesting.

I’d guess most people have some cancellable views. Maybe half of Democrats secretly, in their heart of hearts, wish Trump had died. By firing people for expressing this, by attacking people for this kind of speech, one targets those who are interesting and brave. Those supporting cancel culture support ruining those who are brave and thoughtful—they are the enemies of free thought, the greatest ally of dull conformism, of turning the world into a drab, sterile place, where no one thinks anything that would cause people on Twitter to say “yikes, not a good look chief.” The cashier who expressed sadness that the shooter missed deserves a medal for being willing to speak her mind, to risk being offensive. Those cheering her cancelation are just as spineless as, and no better than the left-wingers trying to get people fired for old offensive Tweets.