Most Victims Of Woke Cancel Mobs Are Woke

It's not conservatives who are retracting their books because blue-haired knitters think they don't adequately center BIPOC perspectives.

The world’s first podcast, Blocked and Reported, recently aired an episode on a bizarre scandal in the literary world. Someone called Taylor Barton got into some hot water for doing…something? It’s not really clear what, except that it caused a bunch of people on Twitter to call them problematic.

This thread is typical of the claims made against Barton—densely laced with weird therapy-speak, full of discussions of red flags and gaslighting, but with nothing concrete. It seems Barton became the main character for a day, so people came out of the woodwork to bash them—even though there’s nothing particular that they did wrong.¹

Barton, of course, gave a groveling apology, but was not forgiven.

Barton is not a conservative, but is about as much of a hippy wokester as they come. Barton’s described as “a Queer and Trans author of Erotic Paranormal Romance and Contemporary Romance.” I don’t have any hard data on this, but I’d guess that Queer and Trans authors of Erotic Paranormal Romance and Contemporary Romance are rarely Trump supporters.

Yet the wolves came for Barton, despite Barton’s impressive woke bona fides. Even though Barton’s critics basically admitted to having no specific claims of wrongdoing, the fact that their case was built on sand didn’t worry them. They explained that if you try to dispute claims made by the mob going after your livelihood, that’s abuser behavior. Victims 👏don’t 👏have👏to👏justify👏their👏abuse👏to👏the👏perpetrators (apparently even when the supposed victims are publicly smearing them and trying to get their books cancelled, without even describing what conduct was objectionable).

(Brookie Ray is Taylor Barton).

Blocked and Reported—or BARPOD, as the cool kids call it—covers a lot of stories like this. These stories mostly involve people on the left having small, weird, insular communities where two people get into a fight. One of them happens to be black or trans or queer or gay or native, and so the other is tarred as some problematic phobe—and is excised from the community.

Sticking to the literary world, Kat Rosenfeld wrote a viral story a few years back about a bizarre sort of cancellation. Someone called Laurie Forest wrote a fantasy book about lots of exotic magical beings—faes, selkies, wolfemen, Kelts—some of whom were subject to vicious discrimination. The main character starts out prejudiced, but eventually comes to question her prejudice against Kelts—it’s apparently an allegory for racism (ooh, so subtle!)

Someone else named Shauna Sinyard apparently didn’t get that the book was against racism, and that it used discrimination against magical creatures as an allegory for racism, and how it’s like bad or whatever. Sinyard devised a poorly written 9,000-word screed describing the book as “racist, ableist, homophobic,” and “written with no marginalized people in mind.” Sinyard claimed the book was “the most dangerous, offensive book I have ever read.”

Aside 1: Somehow I have a feeling Sinyard has not read many dangerous, offensive books.

Aside 2: It’s funny that Sinyard treats it as obvious that every book one writes has to have marginalized people in mind when being written—was my article about the self-sampling assumption “problematic” because I had no marginalized people in mind when I wrote it?

Anyway, Sinyard posted this negative review on Twitter with the injunction to “Read, boost, and inform.” I should include this at the bottom of my articles! Many others in the literary world joined the pile on, and pretty soon Forest’s career was toast and she was a pariah in the literary world.

The favorable Twitter responses to Sinyard were hilarious (whose last name is Morgan now, I think?). One person asked, “How did you get through this?” Another person said “oh my god. So many hugs. I'm shaking from just reading that. The racism. The homophobia. It just got worse and worse,” to which Sinyard bravely replied “It really does. I am appalled, I'm exhausted.” I feel our standards for bravery have dropped a bit since Normandy.

You people aren’t suitably grateful. When I read through literature defending the self-sampling assumption, none of you praise my bravery or offer so many hugs! You don’t offer even one hug! You don’t even marvel at how I got through this!

These stories are just the tip of the iceberg. Similar things have happened with knitting, for example, and about a hundred other random groups. It’s gotten so bad that in the literary world, Rosenfeld reports, people are terrified to touch any controversial topic remotely related to race in any but the most deranged and sycophantic way. In another bizarre and tragic turn of events, someone was bullied to the point that they attempted suicide because they drew a Steven Universe character that others claimed was “problematic.” Even after the suicide attempt, people doubled down on the bullying, saying things like “Me not being a pushover for oppression makes ME toxic??” “Fuck that.”

To take a less tragic but more hilarious example from high school debate, a few years back, one of the best debate teams in the country was debating another of the best debate teams in the country. The first team had at one point called the other team’s arguments incoherent (I haven’t seen their arguments, but they, like almost all kritiks in debate, almost certainly were incoherent). After this, for the crime of calling black people’s arguments incoherent—a similar charge to one they frequently parrot against white teams—they released this utterly cringy, groveling, debased apology:

(Think about how much of a groveling sycophant you have to be to write an apology like this for using the word incoherent. This is what college debate turns people into, tragically).

Was this apology enough penance for the severe crime, almost a violation of the Geneva convention of…calling an argument incoherent? Nope! The team who released the apology lost a round at the most competitive college tournament to the team they’d apologized to. The team who received the apology posting a screenshot of this apology and argued it was racist, claiming “It's time that we talk about the violence of white apologies. Apologies make black people dumping grounds for white shame and retraumatize black people all while giving white people a pat on the back!”

So true! Such an important and underexplored topic!

This is an underappreciated feature of the sorts of left-wing Twitter mobs that talk in strange, stilted therapy and Tumblr speak: about gaslighting, red flags, and so on. They mostly eat their own. For every high profile case of a conservative getting cancelled by the woke mob, there are lots of obscure people who get shamed in the literary world because they failed to center BIPOC voices.

This shouldn't be at all surprising. The woke can only destroy a target in groups where they have power. Woke people would never be able to cancel people for “problematic” Tweets at an NRA convention, because they’d be breezily dismissed. The only places where they have enough support to destroy someone’s life are almost entirely bereft of non-woke people.

There’s a lot of outrage when the cancel mob comes for people like David Shor or random truckers who deranged lunatics claim were making the white power symbol. But I think these people are mostly not the victims (though, of course, when they are cancelled, it’s quite bad). The people most at risk if they speak their mind are those in spaces heavily saturated with crazy leftists—DSA members, conservative academics, debaters who don’t toe the party line. A socialist friend of mine described the utter insanity and McCarthyist witchhunts he witnessed at a DSA meeting he went to.

Furthermore, these people have their lives most thoroughly wrecked by the mob. While if the mob comes for David Shor, he might lose his job, but because his friends are not deranged wokesters (I assume), he’ll be fine. But the people who hang out in these circles, whose friends and colleagues are all crazy woke people, can have their lives thoroughly decimated when the mob comes for them. When the mob comes for David Shor, it’s an external mob, but when the mob comes for Laurie Forest, it’s an et tu brute situation.

For this reason, these people are the least likely to speak up. When people occupy spaces where almost everyone is far left and many support cancellation, speaking up is costly, and people are less likely to do it if the people coming for them are those they once considered friends. Thus, the most frequent targets of cancel culture are the least likely to speak up, the most likely to meekly submit to their woke overlords.

If you liked this piece, read, boost, and inform.

Questions? Objections? Ways my article on the lobster objection to the self-sampling assumption failed to center queer BIPOC voices? Leave a comment.

1. I’ve been surprised my how many people, even relatively disinterested people who don’t know the person being piled-on, are willing to join the pile-on. I remember when I was the debate Twitter Main Character for a day, tons of people were attacking me, yet most of the people I’d never met. Rather amusingly, I was accused only of three crimes: most hilariously antisemitism (I’m Jewish—I had a Bar Mitzvah), asking someone questions about his debate case that apparently made him feel bad, and leaving a blog comment arguing that someone shouldn’t lose his job for liking supposedly transphobic tweets.