Rich Lowry Gets Cancelled For Not Saying A Racial Slur

Misspeaking is a crime

Rich Lowry’s talk has been cancelled at Indiana State University and he’s been disinvited from an address at the right-wing Badger institute. Thousands of people on Twitter have been calling him a racist villain. His crime? Not saying a racial slur.

Lowry’s not saying a racial slur occurred when he was talking about Haitian migrants. Lowry jumbled together the words migrants and immigrants, to accidentally get, well, a word that starts with m and rhymes with bigger. Important note: it started with m, not some other letter.

Linguistics, political opponents, and journalists have all come to Lowry’s defense, saying that he simply did not say the N-word. This is for a very simple reason: he didn’t say it! If you slow down the audio and listen to the tape, it’s clear that the word he spoke began with an M, and if you look at his rounded lips (a feature of words that start with M, not N), it’s even clearer.

Suppose that Lowry was the kind of person to walk around accidentally saying the N-word when discussing Haitian migrants—a fact that, as Lowry notes, hasn’t showed up any other time in his decades in public life. What are the odds that the one time he’d slip it would happen to be when he was talking about immigrants, which he shortened to migrants? What are the odds the ONE TIME he slipped up in all of public life would happen to occur right as he was mixing together two words that just happen to combine to form a word that sounds quite like the N-word? If Lowry were going to slip up once, what are the odds that he’d do it right as he was saying a phrase that could plausibly be misspoken as something that sounds very much like the N-word?

Lowry is a person with whom I do not share politics. He’ll be fine, being quite influential and having a successful career. But he shows something about the nature of these cancel mobs.

Those most responsible for the cancellation didn’t thoroughly investigate. They didn’t slow down the clip and make sure they weren’t slandering a person for a non-existent offense. Mostly, they just liked Tweets condemning Lowry, vaguely joining the pile-on without doing anything major.

Those in positions of power had every incentive to appease the mob. Even if the mob is going after Lowry for a stupid reason, when 50,000 people are calling your organization racist, that’s generally bad for business. Spineless administrators and heads of think tanks have every incentive to bow to the mob, even when the mob is composed of fairly uninterested and ill-informed internet strangers.

Did any of the people responsible for Lowry’s mild cancellation seriously look into the charges? Did any of them bother hearing what he had to say for himself? Of course not. It’s easy to throw fuel on the fire of a cancellation without being either informed or invested. No particular person needs to care very much or look very carefully. As Lowry says:

None of this matters, of course, to an online mob that operates on the principle, “Shoot first, worry about discerning the truth never.”

Now, Lowry’s cancellation is fairly mild. But others are not. If a guy like Lowry with institutional support from conservatives opposed to cancelling is vulnerable to this sort of low-brow smearing, so too are many others. If people are this willing to smear others without doing the barest of investigations, it’s no surprise that most people self-censor.

If provably false career ruining slander can spread because the charges look founded if you do no research and fail to see what the other side says, any time a person ventures anywhere in the vicinity of an interesting idea, they’ll be at significant risk of cancellation. All interesting ideas sound bad when uncharitably phrased. In a world like ours, where our due process standards are so minimal that something sounding bad when presented with half a second of context is grounds for cancellation, we shouldn’t be surprised that people are terrified to speak their minds on controversial subjects.