Cancel Culture
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Notes on Right-Wing Cancel Culture March 03, 2025
This week, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo published chat logs from an internal employee messaging service at the National Security Agency. “These logs,” he wrote, “dating back two years, are lurid, featuring wide-ranging discussions of se...
Has Cancel Culture Been Canceled? February 14, 2025
Marko Elez, a software engineer working in Elon Musk’s DOGE, was recently “canceled” due to some offensive remarks . . . and then uncanceled the next day. Elez had posted some very obnoxious things, such as “Normalize Indian hate,” and “Just for the ...
Is This What Cancel Culture Achieved? February 12, 2025
Over the weekend, the artist and entrepreneur Kanye West, now known as Ye, let loose a blitzkrieg of appalling screeds to his 33 million followers on X. “IM A NAZI,” he proclaimed. He reiterated his position that “SLAVERY WAS A CHOICE,” contended tha...
Don’t Cancel People For What They Didn’t Say September 25, 2024
“The editor of the National Review casually said the N-word in an interview with Megyn Kelly.” Um—right. As the kids would say, “But did he, though?”Headlines aside, the allegations don’t stand up to scrutiny, and how we deal with assessing what (on ...
A Cancellation Trilogy September 24, 2024
Nothing stifles great art like censorship, whether through overt acts by government censors or through acts of pillow-smothering by conformist claques eager to display their virtue. As far as the pillow-smotherers are concerned, it’s no secret that t...
The Sacred and the Profane September 19, 2024
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1937 short story “Thank You For the Light” follows a Chicago-based corset-saleswoman as she scours the streets for matches to light her cigarette. A widow with “no close relatives to write to in the evenings,” smoking “meant a l...
Coming from the Hat September 09, 2024
May you all be so blessed as to have a mother who sends you books. Mine sent me How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto, for no other reason than that it is really, really good. Most of what can be said about its major virtues has been said elsewhe...
How Cancel Culture Lost Its Power July 19, 2024
On July 16, three days after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the founder of the Right-wing X account “Libs of Tiktok” announced she was dedicating “ALL OF LIBS OF TIKTOK’S RESOURCES” toward “EXPOSING the Radical Left fantasizing about kill...
Bring Back The Culture of Debate! April 09, 2024
Not long ago, I finished Tricia Romano’s oral history of The Village Voice, which was once America’s premier alternative newspaper. Even if you don’t care much about the Voice, you’ll find yourself wading through a half century of fascinating, explos...
