Were You 'Cancelled'? Or Are You a Sheltered Elite Who Faced Consequences for the First Time In Your Priviledged Life?
Accusing "cancel culture" is a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for spoiled brats who have nothing to say.
At every point in human history, the rich and powerful have been kept up at night by what worries them most: peasant revolts, foreign conquerors, familial usurpers, and, most harrowing of all, cancel culture.
Taking these fears periodically, it’s safe to say modern elites have it pretty easy. While their Medieval predecessors lay awake fearing they’d be dragged to the gallows by a torchlit mob or choke on conspirators’ poison, the leading concern of 21st-century politicians, capitalists, celebrities, and other notable figures is that they’ll be criticized by we plebeians. While the guillotine was the weapon of choice for the French Revolutionaries, today’s “mob” (their words) wields an even more sinister device to topple society and bring about chaos: cancellation.
“Cancel culture,” as this tendency has been called, has been the media’s bread and butter for the better part of a decade. It’s inspired thousands of op-ed columns, cable news segments, and discussion panels, all daring to ask, “Has [wokeness/political correctness/whatever-term-they-comjur-next] gone too far?” As a true political sicko, I’ve consumed much of this content. And yet, I still haven’t heard a convincing argument as to why cancel culture is the threat to society some claim it is.
While most of the anti-cancel culture crusade comes from rightists on Fox News and NewsMax, the best articulation of it I’ve encountered was the Letter on Justice and Open Debate published in Harper’s in July 2020.1 Signed by Margaret Atwood, Anne Applebaum, Malcolm Gladwell, David Brooks, and other notable members of the commentariat, the essay argues against the “new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” As is common practice, they claim cancel culture is a product of the radical left and equate it to the right-wing authoritarianism of Donald Trump. Remember, the letter is from the Summer of 2020, when Trump was siccing rabid cops on Black Lives Matter protestors.
The authors’ claims are vague, but they do allude to a few issues they take grievance with.
“Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal.”
No citations or specifics are provided, so it’s difficult to investigate these claims. But that’s part of the anti-cancel culture playbook. Sporadic cases aren’t enough to indict an entire culture, so such claims are often open-ended, impressing upon the reader that the woke mob is lurking behind every corner. Here’s the thing about cancel culture. I’m sure managers have been fired for clumsy mistakes, just as there’s probably a college sophomore somewhere currently leading a misguided rally to “decolonize the cafeteria” and demand that only Latino workers are allowed to serve food on Taco Tuesday. That’s silly, but I’m glad their heart is in the right place. And, if you’re like me and don’t want Americans to be fired for slip-ups, you should make it as easy as possible for workers to unionize and have a steward who can protect them from such. But to claim there is a “culture” of silencing newspaper editors, journalists, and professors, mainly driven by the less than 1% of Americans who self-identify as some form of radical leftist, is absurd. In fact, the letter begs its own question.
Everyone who signed this letter is a wealthy public figure, publishing in a prominent publication. Last I checked, Malcolm Gladwell has tenure on The New York Times bestseller list, and not a month goes by where Anne Applebaum isn’t copy-pasting her same anti-communist essay into The Wall Street Journal op-ed page. If there was a culture of “narrowing the boundaries” of what can be said, wouldn’t these people have faced the “reprisal” they warned of? J.K. Rowling has dedicated her life to transphobia, yet Harry Potter is still a cultural phenomenon. If anything, her “deviation from approved ideas” has made her a celebrity with the political right. The only “reprisal” she’s faced is from social media users pointing out how wrong she is about trans issues. Five years on, whatever threat these people thought there was has been proven to be imaginary. Nevertheless, they persist.
For a while, I thought cancel culture was a subject of the past; a short-lived backlash to the social justice consciousness of 2020 that frightened White, upper-income America, which didn’t know what they were scared of, just that they were scared and an imagined woke mob was something they could name and say, “See! I’m not just frightened that a reconsideration of race and class dynamics will threaten my idealized self and social status. It’s cancel culture I’m worried about.”
Unfortunately, I was wrong. Today, cancel culture is an evergreen topic in mainstream media and a go-to excuse for rich, whiny babies who don’t want to face legitimate criticism and consequences for their actions.
Earlier this month, celebrity chef Gino D’Acampo was accused of sexual harassment and workplace abuse by dozens of female employees ranging back to 2013. There are multiple accusers from multiple TV shows, all describing the same pattern of horrendous behavior — bullying, psychological abuse, and sexual harassment. One woman claimed D’Acampo threatened to “turn her over” and “fuck her up the ass” in front of an entire photo shoot crew.2 Jeremy Clarkson, known for hosting Top Gear, defended D’Acampo and claimed the accusations were a product of “cancel culture,” stating, “We live in a world where everyone is offended by everything.” Good point, Jeremy. Let he who has not threatened to anal rape an employee in the middle of a work meeting cast the first stone.
The D’Acampo-Clarkson episode shows the real reason wealthy elites decry cancel culture. They don’t actually want to better our culture to one that prioritizes forgiveness and grace — they want to preserve the class barrier that protects them from the social standards applied to you and me. The accusations against D’Acampo date back over a decade and occurred across multiple entertainment sets. There’s no way Clarkson was present to witness each of them as an off-color joke or someone being “too sensitive,” so he has no basis to offer that defense. Instead, Clarkson’s reflective instinct to call the accusations overblown products of cancel culture because he does not want the standards of polite society applied to himself or his rich friends. Unlike the rest of us, the exorbitant power and wealth of celebrity have shielded elites from reality. Coddled and catered to, someone saying, “Hey, what you did was messed up. You should apologize for that,” has violated what they believe to be the society’s most pivotal social boundary: anyone with widespread name recognition gets to do whatever they want.
The phenomenon persists in politics, as well. Last Sunday’s Politico Playbook was titled, How Trump is Cancelling Cancel Culture.3 Amidst a list of all the horrible people Trump has used his power to protect, Politico cites the temporarily fired and quickly reinstated DOGE employee who self-identified as a racist. Bizarrely, they claim New York City Mayor Eric Adams is another target of attempted cancellation.
Adams, the mayor of America’s most iconic city, hasn’t been “cancelled.” He’s been indicted by the Justice Department for, among other things, taking bribes from the Turkish government to wave fire safety permits on their consulate. Trump instructed the DOJ to drop the charges in return for Adams allowing ICE to turn New York into their own fascist hide-and-seek game. Adams even when on Fox & Friends with Trump’s border czar to brag about the deal.
The charges against Adams are so-well founded Trump’s own appointees are resigning en-masse rather than go along with the corruption. To call this open quid-pro-quo “Trump rolling back political cancel culture” (Politico’s words, verbatim) is a sign that these reporters needs to quit their job and put Washington D.C. into their rearview.
The Politico piece sheds light on an ulterior use of cancel culture panic. As America is faced with a President that is explicitly outside what establishment media figures convinced themselves was possible, there’s an attempt to blame Trump’s lawlessness and desire for dictatorship on the left. That’s why they position Trump as “rolling back cancel culture.” It makes it sound like he’s undoing something terrible the left instituted, when in reality all he’s doing is openly breaking the law. The former is easier for mainstream media to comprehend. The latter is impossible.
Themes of this “look what the cancel culture left made America do” nonsense have appeared in most major publications, but the most ridiculous was published last week in The Atlantic,4 which is named after the place to throw the magazine as soon as someone hands it to you. They write:
“If the genuine but ill-conceived goal [of cancel culture] was to create a kinder, friendlier, more inclusive and equitable world for all (often paradoxically by means of shaming, coercion, and intimidation), the real-world effect has been an abysmal rightward overcorrection in which norms of decency have been gleefully obliterated…
Consider: We had a #MeToo movement characterized by sometimes disproportionate reputational sacrifices; now we have a presidential Cabinet populated by men with credible sexual-assault accusations on their records. The stifling racist/anti-racist binary of the anti-racism movement has led to the wholesale dismantling of DEI initiatives in both the government and the private sector. The insistence that “no human is illegal” has ended with an unconstitutional attempt to retract birthright citizenship. And the push not just for tolerance but for the equivalence of trans athletes with cisgender athletes has culminated with the president banishing “gender ideology” and surrounding himself with a multiethnic crowd of beaming girls to sign the “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order. On every single issue that mattered to them, progressives now find themselves in a weaker position than before.”
To be blunt: the only people who think this are those neither sober nor smart enough to reckon with the current fascist threat. Mainstream publications like The Atlantic and Politico operate on the High School History Worldview, which tells them that America’s capitalist managed-democracy is the Best Government Ever and every political actor is trying to do What Is Best For Every American. This is of course, not true. Any system can be crumbled by those who have the power and will to do so. And that’s what Donald Trump is doing: using his power to break the law, enrich his ilk, and speed run America into fascism, while mockingly asking those who opposed him, “What are you going to do about it?”
As Trump and company defy everything the centrist-liberal political-media establishment has put their faith in, they have to find an excuse. Of course! It was the left all along! They forced American into Trump V2 with their cancel culture! Maybe if Black people hadn’t been so sensitive and whined about ‘police are shooting our children at disproportionate rates’ so much, an open White supremacist wouldn’t be in control of the nuclear codes.
To those of us with a world view that understands power and rejects the idea of American exceptionalism, it’s obvious that Trump’s second term validates the missions of past and present social justice movements. The White House is almost exclusively sexual predators, and the Vice President won’t even defend his half-Indian children from racists in his own administration. To say the anti-rape and anti-racist campaigns of circa 2020 went “too far” is flat out false. The problem is that America is a deeply exploitative country, which makes swaths of the public susceptible to fascism. Trump won on an economic message against a candidate who ran a six-month campaign, and he is already polling underwater. It’s not like his second election was a referral on which letters Americans should be include in ‘LGBTQIA+.’ His Presidency was bought with billionaire money and he’s fulfilling the wildest dreams of billionaire libertarians. It’s a separate thing, not a result of trans students asking to use a bathroom that makes them most comfortable.
But acknowledging that would require The Atlantic and Politico to admit the leftists were correct about Trump and the fascist threat, something they’ll never do. So they retreat to the ideological security of cancel culture and blame woman who outed famous rapists are the reason Jeffrey Epstein’s number one customer is back in charge.
As someone who wants society to be more forgiving and understanding of the human condition, I’m not looking to get anyone fired or socially exiled for trivial offense. I think the less punishment the better, for the purposes of ending mass incarceration and accepting apologies from people who have hurt us. That said, we do actually have to apologize when we mess up. Far too often people cry “cancel culture” when all those they’ve hurt want is an earnest attempt to right the wrongs. I’ll speak for everyone when I say we don’t want to be judged on our worst moments, so it’s unfair for us to use that as a criterion when judging others. However, pursuit of a human, loving society is not the mission of those who want to “cancel cancel culture.”
To them, ending cancel culture is a means to ensure the culture they handsomely benefit from never changes. Entertainers don’t want justice for the mountains of vulnerable women who have been chewed up and spit out by Hollywood since the invention of the film camera. Right wing political actors warn of “cancellation” because they want to silence social justice conversations before they reach hard questions about the lasting discrepancies of slavery and patriarchy. And the Very Serious People who make up most of modern political media use cancel culture as an excuse to avoid the harsh truth that maybe they’re not as smart as they think they are — maybe all the leftists who warned about Republican fascism were right, and they were wrong to ignore them. Then of course, there are the straight grifters —
, , etc. — who write endless articles about cancel culture because it’s easy money.
There’s no better way to end this essay than with my all-time favorite clip that shows what this bullshit is really all about. Back in 2021, the Kentucky Derby winner had its title stripped after failing a post-race drug test. I’ll give you three guesses about what the cheating horse trainer blamed his suspension on. (Bonus points if you can guess which cancel culture-obsessed news channel he appeared on to offer this pitiful defense.)
As the famous poem goes: “First, the woke mob came for a drugged-up racehorse. And I did not speak up, for I was not a gullible dipshit.”
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In Solidarity — Joe
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/gino-dacampo-itv-allegations-italy-express-b2693963.html
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2025/02/16/how-trump-is-canceling-cancel-culture-00204560
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/kanye-vance-republicans-vice-signaling/681641/
These “poor victims” are also huge cowards. They point the finger at the left because anyone who calls out the people they want to hang with puts their desire to rise to that state at risk. It also makes them feel targeted. Clarkson is a great example of this.
Would someone please cancel me? I could use the attention.
Re: this is all the left’s fault
Shit, Joe - you know damn well the only reason they keep us around is so they can blame stuff on us.