A mere three weeks after terrorists attacked Congress, all but five Republican senators sided with the person who incited the riot. They’ll gleefully embrace even violence that threatens their own lives if their cult leader endorses it. And already, they’ve begun spinning the attempted overthrow of an election. It’s not white supremacy, or a violent far right movement, or a despotic president that caused this. It’s cancel culture.
The problem is that cancel culture doesn’t exist.
That’s because what Republicans call cancel culture is simple freedom of speech.
It’s a call to accountability.
It’s a rejection of the stupid, the hateful, the racist, the unqualified.
“Cancel culture” is shorthand for “People don’t like the stupid, entitled, racist, sexist, uninformed things I have to say, and for the first time in my life, I am being held accountable for them.”
No one is entitled to a platform, to a book deal, to a speaking engagement, to respect. Yet white, powerful men have gotten these things with little effort for so long that occasionally losing them feels like the loss of a fundamental right. When you spend your life bathing in privilege and unearned advantage, even small steps toward fairness feel like oppression.
What Republicans call cancel culture is a world where less powerful people finally occasionally feel safe criticizing the powerful. No one has the ability to “cancel” another person. Sure, they can criticize you, make you feel stupid, tell your friends how racist you are, interrogate everything you say, and maybe even make you regret speaking. None of these actions violate any fundamental right.
Indeed, the call to end this behavior, the call to make it more difficult to criticize and mock the powerful is a call to limit free speech. The people whining about cancel culture want free speech only for themselves.
Moreover, the idea that the far right is so afraid to speak that it has remained silent, only to erupt in violence because of its own desperation, is utterly laughable. The far right never shuts up. And it gets away, literally, with murder.
For decades, anti-choice zealots have blocked the entrance to abortion clinics, murdered doctors, bombed clinics, imprisoned women, and stalked and harassed children. The Republican party has advocated murdering peaceful protesters and defended terrorists. They’ve stolen children from their parents, and put them in cages to die and be raped. They’ve advocated for policies that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, opposed clean water for children, and driven our maternal mortality rate so high that we now have the worst maternal death rate in the wealthy world.
Don’t they think that, if there were some widespread liberal conspiracy to silence the far right, we might have stopped them from murdering people in Charlottesville and DC, and at abortion clinics across the country?
Why is it that actual violence is fair in the marketplace of ideas, but critiques of violence are so beyond the pale that they should be put in a special category of forbidden speech called “cancel culture?”
If cancel culture is real, how does Tucker Carlson still have a mouth?
If Republicans really live in terror of speaking, shouldn’t Milo Yiannopoulos be broke, yowling in despair, and living in the sewer where he belongs?
If Democrats have really silenced racists, then how is it that people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity continue to have such massive audiences and paychecks?
Maybe you’re not being canceled. Maybe it’s just that no one likes what you have to say.
If you can’t bear a little criticism without becoming violent, then the criticism is not the problem.
Republicans incited, then supported, then defended, an attempted coup because as Seth Maxon at Slate put it, violence is now mainstream Republican politics.