It’s interesting, nobody notices “cancel culture”, an eternal social phenomenon, until they or someone they know gets cancelled. And then they feel like cancelling just magically started then, and their friend was its first ever victim. The result is everyone thinks the other guy “started it”
AmericanPurposeMag on
**Submission Statement**
Recently, there has been many right-wing figures from figures such as LibsOfTikTok who have justified their who attempted and often succeeded at getting people fired for making tasteless social media posts about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump back in July.
Most of their victims weren’t public figures but regular Americans like Home Depot employees, firefighters, chefs, and school counselors. This was fine and good, many argued, because it constituted sweet revenge for cancel culture excesses driven by the Left.
However, as Jacob Mchangama from Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) notes, the left was hardly the first and only group to utilize cancel culture using examples such as a professor in the 1850s North Carolina who was against slavery, the Red Scare, and more obscurely, the Satanic Panic which affected hobbies such as heavy metal and Dungeons & Dragons, but gave rise to the Evangelical Right.
These examples show that there needs to be a principled defense of free speech, not a tribalistic defense that is often self-serving. While principled defenders throughout history are often difficult to find, Mchangama gives the examples of Frederick Douglass and Salman Rushdie who have suffered from angry mobs, yet still took an absolute defense of free speech.
2 Comments
It’s interesting, nobody notices “cancel culture”, an eternal social phenomenon, until they or someone they know gets cancelled. And then they feel like cancelling just magically started then, and their friend was its first ever victim. The result is everyone thinks the other guy “started it”
**Submission Statement**
Recently, there has been many right-wing figures from figures such as LibsOfTikTok who have justified their who attempted and often succeeded at getting people fired for making tasteless social media posts about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump back in July.
Most of their victims weren’t public figures but regular Americans like Home Depot employees, firefighters, chefs, and school counselors. This was fine and good, many argued, because it constituted sweet revenge for cancel culture excesses driven by the Left.
However, as Jacob Mchangama from Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) notes, the left was hardly the first and only group to utilize cancel culture using examples such as a professor in the 1850s North Carolina who was against slavery, the Red Scare, and more obscurely, the Satanic Panic which affected hobbies such as heavy metal and Dungeons & Dragons, but gave rise to the Evangelical Right.
These examples show that there needs to be a principled defense of free speech, not a tribalistic defense that is often self-serving. While principled defenders throughout history are often difficult to find, Mchangama gives the examples of Frederick Douglass and Salman Rushdie who have suffered from angry mobs, yet still took an absolute defense of free speech.
!ping DEMOCRACY