Cancel Culture is Bad! (Unless It's Against Someone We Hate!)

It began with horror, a terrorist invasion by Hamas, which killed over 1300 Israelis, mostly civilians, including women, children, and the elderly.

Then came the reactions, and the reactions to the reactions, and cancel culture made its inevitable appearance.

What is cancel culture?

An attempt, often carried out by an online mob, to deliver disproportionate punishment against someone or some group for words or behaviors that are not crimes. This punishment usually involves a serious threat to the target’s financial resources, livelihood, or social standing. People calling you mean names on Twitter is not cancel culture. People trying to make sure you are fired or socially ostracized can be cancel culture. The key word is “disproportionate.” A man who marches down the street proudly waving a banner with racial slurs and threats will probably be ostracized, but most observers won’t see him as a victim of cancel culture. His ostracizing is expected and proportionate. A better example would be a Latino man accused of being a white nationalist and fired from his job because he made an “okay” sign with his fingers. Or the Washington Post publishing a 3000-word article about a foolish Halloween costume that would get a woman fired.

So who is getting canceled now? Everyone, eventually, but I’ll start with some Harvard students.

On Oct 8, the day after the Hamas attack, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine issued a short statement that held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence.” Entirely. All the violence. No blame for Hamas at all. This was a fantastically dumb statement. It was signed by 30+ Harvard student groups, ranging from the Harvard Islamic Society to the Harvard Jews for Liberation. No specific students were listed, just student organizations. After a few days of criticism, at least nine groups withdrew their signatures, and the statement was eventually removed, but the Internet never forgets.

Before the statement came down, the online outcry was fierce, and some went further than mean words.

Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire, tweeted:

I have been asked by a number of CEOs if @harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.

Right-wing websites followed up with lists of students alleged to be members of the organizations that had signed the statement. Some of the people doxxed¹ claimed to have never even attended a meeting of their supposed group. All of this is covered in an excellent article by Harvard student journalist Maya Bodnick. The Blocked and Reported podcast noted that some doxxing victims had graduated and were no longer members of any of the groups (it’s not surprising that student groups don’t keep up-to-date membership lists).

Accuracy in Media, a conservative media watchdog organization, even rented two video billboard trucks to drive around Harvard, showing names and pictures of the alleged signers.

All of this was designed to damage the students’ careers—Ackman’s tweet made that clear—but was this attack disproportionate? Many across Twitter argued that the students deserved it. What they had done was a serious violation of acceptable norms.

I don’t equate endorsing the murder of babies with wearing an insensitive Halloween costume to a party.

Except the letter didn’t endorse the murder of babies. It blamed Israel for all the violence but didn’t say the violence was good. It did blame October 7th’s events on the fact that for “two decades,” Palestinians “have been forced to live in an open-air prison,” but arguing that Hamas had been goaded into attacking (which seems to be the implication) is not the same as endorsing murder. The letter's main focus was to bemoan how Palestinians have suffered and to protest against “colonial retaliation.”

Yes, if I wanted to stretch the statement's meaning and take a few ungenerous logical leaps, I could reach an acceptance of murder, but that would be unfairly interpreting their words. Words that were, again, dumb and morally obtuse.

And we should remember that many, perhaps most, of the students being doxxed hadn’t even approved the letter. This letter was from Harvard organizations, made the day after the attacks before the full scope and horror were known. There was no time to check in with every student member before the organizations’ leaders signed on to the group letter.

Picture “Suravi,” age 19, a computer science major I’ve just made up. She’s busy with her schoolwork but tries to be politically involved. She’s a member of the Bengali Association of Students at Harvard College. She’s barely heard about the attacks, certainly none of the details, when she gets a phone call from a member of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee. They read the text of their statement over the phone and ask: Does she support it? Having only a few seconds, wanting to be a good ally, and knowing the consensus view that the Israeli government is always the bad guy, she agrees.

Dumb? Very. Demonstrating a deep-seated and malicious hatred of Jewish people? Hardly.

And that’s ignoring the students who weren’t even asked, but were just lumped in with the rest of their organization or the students who were mistakenly doxxed because membership lists were incorrect.

For this, Ackman and the Internet mob want to destroy the careers of these young idiots. Keep in mind that within a few years, many of them will have abandoned their temporary and pro forma membership in performative activism. (Suravi is destined to work at Google and be a Republican by age 30.) Ackman and company’s attempt to mete out disproportionate punishment is a clear example of cancel culture.

Or take the case of Professor Michael Eisen (University of California, Berkeley), who is also under attack for some hot tweets. (I only have screenshots for the tweets because Eisen has deactivated his Twitter account, a common move in the middle of a Twitter crisis.)

Eisen followed up with

Eisen is editor-in-chief of eLife, a science journal, as well as a regular Twitter gadfly.² There was an immediate outcry for him to be fired for his tweets. eLife responded with a “we’re working on it” tweet.

eLife’s statement received a scad of hostile replies (many grammatically challenged) demanding that Eisen be removed from his position.

Sorry but this is to weak. During investigation your EIC should be suspended. I have a hard time to see that he can stay without severe damage to the journal.

What’s there to investigate @eLife. He needs to be fired and condemned ASAP as a supporter of terrisim

Until your editor in chief will not be expelled, you can ask the Hamas academy to publish in eLife.

Although other replies supported Eisens’ right to express his opinion.

Wait, so Mike Eisen is being condemned for a political opinion on his personal account by an official @eLife account which is expressing a political opinion?!? Cmon stop the madness. IIRC Eisen condemned Hamas also but then also expressed concern for Gaza civilians. Reasonable.

Again, this is attempted cancel culture. Eisen expressed anger at Israel’s actions against Gaza, not a very controversial opinion. He did not endorse Hamas’ behavior, instead condemning it as horrifying and traumatizing.

In defending the Harvard students and Professor Eisen, I’m not suggesting we can’t harshly condemn horrible speech. There are even times when words are so extreme that they cross the line from legitimate criticism to unacceptable indecency. Freelance journalist Najma Sharif (who’s written for Teen Vogue and Paper Magazine) crossed that line when she made light of Hamas’ murders, receiving 101,000 likes on her tweet.

Or just as awful, BLMChicago posted an image of one of the gliders that flew into Israel to slaughter civilians.

Perhaps Najma Sherif and BLM Chicago deserve canceling, whatever that might mean. Glorifying or making light of evil is hideous behavior.

The Harvard students, however, blamed Israel but did not praise violence. Their tweet was bad but did not advocate mass murder. Professor Eisen criticized Israel but also condemned Hamas. Chastising both the students and Eisen is fine, but attempting to ruin the students’ careers or oust a professor from running a science journal is cancel culture.

I’ve heard many justifications for these attempted cancelings.

Some tweets argued this was appropriate revenge against lefties who have used cancel culture in the past.

These folks celebrated cancel culture until they were caught

This is the bed they made and were warned repeatedly that it would happen to them. popular lefty catch phrase "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences". Nicolas Sandmen and a ton of other people were cancelled because of them.

Its tit for tat

Probably some Harvard kids did support cancel culture. So? Revenge is not justice. And the claim that attacking livelihoods is just “consequences” is the refrain of the wannabe censor. If the sword of “consequences culture” was bad when progressives wielded it, then it’s still bad when it’s used against them.

This is wrong. There was no reason for those people to believe their statements were anonymous. Simply identifying them is not the same thing as trying to cancel them.

This is disingenuous. It’s essentially saying, “We’re not canceling you, we’re just announcing your names to the world so someone else can decide to never ever hire you.” That’s exactly what canceling is about!

Look, I get it; the kids said something stupid, and they did it at the moment when most of us were horrified at nightmarish videos coming out of Israel (although, again, remember that most of those videos were not widely distributed when the Harvard students released their letter). People want to punish their stupidity.

There’s also a touch of schadenfreude. Often, it has been lefty academics and students who have been leaders in fueling cancel mobs. It must feel good to target these elitist punks and give them a taste of their own medicine. Except, again, we don’t really know whether these kids tried to cancel anyone, and the suggested punishment far exceeds the crime. They didn’t murder anyone. They didn’t call for anyone to be murdered. They just thoughtlessly blamed Israel for everything. (And Eisen didn’t even do that.) They were dumb.

If we really want a culture that supports free speech, we need to allow room for a wide range of opinions, including opinions we strongly disagree with. “Wide range” doesn’t mean unlimited. We can draw lines. Supporting mass murder is unacceptable, but criticizing Israel is well within the bounds of permissible discourse.

And we must let people, especially college kids, say dumb things. My students say dumb stuff all the time! And I don’t shout them down because I want ideas to flow freely in my classroom. My students also live in terror of getting canceled. That’s a bad thing. Universities thrive on free expression, and that expression includes a lot of dumb ideas (some of which may later turn out to be smart). Making students even more fearful is bad for a society that wants to learn and explore.

As for culture war revenge, that’s the worst excuse of all. If we don’t try and stop cancel culture, why should they? An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. If you don’t oppose all disproportionate attacks on speech, you’re not really against cancel culture; you just want to pick and choose who gets canceled.

1. “Doxxing” is Internet slang for publishing private information about a person without their permission.

2. Eisen is also famous for getting into a giant Twitter brawl where some overwrought folks on science Twitter tried to cancel him because of a joke tweet about a very small worm. An innocent joke about worms triggers a scientific firestorm on Twitter.