Episode 46: Live from City Lights Books it's THE CANCEL CULTURE PANIC

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in Bitwidth the Right.

So, Adrian, today we have a fun live episode recorded at San Francisco's own City Lights Books.

Yeah, shout out to Peter Maravellis and the folks there.

It was a wonderful event.

I love that space.

I love that place.

It's so legendary, right?

Famous for its association with the beats, but really sort of a motor, a big engine of the San Francisco arts scene, really, since the 1950s.

So total honor.

Other fun fact, though,

our producer, Mark Yoshizumi, asked me to make sure I mentioned this.

Other fun fact about the legendary City Lights books, it abuts the Jack Kerouac Alley, which people, I think, play shows, play music shows at occasionally, as was the case the evening when we recorded this.

Maura, do you want to set the scene for folks?

Just to explain some of the audio issues they're going to be encountering.

Yeah, this is actually hilarious in a slapsick-y kind of way, because we get there to launch Adrian's wonderful new book.

Adrian and I were in conversation before a live audience at the Legendary City Lights, and we get upstairs.

The events person is like, listen,

I'm really sorry.

And we're like, what's going on?

And he goes, so the bar across Jarek Kerouac Alley, I think it's called Vesuvio.

I think so.

Yeah.

He's like, Vesuvio is hosting a punk band in the alley.

And they will be playing directly below you, like right below the window.

So Adrian and I conducted this conversation while shouting over punk music.

Yeah.

So funny thing about the audio is you can't hear the punk music, but what you can hear is us shouting insanely.

No, we just sound like we're losing our minds.

Yeah.

Yeah, so that's what this is about.

It's that you have to imagine someone thrashing maniacally, you know, raging against the machine, not like 12 feet away from us, maybe 15 feet away from us, and us sort of having to shout over it.

But the funny thing is, as Peter from City Lights pointed out to us, like, none of that makes it onto the actual audio.

No, we just sound really, really loud.

We sound like we were shouting for no fucking reason whatsoever.

I think really that like as the music got louder and faster and more intense, it gave you this kind of perverse power.

You were like really energized by it.

And after a certain point, you were sort of like flailing your hands.

You know, Adrian is a kind of like personally reserved guy, for those of you not lucky enough to know him in person.

And he really got into this Oz-like power

from having the music playing beneath him.

It was like some sort of dark magic going on.

It was definitely the most Jim Morrison-like I've ever felt giving a public performance.

I'm thrilled that it was preserved.

And we're thrilled that there are still punk shows being played in Jack Herouak Alley.

Like this is what the Russian formalist critic Michael Bartin calls the polyphony, the heteroglossia.

It's a buzzing confusion of voices and we're all part of this wonderful democratic discordance, aren't we?

Thematically appropriate for your book, right?

Because it's a book all about how the cantho culture moral panic tries to pathologize as wrong what is actually just you know the stuff of a of a democratic polity right the marketplace of ideas yeah that people who disagree with each other sometimes shout and uh we definitely were competing in that marketplace of ideas with the punk band downstairs but they did not cancel us exactly so we'll leave it at that i hope you enjoy the conversation we should also mention that you know we have our patreon feel free to subscribe to that Also, there are a couple of very fun episodes coming up for us.

We have a busy December.

The Kirsties are coming up soon.

So we're going to record with Michael Hobbs any day now.

If anybody remembers, last year we did our ranking of the most cursed gender and sexuality discourses of 2023.

And I really feel that 2024 is going to be an even more robust Kirsties award season.

Bumper crop.

Yeah.

It feels like, you know, there's that scene in The Simpsons where Homer is sent to hell and he's forced to kind of gulp on like endless supplies of doughnuts.

That's me and cursed discourses having to do with gender and sexuality in 2024.

Satan is like, oh, really?

You have a podcast about this?

Well, get a load of this shit.

That is our ironic punishment, right?

From the classical hell.

But yeah, please support us on Patreon.

We've got great episodes there.

It's funner and weirder and like kind of more vulgar than our already oh-so buttoned up main feed episodes.

I know.

So I think you'll have fun.

We've got a great Discord going.

That's been a blast.

And thank you just for being our listeners and for helping us along on this weird journey.

Thank you.

All right.

Here's the show.

Welcome to City Lights, everyone, especially to those of you online tonight.

A very, very timely book, The Cancel Culture Panic, which is of course published by our friends over at the Stanford University Press.

And we have some in the audience here tonight.

Such a pleasure to have you both with us.

Welcome to City Lights.

Thank you to everybody in the audience, both here at City Lights and online.

I loved this book.

And I so loved seeing this phenomenon of cancel culture and these fears about like discursive excess on the left that I have witnessed sort of shape the political discourses in my country for so long.

I love seeing it filtered through your analytical mind at great length, like much longer than the typical like tweet-length tweet quip

about cancel culture.

Because I feel like the standard line about cancel culture is that, you know, it's hypocritical, right?

It's very selective.

And what you do is you really establish it as a habit of conservative thought that allows what you call the moral entrepreneur, which is such a great phrase.

Not mine, but it's great.

to synthesize a lot of different anxieties and desires and ideas that might be in conflict ordinarily.

Yeah, I think that's right.

So as Maura is alluding, there is a line of argument that basically cancel culture, the fear of cancel culture is a moral panic, that it kind of blows up these anecdotes to essentially further a conservative political agenda.

And to some extent, my book thinks that too, but I kind of didn't want to stop there.

I wanted to ask, well, how come that it works, right?

Like, how come?

You could think of like the kind of panic over wokeness being kind of very similar.

But if you meet someone at a dinner party and they're like, you know, what I really worry about is all that wokeness and the woke mind virus, right?

Like you kind of know to tune them out.

You know what you're going to get.

This is going to be right-wing culture war stuff.

Cancer culture is unusual because it does exist on the right, right?

Like Ron DeSantis is obsessed with it, Donald Trump is obsessed with it.

But this cancer culture warning did really not originate on the right and didn't.

really succeed first on the right.

It really started more in the New York Times and the Atlantic, you know, in places where you don't don't get to see sort of anti-woke greeds all the time.

And so this is part of why I thought this was an interesting kind of meme to trace, because I'm like, where does this come from?

Where does this kind of uncanny success of this idea stem from?

You know, I mean, I'm a literary scholar, and so I approach this to some extent as a study of text, a study of a genre.

There is a kind of article that used to be written about cancer culture sort of between 2018 and 2022, I would say, right?

Like it starts with three anecdotes, two of them happened on a college campus, then it makes a comparison to McCarthyism.

Then there's going to be something about a study from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Like I could basically write you one of these right now.

I could sort of Madlib this for you.

And the funny thing is that type of text did travel the globe.

Like you could read stuff like that in the UK, read it in Germany, in France.

You can even read them in places in Argentina and Chile.

And at the same time, you wouldn't read them necessarily just in the Wall Street Journal.

You would read them in the New York Times.

You'd read them in the Washington Post.

And they were appealing sort of not to the inveterate culture warrior in your family, but they were appealing to a worried liberal as well.

And so I thought this is to me

really sort of the figure for the Trump age, really, where, you know, like some kind of barrier between center right and far right is really breaking down.

where also the way everything seems to be networked now, right?

That like, you know, Trumpism seems to sort of like travel the globe and like anti-immigration sentiment sort of like keeps getting repeated, like that we kind of recapitulate what the UK did five years ago, or like the gender panic, which came from France to the United States.

So it just seemed to me such a rich thing to kind of trace.

So the fact that the description of cancel culture as an object isn't accurate and that the panic around it is a moral panic is kind of the premise of the book, not the main argument.

The main argument is about what that shows about a particular moment and about the politics of that moment.

This might be a good moment for me to interject and explain to you that because Adrian is the hardest working person in the world,

to a degree that's maybe a little bit insane, he actually wrote a version of this book in German for a German audience.

And then instead of merely translating the book he already wrote,

he in fact reconceived of the book to

make it more legible to an American audience and then wrote it again in English.

So we got a very nice blurb about Adrian's accomplishments here in California and at Stanford, but he's also a pundit for German language media.

And for my sins.

And something that is really interesting to me is like, I feel like a lot of people who start critically engaging with cancel culture.

as a moral panic and start thinking about this discourse in American media and how it functions.

it's because either they were subjected to some kind of cancellation or because they were accused of canceling others, right?

So there's kind of a first-person element of this, which bespeaks to its anecdotal, like iterative nature.

But you didn't come upon it that way.

No, no, never been canceled.

I mean, maybe tonight.

The night is young.

I was going to say, the night is young.

But you started looking at this as a genre and you really started looking at it, how it was operating in an international global context.

Yeah.

Well, I related to it as a producer, right?

As you mentioned, I'm a bit of a pundit.

And so basically I was asked to write these kind of texts.

And I would say, you know, they're like, don't you think that your students are becoming so authoritarian?

I'm like, I don't know.

They're 19 years old.

I don't think they're,

I'm not sure how you get to be authoritarian if I get to grade you, right?

But then they wouldn't like write me back and then someone else would write the piece.

And I'm like, oh, okay, that's what you wanted from from me.

And meanwhile, whenever I would talk to, you know, French audiences, German audiences, or went to the UK, people would ask me these questions that they seem to know the answers to already often about my students.

And I was like, well, I don't know.

American students are pretty diverse.

Like, I don't know if I know like what the university is like, what American students as a group are like.

I mean, how many millions of them are there, right?

But they seem to know the answer.

And I started getting fascinated with these texts that gave them that surety, that assurance that they knew what was amiss right they're like well what's wrong with kids at universities these days i'm like oh my god what what are you basing this on right like i at the time i think i taught something like 1200 undergraduates a year and i i couldn't have generalized like there's some things that are true for some of them there are things that are true for others but that kind of fantasmatic self-assurance really seemed to me like that's where a certain audience meets a certain kind of text right like you're operating in almost a fictional space right like anything we know with some degree of granularity is complicated.

You know, whatever field you're in, like, is, is this truly ah, kind of.

I mean, like, you kind of have to see, and then you go into a whole five-minute description and people glaze over and get super bored.

That's a sign of that you're an expert in that particular field, I would say.

But there is this kind of security and safety that really, I think, comes from distance.

And in the United States, a lot of stories about cancel culture on college campuses came from people who weren't at college campuses or who had left them.

And it comes with living with stories, right?

Our stories tend to be clearer in what they mean and what they communicate about the world than the messy reality we all live through.

Now, I'll give you one example.

I have one little bit in the book where I just kind of went down this rabbit hole to figure out.

I don't know how many of you have read The Human Stain by Philip Roth, a wonderful novel from the year 2000, but I repeat, a novel from the year 2000, right?

And you wouldn't believe the number of pieces in German, French, I think I saw one Argentinian, British newspapers that in 2021 would start their story about cancel culture at American universities with like, we all remember the case of Colman Silk from the human state.

And you're like, yeah, it's a little weird.

Like if I'm doing a piece about like a crime spike and I'm like, we all remember the movie, you know, with Charles Bronson, right?

It's like, first of all this movie is 40 years old.

Second of it's a movie, right?

It's not a documentary.

like how

like and of course the people writing the article knew that but somehow it was a kind of comfort with fiction right like the fiction proved something to them that for something else they probably would have asked for a thing that happened in the world as opposed to a thing that a novelist came up with in the year 2000 and so this is what got me interested in the the the fact that like people felt very ready to judge from a great distance and that they seemed extremely ready and willing to live with fictions, whether those fictions were open about the fact that they were fictions or there were these anecdotes that were so obviously fake, right?

Where you're like, this is a story, you know?

So this, you alluded earlier to the genre of the cancel culture panic magazine piece, right?

Yeah.

This article that appeared, for me as a media watcher, it really did seem like a solidly once-a-week.

Yeah.

And it would either be in the Atlantic or it would be in the New York Times opinion section.

Bari Weiss at the New York Times Opinion section had this as her beat for a long time.

Now that seems to have gone to Pamela Paul,

who writes some version of this quite often.

It might be in The New Yorker or it might be

like the Washington Post, you know, quite a quite wide variety of right, but also center and center left publications.

And you mentioned that as a genre, they all rely heavily on these anecdotes, usually from campuses, to try and diagnose what they claimed was a larger social problem of censoriousness, of punitiveness coming from the political left and often from young people.

And it struck me that I had begun to read these pieces.

for their misrepresentations of those anecdotes.

And this is something you go into a little bit in the book.

First of all, how these anecdotes were being collected very deliberately by right-wing organizations that were trying to seed these stories in the media.

And then also how they were misrepresented, right?

How they would be not factual, but designed to evoke what their readers would feel would be like an emotional truth.

Exactly.

I mean, like, there's two things you're kind of signing on to with one of these anecdotes.

One is, should we do Oberlin Banh Me?

Oberlin Ban Mi is the classic.

Any of you remember Oberlin Bonh Mi?

So there was a story in, I want to say 2017 that undergrads at Oberlin had had decried the serving of banh mi sandwiches, so Vietnamese sandwiches at the cafeteria as racist, right?

And like you read that, and uh on the one hand, you might say that seems odd.

I don't know if that's quite right.

Turns out it is bullshit, but like you might also think, oh, the youth frightened and disturbed me.

It is a Roshak test, right?

Like if you keep reading, if you're like, this is bullshit, I'm not going to read this, fine.

That's not for you.

But if you go past that, basically, you kind of have to just stipulate to the fact that this allegedly happened, right?

And the two things that you don't normally do are ask, who says, and how come we know about this, right?

How is it that a story about dietary preferences at a Ohio liberal arts college with like 1500 students

made it all the way to a national publication?

How did this writer in Washington, D.C.?

learn of this and how come I am now hearing about it.

Those are the questions that you sort of have to mute if you want these kinds of anecdotes to work for you.

I mean, I'll give you an example, another example from Stanford.

I was handed a Christmas present by the Wall Street Journal because the Wall Street Journal reported that Stanford had banned the use of the word American.

And it's exactly this kind of thing.

I'm like,

I feel like I would have heard,

I feel like that would have stood out in my inbox, right?

Like,

someone please clean up the fridge in the rec room.

Dear professor, can have an extension.

Also, please don't use the word American.

It would have stood out.

I didn't get that email.

And so I sort of sighed and I started kind of looking into what the hell happened here.

What had happened here was in that particular case that our IT department, so not the computer science department, mind you, but like the people who

fix our computer

had under the impression of Black Lives Matter in 2020 decided, what if we go over the way we design our websites, the kind of boilerplate text we put on those websites.

And what if we remove certain language from our code?

Because it turns out that apparently programmers refer to slave and master documents.

And they were like, well, what if we not use that language anymore?

Right.

That list that they'd come up with.

An in-house style guide for their backup.

Something like that.

Yeah.

It was on a Slack channel for like six months, and no one looked at it until it somehow wound up in the Wall Street Journal.

It is a thing of beauty, I do have to say.

Like it was just clearly like, there are no bad ideas kind of thing, because it had some words where he's like, well, if that's on our website, we probably should shut down our website.

Like the N-words on there, and you're like, well, I would hope that that's not on any Stanford website, right?

But so is the word Karen, where you're like, well, it feels hard to avoid with a faculty of several thousand people.

We're going to have some Karens.

No, hey, but like, there's going to be just some literal Karens out there.

But that's the thing.

Like, you had to kind of dig down into like who did what to whom.

And then the second question was like, how, and this is the question I never was able to figure out.

Like, how did the Wall Street Journal get this?

Right.

I have my theories.

I'm not going to say, but like, it's very noticeable that a person who's like, I can't believe those Wooksters at Stanford, right?

Like, has to not ask themselves, like, wait, why am I hearing about this?

Like, how did this get to me?

Which might bring me to something you identify as a...

a real telling feature of the cancel culture panic genre, which is this kind of like motivated disproportionality, right?

Like these tiny incidents where the motivation is not what's being presented and really the stakes could not possibly be any lower

is being blown up into quite literally a national scandal what are the mechanisms that make it travel that far the mechanisms are sort of associational comparison right like this is where you get like oh this is like the mccarthy era right like stephen pinker is very fond of that comparison right sometimes they use the dreyfus affair the dreyfus affair there's a piece by peggy noonan from 2021 about cancel cancel culture showing a bunch of Chinese kids from the cultural revolution being like, now comes the struggle session.

And you're like, I don't know, man, I would be much more afraid of an actual struggle session than, you know, people were mean to me on Twitter or whatever.

But yeah, it's this comparison.

Then it's the claim that this is getting worse, right?

Like these may seem like small potatoes, but it's getting worse and it's getting more.

What, of course, they don't reflect on is that these kinds of discourses tend to create feedback loops.

They tend to create their own positives, right?

Like once you've put it in everyone's head that like you can get a lot of attention in the media ecosphere by saying you were canceled, just disproportionately more people will say that that's what happened to them.

So these are all sort of the mechanisms.

And then the other thing about it is, of course, the mechanisms themselves, they may not work for most people.

There are a lot of people who see through them, right?

People on Twitter have a lot of fun dunking on these.

What actually happened here, right?

But I think the reason that they work is also the secret kind of principle of the thing the worry about cancer culture started around 29 1819 and then really caught on in 2020.

and if you think about what happened in between 2018 and 2020 right about things that have to do with anecdotes and then make broader claims about those anecdotes right you have me too and you have black lives matter And to some extent, I think, or I argue in the book, I try to show in the book, that the cancel culture anecdote functions as the antidote, right?

It's me too for people who are scared of me too, people who think that me too went too far, but who want to sort of come up with their own anecdotes to invalidate those other anecdotes, right?

The same people who want like five more Weinstein accusers before they're like going to believe that you did anything wrong, right?

Are like, but can you believe what those kids did at Oberlin, right?

And you're like, okay, I see what you're doing, right?

You're playing with the relationship between the individual case, right?

Because in the end, like Me Too is to some extent an anecdotal discourse too it's just like it's a lot more anecdotes but like in the end we do when i say me too we do flash back to individual proper names right so does someone who's scared of cancel culture it's actually fairly similar in their mind it's just that like the numbers are super low and as you say the stakes are far less and far smaller than especially for black lives matter right you're starting to tap into what i think is really the overarching novel insight of your book, which is how cancel culture allows a lot of different anxieties to get laundered from sometimes like quite far marginal reaches of the right into our mainstream centrist discourses.

Before we get really into the weeds in that, do you want to read?

Should I read?

I feel like

it's flowing so nicely, but I can read a little bit.

You want to give people a little taste of the product.

Yeah, exactly.

So this is the part of the book where I talk about how

just how does this happen, right?

Like one day, you know, you haven't never heard of cancel culture.

Suddenly you're like, this is like the third article I'm reading about cancel culture this week, right?

How does that process work?

And that was the part of the book about that.

It's unclear when the term cancel culture was first used on Twitter, but it was first used on Twitter.

The term existed in relation to all sorts of things, the tendency to cancel Uber rights, for instance, or TV shows, long before it was used in its contemporary sense.

The first tweet that does use it in a way that is at least similar to modern usage dates back to the autumn of 2016.

It refers to the alleged relationship between Drake and Taylor Swift and expresses the worry that they would very likely cancel each other in song after they split.

So this is a tweet from a Swifty named at Unicorn in KK.

Ugh, I hate the cancel culture until I want to set things on fire.

Okay.

Most likely, what at Unicorn in KK meant by that term was the tendency, particularly Taylor Swift's, to devote thinly veiled diss tracks to ex-partners immediately after breaking up with them or after being broken up with.

Two things seem worth noting here.

First, that practice would have corresponded exactly to a description of something else, namely call-out culture that was very common at the time.

And second, Unicorn NKK's verdict was explicitly aesthetic.

She wasn't worried about freedom of speech.

She simply didn't want to hear any more songs of this type.

Talk about cancel culture, like the word canceling, originated on Black Twitter, where it was marshaled in defense of various problematic faves, from Jay-Z to R.

Kelly and Azalea Banks to Erica Badou.

But it was used as a kind of imminent critique in these fan communities and online spaces.

When users complained about cancel culture, they indicated that those who criticized these stars made it too easy on themselves, were too moralistic, too quick to pass judgment, or to declare someone problematic.

Importantly, Both sides of this debate, those who criticized something as problematic and those who claimed that this critique itself was problematic were part of the same discursive space.

They were fans, for lack of a better term.

Blog posts using the word in the summer of 2017 are steeped in the vernacular and preoccupations of Black Twitter and LGBTQ plus bubbles largely on Tumblr and largely address users only in those spaces.

Up until this point, the diagnosis cancer culture had been part of a larger critique of what is today known as toxic stan Twitter, which is indisputably an unpleasant aspect of online fan cultures, but ultimately something that is true largely of fan cultures.

This was about users wanting to make their little corner of the internet a little bit of a better place.

Many tweets from 2016 to 2018 have since been deleted, meaning that it's almost impossible to say anything with any certainty about the Twitter discourse on canceling and cancer culture.

Nevertheless, And this was true even before Elon Musk completely fucked up the platform, by the way.

But nevertheless, until 2018, not a single tweet I could find on the subject, hundreds, if not thousands in the spring of 2018 alone contained the words campus, university, student, or freedom of speech.

Cancel culture's big break came in June and July of 2018 with Kanye West.

For the first time, a canceled person spoke out about their cancellation.

And West also identified a possible second cancellation victim, a man whose ability to present and indeed regard himself as a perpetual victim is perhaps unmatched in the long history of American thin-skinnedness, namely then-President Donald Trump.

In an interview with the New York Times, rapper Kanye West used the word canceled seven times.

I'm canceled, West said and added, I'm canceled because I didn't cancel Trump.

Here it was, the word from hip-hop fandom from queer Twitter, threatening both a white conservative man and his most bizarre and devoted fan.

The interview appeared on June 25th and the word word was soon everywhere.

In relation to Roseanne Barr, YouTuber Logan Paul, and Hollywood actor Kevin Space.

Three things are striking about this coming out of the term.

First, it seems to have entered the vocabulary of the Trumpists only through the liberal New York Times.

Unlike the term political correctness, which was essentially a right-wing psyop that was later adapted by mainstream media, cancel culture was popularized by liberal media.

Only in the second step did the right-wingers discover the label as something that they could use.

Everyone is canceled, wrote Jonah Bromwich in a long article in the style section of the New York Times on June 28, 2018, most likely also to explain to readers the specifics of the Kanye West interview, which probably left a few of them dumbfounded.

Bromwich's article drives home a second point.

Early uses in the traditional media did not use the term to diagnose anything new.

The early coverage did not treat, for instance, Roseanne Barr's scandal, the uproar over Logan Paul, and Kevin Spacey as anything new.

What they treated as new was the nomenclature of canceling.

Third, the New York Times' early reporting was entirely without any note of panic.

Bromwich's article treated the term cancel culture as an online curio.

The text clearly referred to internet culture.

The author had interviewed academics familiar with the phenomenon, I like that, such as my colleague Meredith Clark, who's fantastic, fantastic, and seemed to view everything with a healthy dose of humor and irony.

And although Kanye West was always worth a headline in 2018, he wasn't exactly known as a trendsetter, but more as an inveterate eccentric.

Less than four years later, the same newspaper would warn in a huge editorial about the immense burden of canceller culture.

Gone was the talk of Kanye West or Black Twitter.

Gone were the problematic faves or backtalk.

Gone were the celebrities and their fans.

And gone were the academics.

Cancel culture was now about language police and about self-censorship, about the fear of being mistaken for racist or homophobic or sexist.

The word, in other words, now evoked all the classic topoy of the political correctness panic of decades past.

Had things shifted so fundamentally in public discourse between 2018 and 2022 that such a redefinition of canceling became necessary?

This seems very unlikely, especially since the examples offered for cancellation often come from 2017, 2018, or 2019.

It seems much more likely that in the discursive explosion that followed the first articles about cancer culture in June and July of 2018, the outlines of the alleged phenomenon began to blur.

Or perhaps better, Once alienated from the specific discursive spaces, from the specific users that had developed it, the term could be applied to just about everything and anything, and haphazardly integrated into discourse, old and new.

In some contexts, cancel culture simply replaced the expression political correctness.

In others, it reactivated the panic about speech codes or gave new shape to a nearly 40-year-old fear of identity politics.

Precisely because its origins had become so thoroughly repressed, cancel culture was able to mean many things to many different people.

It wasn't really a concept anymore.

It was a meme.

But it was a meme that wasn't allowed to admit it was a meme.

Rather, it had to act as though it still were a highly precise term denoting an acute and clearly defined historic problem.

Newspaper readers and Twitter users in the United States witnessed this process firsthand, and many commented on it at the time.

What they likely didn't notice, and what many still don't realize, is that in the midst of this very process, the term spilled over into Europe and later Latin America.

It did not really make that transition when it was an online-only term, but now it was transferred from U.S.

newspapers to German, to French, to Italian print media.

The term appears in the London Times for the first time on April 4th, 2019, in an article about Gen Z and the difficulty about marketing to it.

The French daily, Le Figaro, mentions the word on June 13th, 2019 in the paper's culture section.

in an article dealing with Woody Allen as a, quote, victim of the cancer culture rampant in the US.

Other examples, by the way, are Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski.

Real heartbreakers, that one.

Okay.

The first mentioned in the Australian in Sydney is a column on September 25th, 2019, in connection with a book by the political scientist James Flynn that was cancelled by its British publisher.

The first mention of the expression cancer culture in Germany was in the center-right Biveld

in the culture section on July 25th.

The occasion, quote, The legendary comedian Louis C.K.

has masturbated in front of several women and was banned from stage.

Now he is planning his comeback.

Okay.

The first article in Mexico's Millennio appeared in December 1st, 2019 and was about Woody Allen.

In Spain, the first article to use Jultura de Cantelación appeared in El País on December 6, 2019.

Its first example are Kevin Spacey being cut out of House of Cards and R.

Kelly's concerts being cancelled.

The first mention of Cultura de Cantalamento in Brazilian media appears to have been in an article about virtual boycott in the the Foya de São Paulo.

While the article names many examples, it opens with an anecdote about people picketing a screening of a Polanski film.

Despite the various national differences, these articles make it relatively clear what version of the term cancel culture was first exported.

It traveled the world as an aftershock of Me Too.

And above all, Me Too in U.S.

media and culture.

There was, at least in the beginning, no talk of creeping authoritarianism, no spillover of a new spirit of censoriousness from America to wherever the writer was sitting, no fear of a woke wave that would later come to dominate the imaginaries from Emmanuel Macron to Vladimir Putin.

Certainly, there were attempts at making these stories locally relevant.

For instance, Le Figaro clearly reported on Woody Allen because the French public has maintained a...

exceedingly positive relationship, let's say, to Allen for years.

But the focus was resolutely on the U.S.

Also notable is the tendency of cancer culture to become a subject for the culture pages and to attach itself to culture issues.

As we shall see, whether in France, in Germany, or the UK, the term would make only sporadic appearances in cover stories in the politics sections, or remarkably, given how U.S.-centric the cancer culture articles were and have remained, even in the foreign affairs section of European newspapers.

Rather, the topic was always refracted through the chrism of culture.

It was about authors and philosophers, statues and films, books and performances.

Tamir, I'll stop there.

Thank you.

What I so love about that section of the book is that you can really see how the imprecision of the term cancel, it allows it to stand in for so many different types of interaction, so many different fears.

And you can also see how it's divorced from its original context, where in these sort of self-referential communities online that might be like people of color or very young people or all queer people or maybe some mix of those three where the term had a degree of like self-conscious irony.

Right.

And then it gets taken away and used with like full seriousness.

And that was an interesting process of de-ironization, right?

As it goes further and further to the right.

So I think that that's what made me reach for the label of moral panic in the first place.

I don't know how much everyone knows about that concept.

It was introduced

in the 1970s by the sociologist Stanley Cohen.

And it is about these kind of descriptions that kind of spill over and that the broader culture becomes like convinced, like denote these like really threatening developments to our way of life, our freedom or whatever, or like public decency, public morality, et cetera, et cetera.

And a couple of things that they have in common is they usually buy young people and they usually don't ask young people, right?

It's a bunch of politicians, journalists, members of Congress, like your local sheriff being like, oh, I have heard many of the youths partaking in these kinds of sex parties or these kinds of.

Remember rainbow parties?

This thing that we were told in the 2000s was definitely totally happening.

And do you want to tell the story?

I don't know if I want to tell what a rainbow party is.

It involved oral sex and lipstick and a sex act that cannot possibly be performed, which like large groups of very serious pundits sort of sat around and debating this without anyone ever being like, wait, does this work?

Can you actually do this?

How is it done?

Is this a non-erasable marker?

Because otherwise you can't do this.

Anyway, that's one, right?

Like people talking about heavy metal music.

I recently recorded an episode of a podcast about Dungeons and Dragons.

That's another one of these.

The Satanic Panic is a pretty classic one of these.

And it usually is about the youths and what they're getting up to.

And it pointedly, the youths are the last people you ask, right?

Because they're already lost.

You need that nice man from the sheriff's office to explain it to you.

Second thing it does, it grants, right?

Like, were there more kids with Satanism tattoos running around in the 80s?

Like, yeah, they were in bands, right?

Like the thing you can't credit is that the youths might be kidding, or that the people you're describing might be ironic.

It's like, oh, no, they don't understand irony.

It's like, no, I think the problem is that you don't understand their irony, right?

So this is another aspect of moral panic that I think the cancer culture panic exemplifies perfectly, that you have to impute to your opposite number kind of perfect lack of self-consciousness and irony while yourself being completely unironic and unself-conscious, right?

So that to me was like just like the classic moment as I was watching this word.

I mean, literally my method in this section is like, you know, I went on LexisNexis and I printed out like 500 articles.

And I was like, okay, when is the first time it shows up here?

I like did make like maps.

I had like a board of crazy with like pins on like a world map.

And as I was watching this, I'm like, oh, you're just scared of me too.

And you, you don't feel that great about going to see the latest Woody Allen movie.

And you want to make that someone else's problem.

Like it became so obvious what it was.

And once you trace it, once you sort of narrate it, suddenly the whole thing takes on a totally different shape and appearance.

Yeah.

This brings us to something that I really like about the book, which is how it makes makes it really clear that panicking about cancel culture became like a tool of disavowal, right?

To not have to grapple with the thing that you're actually panicking about.

Could you like tell us a little bit about that, Megan?

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

Like it was a way of kind of getting at me too from the side, right?

Like, oh, I'm not against me too.

I understand.

Like, what points is terrible, right?

Like,

but you don't think that like this cancel culture thing is kind of out of control?

Like, well, you said two opposed things just just there, right?

A lot of this is about language politics and about like the way you can't talk anymore, right?

So it's about like language change.

And it's specifically about language change that you don't participate in.

This is a huge thing in Europe, but it's also in the United States.

Like Jordan Peterson, what is Jordan Peterson famous for?

Like, I will be canceled when I dead name my students, I guess, at the University of Toronto.

And you're like, you have no students, Jordan.

Also, like,

you know, you got rich dead naming your students.

Like, I'm not sure what the problem is here.

People are always saying the thing that they're not allowed to say, like into a microphone.

Or think of like pronouns, another one of these, right?

Like, the students can be illegal to use the wrong pronouns.

Like, yeah, sure, absolutely.

That seems like a thing that happens in the world.

Let's go with that.

And what it is about is like actual language change that is voluntary, but that is experienced as conspiratorial because everyone else is doing it and you're not, right?

Sometime around May of 2020, a lot of, let's be real, white people people in the United States discovered that like their neighbors were actually pro-Black Lives Matter and were not horrified by like a burning footlocker, but were horrified by what the cops had done to Michael Brown.

And like there are two ways to like deal with that fact.

You can either say like, oh shit, gotta revise some of my priors, or you can say, it's a conspiracy, I tell you.

It's like, they don't really believe that.

If they had their drothers, if they could speak openly, they too would say what I would say, but they don't dare.

i am the lone bold truth teller for saying that like maybe michael brown had it coming right like my neighbors would say the same thing obviously but they have been too cowed by cancel culture right like so it becomes this way to narrate societal change to you about the young about the non-white about the trans, about the LGBT,

about the, you know, about the people with they, them pronouns, like that you do not wish to participate in.

It's a way to make your non-participation a bold move, a bold truth-telling move, right?

Like, it's not that you're kind of a little stuck in your ways and maybe you should feel sheepish about that.

No,

you are actually the bold outlier.

You're like, not me, Wolkskers.

I will not use your they, them pronouns.

And I think what you're describing here is the way that cancel culture goes, at least in the minds of the people who use it as an accusation, from a critique of liberal excess to a defense of liberal values, right?

It allows liberals to be conservative or to argue for conservative positions while at the same time

claiming themselves to be the true liberals or the classical liberals.

Right, classical liberals.

Exactly.

And this is like people who tell me that my book is dangerous and that like, actually cancer culture is a huge problem.

Like nine times out of 10, if I click on their bio, it'll be like, neither conservative nor liberal or like classical liberal.

And you're like, yeah, yeah, okay,

I get it.

But no, you're exactly right.

I don't think of it in terms of positions because I think it's ultimately like more about like impulses.

It's people who conceive of themselves as liberal, but are starting to have conservative impulses on certain things, right?

Like their kid came home with pronouns and now they're like, whoa, okay, right.

And like they don't know how to feel about it.

And like, basically, right, they're like at a crossroads.

They can either sort of be like, okay, I'm learning a new thing.

Some of it seems good.

Some of it seems strange, strange, but it seems fine.

Or they can be like, no, it is the children who are wrong.

And, you know, and then Cancer Kilature is there for them.

And it'll be there to articulate for them why they're not being jerks, but really why

they're being, yeah.

Like, yeah, the Guardians, they're the new, the latter-day Alexis de Tocqueville, right?

Like they're standing up for the American commonweal at this point.

I mean, what they're literally doing is being a dick to their kids, but like, no, but like, isn't the most important thing to be addict to your kids for democracy you know right you're explaining this like kind of like magnifying feature that it has right because on the one hand cancel culture panic can take incidents that are like incredibly banal and don't matter or are like wildly misconstrued yeah and blow them up to have you know civilizational consequence and some of this rhetoric but it can also take these like gestures of pettiness or like just withholding or like willful refusal to understand and blow that up into like grand principled defenses right so it it takes these interactions that are actually just like really like incredibly low stakes and small like small morally small consequentially and then turn them into these grand battles of good and evil yeah there is a kind of secondary narcissism you get to like enjoy yourself

self-portrait at the biggest possible scale right like i'll say a thing now.

I'm going to have a cancelable opinion.

Something that my undergraduates say and do strikes me as dumb and uninteresting.

There are things that they do where I'm like, I don't get it.

It's not for me.

I'm canceling you, Adrian.

I know.

I'm being bold right now, right?

Like, which I think drives home the point that, like, isn't it awfully convenient when a discourse allows you to think of a thing that mildly annoys you as also the greatest threat to the West since whatever, like Stalinism or something like that, right?

Like, that's convenient, right?

Like, I hate people cutting me off in traffic.

It is now the, right?

Like, there's, there's something deeply appealing to like having your own petty gripes be super important, right?

You and I have made fun of David Sederis for this a little bit of like being like, David Sederis doesn't like to use the word queer.

And he like keeps writing like texts about like, oh, you'll come for me, but I, I do not believe in the word, I don't want to self-apply the word queer.

It's like, that's totally fine, David Sederis.

Just like, don't use the word queer.

Like, it's really not a big deal.

And like, kind of can't help but notice that you keep making it one, right?

So that's one thing.

The other thing is like, exactly, like, it is a way to like heighten the texture of everyday life.

This is not a cancer culture story.

This is a

cancer culture story of alletzo.

This is a political correctness anecdote from 1988 from the University of Texas in Austin.

I'm not even drawing a blank on who the guy is.

He was an English professor and he was in a lot of these sort of, he was in the time at the big time piece on 1992 thought police, the new McCarthyism on campus.

Like he's like the first anecdote or whatever.

His story is like, I made a couple of comments about like, we were only reading these like black authors anymore and we weren't teaching like Melville anymore.

And then my, well, he didn't use cancellation, but then like my hounding began.

And the hounding is like

One colleague who's black was mean to me at the Xerox machine because I left a bunch of Xerox paper in the the Xerox machine.

And then they didn't invite me to the Christmas party at another colleague's house, right?

And you're like, so just running the tape backwards here, like someone was mean to an older faculty member at a copying machine.

Like older faculty should not be allowed another cancelable opinion near copying machines.

I'm sorry.

Like they just keep hitting the button and it just keeps going and like.

you're trying to get your syllabus out.

It's terrible.

It's terrible.

Right.

And you didn't get invited to a dinner party, right?

Like, and like suddenly here it was in in like the chronicle of fucking higher education.

And I think, not entirely sure of this, but I think it was either Newsweek or in Time.

Imagine your dinner party, this invitation, making it into national media.

That's remarkable.

That's magical.

That's wonderful.

And like, and maybe these colleagues were even jerks, for all I know, maybe they were mean to him.

But it takes these minuscule little blow-ups on college campuses.

And this is why I think university professors are particularly susceptible to them, because it says to them the one thing that we cannot resist.

Hey, you know how you don't matter at all?

And like you live in this like tiny weird bubble and like you're getting older and the students are very scandalously staying exactly the same age.

What if that were a big problem?

What if this mattered?

What if your aging process mattered, right?

Like, yes, I have thought this myself many a time.

Thank you, Mr.

Newsweek.

I will now, I will now write you a 2000 word piece, right?

Like, it is fucking catnip for people like me right like that why was i being asked by german french british newspapers to write about how i'm scared of my students because that's when i matter right i'm like oh i would like to write about like franz kafka they're like kafka we're not doing kafka right like i want to write about alfred dublin like yeah city lights takes my call like i can't be in the atlantic my students won't even read kafka anymore boom i am printed right like i think there was that there was literally an atlantic piece about how how our students can't read anymore.

Like two weeks ago, I could place that tomorrow.

You and I could like do a bunch of bloat in Jack Kerouac Alley, pound that thing out, and we are, we are ready.

We can like just cache that article.

I think you've like discovered our get-witch quick scheme.

Oh, yeah.

This is what we're gonna do after this.

Oh, it is.

I mean, that's what it is.

Like, it destroys proportion.

And that can be bad.

That's really fracking bad for my students.

It was bad for the Stanford IT department that got like death threats, I think, or like really mean emails at least for like this thing they put on the Slack.

They're like, what happened?

Right.

I interviewed a bunch of them to like find out what happened.

And they were all just like, their first word to me was always like,

their Christmas is ruined.

Right.

And for them, it sucks.

For the, for the Banmi kids in Oberlin, it sucked.

But it can also be exciting.

And for Jordan Peterson, it made him rich.

For some people, it validates their own narcissism.

For others, it's just a fun way to get back at their colleagues, right?

Like, for some, it may even be bad, but like still, the lure is there.

Hey, what if we lost all sense of proportion and just kind of blew this the hell up?

That's what cancer culture allows us to do.

With that, I think it might be a good time to move to Q ⁇ A.

Yeah.

Hi.

Hi.

So before I even ask my question, I...

I got a little lost with a sea of anecdotes and dates and names.

You never gave us like a one sentence of what the main argument of your book is.

So before I ask my question, I just want to confirm, if I understood correctly,

your main argument is that the media and certain portions of society are blowing out of proportion the importance of the cancel culture.

Is that?

That's right.

I would say that my argument is not that they're blowing out of proportion.

They're misdefining it.

They're basically creating this object of cancer culture doesn't really exist in that way.

There are aspects of this problem that exist, right?

People are too easily fired.

People online get mad too quickly.

That's definitely true.

But the moniker cancer culture makes a bunch of assumptions about that that are incorrect.

So, as an object, it doesn't exist.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, my question is: you just kind of actually addressed that a little bit.

So, there are people who are losing their jobs, there are people losing their careers.

people that basically their entire lives tank because of cancer culture.

Yeah.

Sometimes they didn't even get a chance to defend themselves.

And so I'm questioning how can you

kind of be a bit blasé about the whole thing?

And not only that, but there seems to be such a chill on what, particularly in your field, in academia, what teachers are able to say, write, even the curriculum that they choose.

There are professors who would not accept a female student's dissertation as their advisor, their mentor, because they don't want to spend too much time one-on-one with a female student because that could somehow backfire on them.

I mean, there are all kinds of terrible things as a result of this.

So I'm just wondering, how come you think it's all a bit kind of blown out of proportion?

Yeah,

I do think it's all blown out of proportion.

I'll go in reverse order.

The complaint that you can't say anything on college campuses anymore is 45 years old.

The claim that certain things cannot be taught anymore is 40 years old.

This is the Western canon debate of the 80s.

It's not true.

You can teach anything you want on a college campus.

You know, you may need to defend it, but you can teach anything.

You gave the example, the last example.

I hadn't heard about dissertations.

I have heard about...

people keeping the door ajar, door open to their office when they are meeting with a female student because the fear is that she might claim sexual harassment, right?

Yeah, that would be a problem.

That is a very chilling thing.

Um, there is a book behind you.

There's a Tom Gunn biography right here by Michael Knott that mentions a letter from Tom Gunn mentioning that Ivor Winters warned him about this and said, You should keep your door open when you meet with female students.

You don't want to be accused of sexually harassing them.

This was, I believe, in 1959.

These tropes are old.

They are very old.

The claim that this is now happening more is an artifact of the fact that we look for this data when we have these modish terms like PC, like cancer culture.

And the fact is these problems have been diagnosed and described since the 1950s.

We're always told it's going to get worse and worse and worse.

The wolf has not yet shown up.

Let's put it this way.

Now, I do not say that it's not a problem if someone loses their job, but cancer culture as a term makes a couple of claims.

It says A, people lose it for voicing their opinion.

It says B, it's usually conservative opinions lost because lefties and students have done something.

And then the third thing is that it's getting worse, that this is basically something that is a new dimension.

Now, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education collects this data.

There are sometimes upticks, but the number of people losing their jobs for protected speech until quite recently was extremely steady.

It ticked up in 2022 thanks to Ron DeSantis.

The uptick is due to right-wing efforts and they're not efforts from students.

They're efforts from state governments, from governors.

And I wouldn't describe that as cancel culture.

That's censorship.

If my boss fires me, that's not cancel culture, right?

Like if Twitter fires me, yes, I grant you, that would be the definition of cancel culture.

If it's the person who signs my paycheck, or if the state legislature wants me gone, that is state-mandated censorship.

We have a good word for that.

That is a huge problem.

I'll I'll grant you that.

It's not cancel culture.

Second point,

the number of people in the FHIR database who have lost their job because of a student effort is minuscule.

The number one way, if I want to get fired from Stanford University tomorrow, I can probably do it.

The way I would do it is not to piss off my students.

I mean, I don't even know what I would do.

I could think of some things, but like they would be crimes.

They would be crimes.

If I want to get really just canned for my speech, piss off a donor, right?

Donors Donors tend to be extremely powerful at American institutions or piss off a state legislature if I'm at a state school, right?

Very easy to lose your job that way.

They don't tend to be very left-wing.

They don't tend to be particularly woke.

They tend to be right-wingers who are pissed off about

left-wing speech, right?

Another one would be probably to piss off a dean.

That's another pretty good thing.

Again, not sure that's cancer culture.

That is a problem.

I wouldn't deny that.

but not what we mean by cancer culture, right?

Like, so I don't know if I've addressed everything, but I would say that these are my main points.

This is a long-described problem.

The recency bias on this is enormous.

And at the same time, it makes us blind to things that really are rising in our society.

The fire database for something like 2021-22 is going to have like something like 15 to 20 people losing their jobs at American universities on 5,000 campuses.

That's...

It's not nothing.

For these people, that's obviously awful.

And I think one case is one too many.

I would agree with you on that.

At the same time, West Virginia University detenured and fired 140 professors as one university.

So cancer culture directs attention.

I'm not here to tell you that campuses are a great place to live and be, right?

Like there's a lot amiss on American campuses.

What cancer culture does is directs our attention to certain things that happen on college campuses and they make us blind to others.

And I would argue that the threat that emanates from a man like Ron DeSantis, that comes from university presidents like the one at West Virginia University, that comes from people trying to take LGBT content out of libraries is far greater, and the numbers bear this out than by students who say, I don't like that this professor used the N-word in class, right?

So sorry, it's a long answer, but you really did rehearse a lot of what I talk about in the book.

And it's, I think the book is written with people like you and mine, because I can sense your worries and I think they're justifiable worries.

But I think that you do not serve those worries well by attaching them to the label cancer culture.

You will get misinformed and your attention will be misdirected is my suspicion.

And that's what I expressed in the book.

Nancy asks, could you expand on what you said about how cancel culture can be used to take reactionary stands on new ideas and make it seem heroic?

Yeah, the best example of this, oh, this is not just limited to language change, but one would be language change.

Refusing to go with a change in the language.

Right.

And this was very key to like the PC panic of the 90s, right?

Like, well, I may not, it may not be PC, but I I still use the word whatever.

And then it's what, basically, what you're doing in that moment, you're just talking the way you've always talked, but you're in that moment, right?

Think of how many comedy specials in the 90s were called politically incorrect, right?

Like people made their money being like, folks, I'm not particularly politically correct.

I still say this word and that word, like, and you can just, you can take it from my cold, dead hands or whatever, right?

Like, so it's a way to monetize and to kind of to exceptionalize, right?

Like language change is a tricky thing.

Some of it we go along with and some of it we don't sometimes because we don't want to and some of it because we kind of can't figure it out right like there's just like i'm not learning this this is too complicated right there's a moment when you're just like i don't care enough right to like to like learn this but what the pc label did was kind of give you a vocabulary for casting that in a heroic mold but that's true for a lot of things right A lot of people who present themselves as cancel victims in public discourse have attained a certain level in their particular fields.

We don't tend to speak of cancel culture when someone gets fired from Starbucks, for instance, right?

Cancel culture happens to editors.

It happens to very famous journalists.

It happens to the Matt Lauers.

It happens to your studio heads.

It happens to famous authors, right?

It happens to professors, right?

It doesn't happen to graduate students.

That's just called being fired, right?

It's a way to cast,

they're clinging on to existing hierarchies.

as something hero, right?

What they're saying is like, I shouldn't have been kicked out because like, I am too important.

I was the best editor that the

picking something at random here, New York review of books ever had.

You know, how dare you?

Right.

And so in some way, that's a structurally conservative argument.

It says our hierarchies are there for a reason.

People who have power in our society have it for a reason.

And you are wrong to try and take it away from them.

Absolutely fine position, but it is a conservative position.

But cancer culture allows you to cast that not as a conservative defense of the principle of hierarchy, but as a heroic stance for individual liberty, right?

Cancer culture is a base, a fairly libertarian discourse.

It treats Twitter like state overreach.

It's saying there's other people have too much power over us.

We want to be more independent.

In the end, though, it is a deeply community-dependent discourse because it says, hey, remember that power you invested in me 10 years ago?

I deserve that.

The power they withdrew from me last year, I didn't deserve that.

right so it does become this kind of funny mix of a libertarian conservatism and this kind of heroic individualism.

Leia asks, what's your take on how these moral panics die or at least subside back down to a baseline when funding dries up for Barry Weiss and Peterson type figures or just that each term, political correctness, cancel culture, woke, et cetera, gets hollowed out and runs out of energy?

That's a great question.

There's one part I can answer.

Barry Weiss and Jordan Peterson will never run out of funds.

This is part of what has sustained this panic for so long in its new guises.

There is right-wing donor money attached to it, and there are people who make their living getting paid by that writing donor money.

I know that sounds a little conspiratorial, but all I'm saying is like there is someone drawing a paycheck at the Heritage Foundation bundling campus anecdotes.

That person is going to keep doing that.

as long as the checks roll in and Heritage has an interest in keeping that going, right?

So I think that is part of the problem.

But the other parts of this are more complicated.

I do think that they run out of steam fairly quickly.

Stanley Cohen said that basically he thought that moral panics really exhaust themselves fairly quickly just because that level of emotional pitch can't be sustained.

Now, I would say Stanley Cohen, me Twitter, right?

Like you can, we can sustain emotional pitch a lot better in the online age.

And that's a problem, right?

So I think these run longer.

I do think what makes Leah's question so interesting is I think that as I'm talking about this moral panic, I think it is running out of steam.

I think we're kind of getting to the tail end of it.

And you're starting to see kind of attempts to rebrand it.

There is already a French candidate for a replacement, right?

So cancer culture came to France, didn't succeed very well because the French think culture is a good thing.

So like they don't like the cancel culture.

It has to be this canceling.

And then they got Le Bouchisme.

They're like, yes.

And so they have like 40 books appeared on Le Bouchisme in like one year.

And then they have a new concept, and that's Islamo-Goshisma.

So Islamo-leftism.

And you're starting to see Islamo-leftism crop up in like the British spectator and like sort of the far-right rags in the UK.

That might be the next one.

And you're starting to see the points about like, oh, aren't our universities secretly in league with Hamas?

You're starting to see that sort of on Barry Weiss's substack and that kind of thing.

So that would be my guess.

That's the next one that's kind of warming itself up.

It's like doing stretches, courtside, and it's like, put me in coach, right?

And like, I wouldn't be shocked if that's the next one.

DEI was a brief one.

It didn't really sort of like, didn't seem to work that well.

I'm still not sure why some run out of juice faster than others.

It's really kind of interesting.

And we do have the gift of Chris Rufo, who is like.

narrating seeding these things and is like, yeah, it didn't work.

We tried the other one, right?

Like, I found this like on the Seattle public something or other, like public web, and like tried that one out for a while.

Right.

So Rufo is fantastic and sort of like kind of just talking you through the process, but that guy can't make this happen by himself.

These things work when non-right wingers agree that this is a problem, right?

So I don't quite know how that spark flies over and how it works.

I think that there is some element where I can sort of show in the book, like this is how this works.

And this kind of ping pong effect where like the US provides the examples and the anecdotes and the phrases for some time.

And then like the French can sort of take it over and volley it back.

Remember when we all got, when like American conservatives got freaked out about gender?

Like Europe had had that panic for like five years prior.

Europeans were like, whoa, like did you guys just like steal our thing?

Like we didn't know that it worked that way.

And like, yeah, it's bi-directional, right?

But then there are other aspects of it that are frankly kind of mysterious.

My guess is a lot will depend on where the Republican Party goes in the next, you know, 12 months.

But like, this isn't independent.

Just because I isolated in this and sort of just try to sort of like have pins on a map and like on a calendar, like I understand this doesn't happen in a vacuum.

This is deeply entwined with political actors who have their own thing going, right?

Like Rhonda Santis doesn't care about cancer call.

She cares about getting re-elected.

Other people care about selling newspapers.

Other people care about like not losing their job at the Heritage Foundation.

Other people care about like spending their gigantic fortune that they inherited and that they like need to blow through somehow.

Everyone has has a different set of priorities they bring to it.

And as those realign and shift, I mean, one thing I think that could dial these down is that the stock market took a take.

It might be as easy as that.

A lot of these places functions for endowments.

Like I know Stanford is suddenly like a lot less interested in like seeding new AI institutes when like our endowments in the toilet.

But I could imagine that like people like, well, the culture where stuff's not as important, let's lower taxes kind of thing.

So I'm sorry that I'm giving kind of a scattered answer, but the problem is there are a lot of things that flow into this.

And any of these dials could be determinative in like how long these things last, what they get succeeded by, and how the transition looks.

First of all, thanks.

I really appreciated the, particularly the answer to the questions.

I think the sides are clear.

I think it's the people in the middle that I wanted you to have a little more empathy with in the conversation.

Kolansky, Woody Allen, to me, they're people I want to talk about.

That's more confusing.

Like it's not as clear-cut as other other people yeah i didn't know quite where you were going with i have two daughters this issue of pronouns the issue of gender comes up they're at that age how do you have that conversation as a parent when you talk about the kind of flippant nature of both left and right wing media i think about the power of a movie like tar which i thought was brilliant but like actually confused me now based on this conversation thinking like well that movie really affirmed to me that there was an issue in colleges.

I was thinking it was so well made, and it was Hollywood, and someone wrote it, and people put money into it.

So, I think where I sit is, I appreciate particularly the response to this question and a little bit of the last.

But in the middle ground, we want to be able to have the conversation about cancelled culture because I think I felt you were a little flippant earlier.

You both were.

Canceled culture does exist.

And I think it's helpful to frame it for us a little more like people take advantage of it.

How much should we be worried about it?

You know, and it's very useful, this part of the conversation.

Well, yeah, at the same time, to go back to another moral panic, and this is, again, sorry, I keep coming back to this term, but I think it does help clarify something, right?

Like there was in the 80s a moral panic about stranger abductions.

Now, like there were stranger abductions and it was a huge problem.

It was not a numerically huge problem, but like, I mean, I have a child and like, it's the worst thing I could possibly imagine, right?

It doesn't mean that the discourse about it was helpful, right?

Because it often directed people's attention towards things that were useless, right?

The famous strangers with candy or your like unmarked white vans and away from things that people should be paying more attention to, like weird Uncle So-and-so, who like kind of keeps hanging out with the kids at Thanksgiving and the kids don't seem that comfortable with him, right?

Like, so I think we're quibbling over definitions here.

Like, I'm saying the cases and the difficulties and the awkwardnesses and the problems you describe are real.

But I think the moment you group them in that way, I think there are certain things that fall under the table.

It's like a three-card monty, right?

Where you like make the thing fall behind the table, right?

Like there's something already falling out of the discussion by the time you've committed to saying there is this one thing called cancel culture.

But we can probably say you already gave a good list of things that you feel

leery about.

And I think if you just stick with that list, you're actually much better off.

Because some of these things are similar to each other, some are not, right?

Like, as I say, language change is is one thing, right?

Gender is another, right?

That can be about language change, but it is not necessarily about language change.

The intergenerational aspect, the fact that there are some aspects of our children's lives, and now I have a three-year-old, I'm not anywhere near in the position you're in, I'm guessing, in terms of experiencing the alienation of like this person that I knew everything about.

I now am starting to have serious doubts about like, I don't, there are parts of their lives that are just inaccessible to me.

Naming that is important.

And sitting with that awkwardness and sitting with the ambiguities of that is very powerful.

Whether or not it gains anything by being connected to these other things

or whether that moralizes it too much and sort of makes it such that one way, one side or the other, right, either you who says cancer culture is real or let's say the other side that says like it's not.

I guess it's another question, like whether or not to just sit with, hey, there's this thing that we find difficult to talk about.

And maybe we have to talk about the difficulty, right?

I'm not sure what you gain from saying, and that is indicative of a broader thing in this culture, such as, right, Roman Polanski.

Like what Roman Polanski did is entirely separate from the difficulty of talking to one's children, right?

Like, so I would say in some way, being open and honest about lists and just saying, like, here's some things I've noticed.

Let's take them one by one is probably more helpful than trying to group them under this kind of modish moniker, I would say.

To give you one one example, it was between 2020 and 22, a very strange spate of firings at Starbucks of people who had served coffee to police officers.

And the police officers went on Twitter and said, this person wrote pig on my Starbucks cup.

And the people invariably got fired.

Starbucks, being a corporate employer, obviously hates bad publicity.

Turns out no one wrote pig on someone's Starbucks cup.

This didn't happen.

There were like 20 cases like this.

It's not huge, right?

But like 20 cases, none of them I've ever seen discussed as cancel culture, right?

Even though it would fit.

And that's what I mean.

Being fired from a job at Starbucks sucks, right?

Like losing an editorship for an academic journal, like you're not losing any money, but like these people lost their livelihood, right?

But it's not discussed as cancel culture because A, the people accusing were police.

We tend to credit police more than we credit an undergraduate who said this person said a slur to me.

And because it sort of didn't fit, right?

It didn't fit the story.

And that's that's what i mean right the movie tar is about a person who in a brutal way i mean unless i misunderstood the movie like abused her power right and drove someone to suicide right like i agree there are thorny issues raised by that movie but i wouldn't want to connect it to like not knowing how to use pronouns that person is making a perfectly human mistake lydia tar in the movie tar is somewhere beyond a perfectly understandable error.

We can still have to say, does she deserve what happens to her in the movie?

But it's on on a different register.

So that's what I would plead for.

Context dependence, specificity, local knowledge, right?

Situating it not in this international story of cancel culture, but in the very lived experience of what it's like to be in an American workplace, what it is to like to be in an American university, what it's like to be in an American family, right?

And suddenly the empathy, suddenly the knowledge, suddenly the context comes back in that I find cancel culture tends to magically make go away.

So it's a long answer, but that would be my answer.

Be comfortable with lists and saying they feel similar to me, but I acknowledge they're not 100% similar, right?

I think we have time for one more.

This is going to bring it down a notch.

A little niche.

I'm really curious about how you went about researching the book, how you collected that information, what information you sought.

Could you quantify it?

Were you able to quantify it?

And finally, you alluded to Twitter changing.

Like, what challenges did you face when that changed?

Yeah.

Having the, having

the

main place where a word you're studying is being used be acquired by a man child that destroys the API,

not recommended.

Zero out of 10 would not recommend, right?

That was bad.

At the same time,

I'm leery of using Twitter for this kind of of stuff anyway on account of like people also delete a lot of tweets there are a lot of people who automatically delete their tweets i tried to i basically in the book you kind of heard me do it i sort of said this is what i found that's the best i could do i didn't quantify anything i sort of said twitter was wonky even before elon musk showed up on this stuff i basically tried to sort of double check triple check things constantly what i did was cite individual instances and then say like here's what i found here's what i didn't find That is a qualitative method that I wouldn't recommend, but like unlike something like YouTube, which has good API, I found Twitter very difficult to work with.

What I did end up doing is kind of make a timeline, just sort of see like, how often am I seeing this, right?

When's my first French tweet?

When is my first German tweet?

When's my first tweet that's clearly from a UK vantage point?

When has J.K.

Rowling's name first come up, right?

It's not perfect, right?

Like, could there have been someone who went on a spree a month prior and I don't have it?

Yeah, absolutely possible.

And then I sort of tried to do sort of macro trends because I feel like with Twitter, you can't put too much weight on it.

So you just have to kind of go in the big picture and say, like, like what I was saying, like, I didn't find university.

That seems interesting.

Often it's easier to talk about an absence than about what's there.

Right.

So that's the Twitter piece of it.

I'm sorry if I can't give you a very good example.

YouTube is the great counterexample.

I'm working right now on an academic piece on the Depp Heard trial on YouTube.

YouTube is a dream.

Someone made an app that rips every comment ever made on a video.

It's beautiful.

It takes like an hour.

It's fantastic.

I mean, you have to still make sure it didn't like misread something that can happen, but like very rare.

It's very, very good.

But if this had been a YouTube phenomenon, I would have like jumped in the air and loved it.

What was the first methods question?

Oh, my, which is my general method.

My general method really was my number one source was LexisNexis.

I just kind of, I looked through where it showed up in newspapers, and then I would subscribe to certain newspapers that kept coming up to double check, because LexisNexis does not index every, like, right, some that want to get rich on their own, I kind of opt out of it.

And so I would sort of double check and be like, to make sure I wasn't kind of off entirely.

I would do analysis of like which sections in the newspaper this came in.

I would ask who the most frequent writers were.

I would look into what was the picture.

What did the picture legend say about like, right?

Because it's often the stuff that the editor writes, right?

Like not the writer themselves.

So that's kind of, that can tell you sort of where the paper is at, right?

Especially with dailies where this stuff happens very quickly.

People kind of can be unconsciously revealing of like, what's the first thing they think of is cancel culture, right?

Like, like, shit, it's 11.55 p.m.

We're going to print in half an hour.

What's our picture?

Right.

Like, oh, Roman Polanski, right?

Like, it is really, really telling.

what they reach for in that moment, right?

Because like, that's when we can be at our most unguarded in some way, when like five people get together and they're like, ah, quickly, say someone say something.

Someone say something cancelling, right?

That was something I would do.

The other thing I did was, is this going to be on YouTube?

Yeah.

Okay.

Some other things involved copyrighted material that I will not go into now.

My method was large corpus analysis, right?

The number one observation I made about cancel culture discourse was how much there was of it.

And I thought, I'm going to use that.

I'm not going to say what one person thought.

I'm not going to say what Yasha Munks thought.

I'm going to say what Anne Applebaum thinks.

I'm not going to say what Barry Weiss thinks.

I'm going to try and see what these people say in the aggregate.

And for that, luckily, in the age of the algorithm, we do have large corpus analysis.

My method was to accumulate large text databases and then run analysis on them and sort of look for co-occurrences, frequencies.

There's something called collocation.

So like, what is the word within five words of the word to cancel in an article?

What's the most likely word to show up.

That's the kind of thing.

I didn't end up writing most of that in the book, but that's what's behind, that's how I analyze these things.

That's how you sort of start noticing these patterns.

That's where I noticed that, like, yeah, at some point, the Europeans became convinced that cancer culture was not about politicians.

It's not about publishing.

It's not about journalism.

It was about the arts, right?

And that's when I could sort of pinpoint, like, this is when they started being convinced about the fact that it was about the university, right?

Like, and you could show that like two months prior, no one seemed to think it was about the university right and you can say that with a greater degree of confidence if you if you have these large corpora at your disposal which i did in non-copyright violating ways so does that answer your question or do you want me to go more granular yeah well we have run out of time so uh adrian congratulations again on a very compelling book and

moira thank you for doing the honors and thanks to all of you in the audience for joining us and those of you online thank you so much and thank you peter thank you Maura.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.