{"id":104559,"date":"2026-09-05T03:00:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T07:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=104559"},"modified":"2026-09-03T12:04:05","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T16:04:05","slug":"the-high-water-mark-of-cancel-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/the-high-water-mark-of-cancel-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"The high-water mark of Cancel Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Noahpinion piece<\/a> is from last year, but I hadn’t seen it before and I think it outlines fairly accurately why “we” allowed Cancel Culture to temporarily take over social media and cause so much personal damage to disfavoured individuals. It gave the mob the power to identify their own Emmanuel Goldsteins and drive them from the public sphere:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Arrest of Robespierre, The Night of the 9th to 10th Thermidor, Year II, 27th July 1794<\/em>
Colour engraving by Jean-Joseph-Fran\u00e7ois Tassaert (1765 – ca.1835) via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

I think about this when I think about cancel culture.<\/p>\n

Back in 2018, Bari Weiss got dogpiled on Twitter for an anodyne liberal tweet. Weiss congratulated Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu on pulling off a difficult move, quoting a line from the musical Hamilton about immigrants being great:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Weiss was viciously attacked for this tweet by thousands of people who called her racist over the course of several days. Why? Because Mirai Nagasu isn’t actually an immigrant \u2014 she was born in the U.S. According to Weiss’ many attackers, Weiss’ statement implied that nonwhite people are perpetual foreigners.<\/p>\n

That was, of course, complete hogwash. Nagasu’s parents are immigrants; the use of the term “second-generation immigrants” to describe the children of immigrants is utterly standard terminology in academic sociology. And by quoting a line from Hamilton in praise of a second-generation immigrant athlete competing on behalf of the U.S., Weiss was clearly advocating in favor of (nonwhite) immigration as something that makes America stronger \u2014 a very standard liberal viewpoint.<\/p>\n

Whether this particular pile-on had long-term negative consequences for Weiss’ life isn’t clear, but she encountered an increasingly hostile climate at the New York Times<\/em>, the paper where she worked, and eventually was forced to quit. It would have been reasonable for people observing that pile-on \u2014 and similar attacks directed at Weiss over the years \u2014 to conclude that speaking up is dangerous and that Twitter mobs hold a lot of real power.<\/p>\n

The perception that cancel culture was the progressive H-bomb \u2014 an invincible weapon that could be fired any time at anyone who didn’t conform perfectly to a set of progressive mores that had only emerged a few years ago \u2014 reshaped much of American society in the 2010s. Every organization in the country, from knitting circles to romance novelist associations to sci-fi conventions, had its internal hierarchy disrupted by the fear that disgruntled or opportunistic subordinates would take their grievances online and summon the dreaded cancel-mob against their superiors.<\/p>\n

Why was cancel culture both so powerful and so popular for those few years? The most obvious reason is that it worked<\/em>. If you were a progressive in 2018 who really believed that calling a second-generation American an “immigrant” was racist, then you could often effectively strike at that person by raising a hue and cry about them on Twitter. Companies were afraid of boycotts, of course. But beyond that, the Gen Xers who ran those companies came from an age when having a thousand people yelling in your face meant that you were in grave danger; corporate managers would often cave out of pure fear of online negativity.<\/p>\n

Another reason was that cancel culture was a quick route to online clout. As Eugene Wei wrote in his famous blog post “Status as a Service (StaaS)<\/a>“, social media offers most people the opportunity to get much more social status than they have any hope of getting in their daily lives, if they happen to get lucky and go viral and become an influencer.<\/p>\n

But to get that clout, you have to stand out. Attacking the same old progressive targets \u2014 Donald Trump, Republican senators, conservative influencers \u2014 is a low-yield activity, because the field is too competitive. Everyone attacks those people. But finding more novel targets for mob attack \u2014 like an NYT<\/em> writer who calls a second-generation American an “immigrant” \u2014 can be a high-yield activity. It’s basically outrage entrepreneurship<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Of course, this means that there was an incentive for progressive purity spirals<\/em> and tent-shrinking<\/em>. If you’re a progressive looking for new people to denounce, the most tempting targets are probably center-left liberals who have heretofore been safe from cancellation. Hating Donald Trump is old news. But hating Matt Yglesias? That could get you some real attention!<\/p>\n

And so the ranks of the online cancel-mobs were probably also swollen by people who participated in the mobs out of fear that if they didn’t, they too would be canceled. This gave rise to a phenomenon I call ponzi screaming<\/em> \u2014 berating the person immediately to your right on the political spectrum, out of fear that if you don’t berate them, people further to your left will berate you<\/em>. You have people like the progressive online shouter and failed Congressional candidate Will Stancil berating Nate Silver even as he gets frequently dogpiled and berated by leftists.<\/p>\n

Between outrage entrepreneurship, purity contests, and ponzi screaming, late-2010s progressive cancel culture started to look like a farcical imitation of the French Terror or the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The stakes were obviously much lower \u2014 losing your job is a lot less bad than losing your head \u2014 but many of the social dynamics and behavior patterns were recognizably similar. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This Noahpinion piece is from last year, but I hadn’t seen it before and I think it outlines fairly accurately why “we” allowed Cancel Culture to temporarily take over social media and cause so much personal damage to disfavoured individuals. It gave the mob the power to identify their own Emmanuel Goldsteins and drive them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[1611,459,456,1020,593,1238],"class_list":["post-104559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-2010s","tag-censorship","tag-hysteria","tag-progressives","tag-socialmedia","tag-virtuesignalling"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-rcr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104559"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104563,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104559\/revisions\/104563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}