25 times cancel culture was real - "Alastair Stewart, veteran broadcaster
Brian Leach, Asda tillworker
Christian Webb, schoolteacher
Danny Baker, veteran radio host
David Starkey, Tudor historian
Emma Nicholson, Booker Prize vice-president
Felix Ngole, social-work student
Gareth Roberts, Doctor Who writer
Gillian Philip, bestselling children’s author
Jake Hepple, welder
Martin Shipton, journalist
Maya Forstater, tax expert
Nick Buckley, charity director
Nigel Farage, radio host
Noah Carl, academic
Paul Embery, trade unionist
Rebecca Long-Bailey, shadow minister
Richard Page, magistrate and NHS trust director
Roger Scruton, philosopher
Sarah Champion, shadow minister
Stella Perrett, cartoonist Stella Perrett, cartoonist
Stuart Peters, Manx radio presenter
Tim Hunt, Nobel-prize winning biochemist
Toby Young, journalist and educator
Vanity Von Glow, drag queen"
From 2020. Even disagreeing with the left means you can lose your job
South Korea's toxic 'cancel culture' needs to change: Experts | The Straits Times - "One moment South Korean actor Kim Seon-ho was raving over a certain pizza brand in a hot-trending drama serial. The next, his face was removed from the brand's social media channels after he was caught in an abortion scandal. Hundreds of thousands of fans unfollowed him on Instagram within days. He was also pulled from a popular variety show and dropped from two upcoming films. The 35-year-old is the latest K-idol to be dragged down by the country's unforgiving "cancel culture", which has killed the careers of many scandal-plagued actors, singers, YouTubers and even sports stars... South Korean stars typically portray characters with such a pure and perfect image that when their supposed true colours are exposed - whether they are accused of bullying, sexual harassment, or in Kim's case, forcing an ex-girlfriend to go for an abortion - they drive fans away in droves... Sociologist John Lie, who has written a book about South Korean pop music and culture, told The Straits Times that K-pop and K-dramas "carry an unusual burden of people's yearning for ideals", and entertainment agencies try to satisfy this demand by debuting new stars with the same "pure" image. However, once they are embroiled in a scandal, advertisers will drop them because "there's a widespread belief that a 'polluted' celebrity 'pollutes' the brand", he added. "What makes (the cancel culture in) South Korea especially toxic is its digitally connected nature," said Professor Lie, who teaches at University of California, Berkeley (UCB)... For Kim, the scandal was triggered by an anonymous post on Oct 17. He issued a statement saying he had apologised to his ex, and she responded in a post saying that she has forgiven him. More twists ensued when it was revealed that the abortion was a mutual decision, and that she was allegedly seeing other men while dating him. Unlike those before him, Kim's "cancellation" appears to be short-lived. After it was revealed that he was not the horrible boyfriend that the post made him out to be, fans returned to his social media accounts and at least three advertisers have reinstated his presence on their social media accounts. Mr Heo Young-hoon, culture director of news portal PS News, noted that Kim's private life "became a social problem overnight" due to widespread media propagation, leading many netizens to "attack and criticise (him) indiscriminately" before the truth was revealed... Beauty magazine publisher Lee Hye-jin has also urged against condemning a celebrity who has not broken the law. She noted that many South Korean celebrities have been condemned due to controversy over their personal life, and many of them made the extreme decision to quit because they could not stand the harsh criticisms. "Is it reasonable to demand such a high level of morality from celebrities who entertain the public by acting, singing and dancing?" Ms Lee asked. "If the wronged parties have forgiven them, the accusation should stop and so should public criticism. If we kick celebrities with cancel culture whenever personal privacy issues arise, we'll probably lose a lot of great actors and singers." Prof Lie also called for better protection of the privacy of South Korean celebrities."
From 2021. Aka "Cancel culture in South Korea far too toxic, say experts"
Will Stancil on X - "The US has one of the more progressive governments in the world right now - at least to the extent it’s run by Democrats. And while talking about the “inherent” ideological composition of a country is more complex, recent elections suggest we’re basically a center-left country."
jz on X - "bro is talking about the most genocidal regime in history and pushing his glasses up to say um actually 🤓☝️"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Someone said this yesterday, but: one of the reasons cancel culture was so initially successful was that normie bosses and editors didn't understand that online and campus leftists literally just say anything. They'd see an accusation of something very serious - racism, "facism," rape/SA, "pedophilia," hate crime - and assume real evil HAD to underlie it. Nah. These are people who call Will Stancil a Nazi and the Joe Biden USA the most genocidal rightist regime in history. They cray."
Commies keep claiming there is no left wing party in the US - because to them, being left wing means communism
Wedding Ceremony “Takes Over” Independent Cafe, Owners Say Fear Of Social Media Backlash Stopped Them From Intervening - "A viral post on social media is sparking debate and discussion after a small coffee shop in Indianapolis revealed a large group of people had “taken control” of their venue for an unbooked, unannounced wedding. The Mansion Society is a small, independent coffee shop operated in Indianapolis, Indiana. According to their website, the cafe, which is located at the historic Central State Hospital in the Hawthorne neighborhood, is owned and operated by a mother-daughter duo with a passion for serving their community. But what is usually a quiet local favorite for snacks and drinks has now garnered international attention after revealing they had been the victims of a rogue wedding. In an Instagram post made on January 1, the coffee shop details their bizarre ordeal... The post states that the Mansion Society had also been scared of stopping the wedding party due to fears of being cancelled on social media. “The social media backlash could have been cancel worthy if spun the right way,” the post reads, including a short snippet of the wedding ceremony taking place, and screenshots of an email the cafe owners had sent to the bridal party after managing to get in touch. The newlywed couple in the situation reportedly offered the cafe a “donation” of $200 to compensate them for the use of the space, which is over $300 less than the event booking fee the Mansion Society typically charges. The cafe rejected the offer, noting that the $200 was not only less than the base fee, but also didn’t include the minimum consumption requirement or any fees associated with preventing paying customers from accessing the business. Despite taking over the coffee shop for approximately 90 minutes, the wedding party guests only ordered a total of 6 lattes and four croissants while leaving no tips for the workers who were also attending to their personal items. Screenshots of the Mansion Society’s posts have begun circulating on X and prompting widespread discussion, with some users speculating that race was a factor in the small business being too afraid to stop the impromptu event."
Aaron Sibarium on X - "According to one theory, “cancel culture” will end once there is mutually assured destruction—meaning it is in the right’s interest to cancel liberals somewhat indiscriminately. This is the game theoretic argument of linked tweet. According to another theory, cancel culture is not (just) a product of incentives but of shared habits and assumptions—the taken-for-granted social scripts that govern universities, C-suits, and the rest of professional America. We are about to discover which of these theories is right."
Judge Judy talks cancel culture, Derek Chauvin trial and how she negotiated $47million salary - "Judge Judy believes Cancel Culture has made America a 'frightening place to be' where people are afraid of voicing their opinions... 'To have a fear of speaking your opinion, for fear of being put on somebody's list and canceled? It's a frightening place for America to be,' Sheindlin told The Hollywood Reporter. 'I'm not a big fan of the PC police.' 'Is it PC to say to people who are 19 or 23 years old, have no job, no prospects and six children, "Find something else to do with that organ"? No. But where I come from, I've seen the ravages of that kind of neglect,' she added... Sheindlin also ridiculed proposals to expand the Supreme Court after Donald Trump was able to seat three judges during his three years in office. She said: 'It’s a dumb idea. We’ve worked brilliantly in this country with the Supreme Court exactly the way it is. Changing it makes absolutely no sense to me, except politically. 'As vacancies become available, the next crop may represent one view and it may not. Judges very often become chameleons when they take the bench.'"
‘Cancel Culture’ is just free speech holding others accountable
Of course, holding the left accountable is "harassment" and "hate speech". As usual, this pretends that boycotts are the same as cancelling, to draw a false equivalence between the left and right
Cancel Culture Cuts Both Ways - The Atlantic - "Much of the debate about “cancel culture” has focused on people targeted for offending left-wing sensibilities. But the same dynamics can evidently also operate against left-wing activists, particularly those critical of Israel’s response to Hamas’s terror attack... At one university after another, collective letters have denounced Israel or called for an immediate cease-fire without a word of condemnation for Hamas’s mass killing or any call for the release of more than 200 people held hostage in Gaza. One such letter, signed by some of Columbia University’s most prominent academics, describes the worst murder of Jews since World War II as a “military action.” The Onion headline blithely implied that there was nothing wrong with this form of moral blindness... principled defenders of free speech must be willing to stand up for those who cause offense even if their past comportment has been less than perfect. Many institutional leaders and public figures will have made some kind of misstep or controversial decision in the past; if institutions can retroactively identify some such excuse in order to justify firing somebody who engages in unpopular speech today, they will be able to censor at will... The space for free speech in American life has been shrinking. A professor was removed from her teaching post for offending the religious convictions of her students. For several months, Facebook banned from its platform discussion of the coronavirus lab-leak theory. Private companies have turned into self-appointed censors, severing their relationships with clients because of the views they have hosted or expressed. The left was once known to be a stout defender of the First Amendment. But lately many on the left have either excused or even welcomed severe limits on free speech. When companies have fired employees for controversial political speech, progressives have pointed out that the First Amendment does not cover the actions of private businesses. And when free-speech advocates have warned about the illiberal effects of cancel culture, some progressives have argued in favor of a new “consequence culture” that would, they hope, serve to discourage what they regard as harmful speech. As Denise Branch, a self-described anti-racism consultant cited in a Forbes article, said, “‘Consequence culture’ is needed to build safer, more inclusive, equitable and accountable workplaces.” Others have claimed that left-wing critiques of free speech are an invention of right-wing culture warriors. Eisen himself used to be one of these cancel-culture deniers. “Has anyone, anywhere actually been cancelled?” he tweeted as recently as March 2022... Eisen is especially concerned about institutions’ failure to stick by their principles when under external attack. “What happened with me, and with lots of other people, is that organizations don’t like being involved in controversies,” Eisen told me. It is, he pointed out, incredibly easy to create controversy online. So “if the standard for an organization is that we will get rid of anyone who creates controversy, that has a very bad effect on speech.” Eisen worries about the unfair effect this has on those who get on the wrong side of a social-media mob. But he is even more worried about the prohibition on expression that such cancellations impose on everyone else. “This is sending a message to lots of people that you’re only one political expression away from being fired,” he told me. The lesson that many rational people take from that, he believes, is that “if you value your job, you can’t speak out on anything.” If we allow the new restrictions on free speech to stand, our institutions will suffer, and “we’ll just have more and more chaos—or institutions are going to be run by complete dullards.” The logical end point of cancel culture is a race to the bottom that pits different groups against one another... Rather than encouraging greater harmony, a “consequence culture” for supposedly offensive views will end with everyone convinced that they’re being persecuted. The only way out of this crisis is to embrace a principled defense of free speech... “How are we ever going to have a functioning institution,” he asked, “if we cave to this sort of public pressure on a whim?”"
The Latest Victims of the Free-Speech Crisis - The Atlantic - "Protecting free speech requires defending the rights of both sides of any conflict. That will only get harder if we ignore just how long colleges have been falling short. Today’s headlines can distract from the fact that campuses have been in crisis for the better part of a decade. Since 2000, FIRE has tracked incidents in which professors have been targeted for their speech. We’ve found that, until 2014, academics had little reason to self-censor, even when discussing the day’s most controversial topics. In the five years after 9/11, for example, more than a dozen professors faced calls to be fired, investigated, or otherwise sanctioned for statements they made about the attacks. These included Ward Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who compared the World Trade Center victims to a Nazi war criminal, as well as the University of New Mexico professor Richard Berthold, who told his class, “Anyone who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote.” Only three ended up losing their job—including Churchill—each for reasons that went beyond protected speech. From 2014 to July of this year, by comparison, we’ve counted more than 1,000 campaigns to investigate or punish scholars for their views. About two-thirds of them succeeded, resulting in almost 200 firings and hundreds of other sanctions. These numbers are almost certainly an underestimate. According to a national survey of nearly 1,500 faculty commissioned last year by FIRE, one in six professors reports having been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech, and one in three said they’ve been pressured by colleagues to avoid researching controversial topics. This is what I, along with my co-author, Rikki Schlott, document in our new book, The Canceling of the American Mind. We found that the censorship people are alarmed by now is really business as usual. Cancel culture—which I define as campaigns to get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is, or would be, protected by the First Amendment—has been pervasive for years, not weeks. The phenomenon kicked off in 2014 and ramped up starting in 2017, right as Gen Z, the first generation to grow up with social media, began entering higher education in massive numbers. Some have described the recent sanctioning of pro-Palestinian advocacy as a “new McCarthyism.” But even McCarthyism didn’t seem to cause as much damage on campuses as we’ve seen in the past decade. According to the largest study at the time, about 100 professors were fired over a 10-year period during the second Red Scare for their political beliefs or communist ties. We found that, in the past nine years, the number of professors fired for their beliefs was closer to 200. In the late 1950s, when McCarthyism ended, only 9 percent of social scientists said they had toned down anything they had written because they were worried it might cause controversy. Since then, self-censoring has grown even though legal protections for professors have improved... last year’s FIRE survey found that 59 percent of professors are at least “somewhat likely” to self-censor in academic publications. With respect to publications, talks, interviews, or lectures directed to a general audience, that figure was 79 percent. And the problem continues to get worse: 38 percent of faculty said they were more likely to self-censor at the end of 2022 than they were in September 2020. A 2021 report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found that a staggering 70 percent of right-leaning academics in the social sciences and humanities self-censor in their teaching or research. It seems to me that the only major difference between the past few weeks and the past decade has to do with who is finally acknowledging the problem. People who once claimed that cancel culture doesn’t exist—or that it’s really just “accountability” or “consequence” culture—are lamenting the issue now that they agree with the group suffering the consequences. Indeed, ideology plays an important role in how campus speech is treated. The specifics of each case vary significantly, but FIRE data show that pro-Palestinian speech has generally been more likely to trigger campaigns to get professors fired, investigated, or sanctioned than pro-Israel speech has. Campaigns targeting pro-Israel speech, however, have been more likely to succeed. Similarly, more attempts have been made to deplatform pro-Palestinian speeches on campus, but attempts against pro-Israel speakers have been more successful. In fact, all substantial and successful disruptions of campus speeches that FIRE has recorded on this issue have targeted pro-Israel advocacy. This might partly be explained by the fact that pro-Palestinian—and even pro-Hamas—sentiments are relatively common on campus and among college-aged Americans. If we want to defeat cancel culture and preserve free speech and academic freedom on campus, we need to recognize it regardless of its victims. Those decrying today’s so-called new McCarthyism will have to acknowledge just how long it’s been going on—not only for the past 40 days, but for the past nine years."
The left used to claim the Campus Free Speech Crisis was a myth, so they're going to have to do a lot of backpedalling now, and it won't be so easy to pretend that they're the victims of Conservative Persecution. Meanwhile they'll pretend that pro-Israel speech needs to be suppressed because that's what decent human beings do
Stop Firing the Innocent - The Atlantic - "As companies and organizations of all sorts have scrambled to institute a zero-tolerance policy on racism over the past few weeks, some of them have turned out to be more interested in signaling their good intentions than punishing actual culprits. This emphasis on appearing rather than being virtuous has already resulted in the mistreatment of innocent people—not all of them public figures or well-connected individuals with wealth to cushion their fall. What happened to Emmanuel Cafferty is an especially egregious example... When he came to a halt at a traffic light, another driver flipped him off. Then, Cafferty told me a few days ago, the other driver began to act even more strangely. He flashed what looked to Cafferty like an “okay” hand gesture and started cussing him out. When the light turned green, Cafferty drove off, hoping to put an end to the disconcerting encounter. But when Cafferty reached another red light, the man, now holding a cellphone camera, was there again. “Do it! Do it!” he shouted. Unsure what to do, Cafferty copied the gesture the other driver kept making. The man appeared to take a video, or perhaps a photo. Two hours later, Cafferty got a call from his supervisor, who told him that somebody had seen Cafferty making a white-supremacist hand gesture, and had posted photographic evidence on Twitter. (Likely unbeknownst to most Americans, the alt-right has appropriated a version of the “okay” symbol for their own purposes because it looks like the initials for “white power”; this is the symbol the man accused Cafferty of making when his hand was dangling out of his truck.) Dozens of people were now calling the company to demand Cafferty’s dismissal. By the end of the call, Cafferty had been suspended without pay. By the end of the day, his colleagues had come by his house to pick up the company truck. By the following Monday, he was out of a job. Cafferty is a big, calm, muscular man in his 40s who was born and raised in a diverse working-class community on the south side of San Diego. On his father’s side, he has both Irish and Mexican ancestors. His mother is Latina. “If I was a white supremacist,” he told me, “I would literally have to hate 75 percent of myself.”... When Cafferty was wrongly accused of being a white supremacist, he fought hard to keep his job. He said he explained to the people carrying out the investigation—all of them were white—that he had no earthly idea some racists had tried to appropriate the “okay” sign for their sinister purposes. He told them he simply wasn’t interested in politics; as far as he remembered, he had not voted in a single election. Eventually, he told me, “I got so desperate, I was showing them the color of my skin. I was saying, ‘Look at me. Look at the color of my skin.’” It was all to no avail. SDG&E, Cafferty told me, never presented him with any evidence that he held racist beliefs or knew about the meaning of his gesture. Yet he was terminated... “A man can learn from making a mistake,” he told me. “But what am I supposed to learn from this? It’s like I was struck by lightning.” After Cafferty told his side of the story, the initial social-media vilification he had experienced gave way to a kind of embarrassed silence. The man who had posted a picture of the encounter on Twitter deleted his account and admitted to Priya Sridhar, a local news reporter, that he “may have gotten ‘spun up’ about the interaction and misinterpreted it.” Repeatedly asked whether they had any evidence that Cafferty was a white supremacist, had known the meaning of the inverted “okay” symbol, or had previously been reprimanded for his performance, SDG&E refused to answer. Nor did the company respond to my request for confirmation that the team that had investigated Cafferty was all white... Emmanuel Cafferty’s story is not one of a kind. Other companies, trying to prove to the public that they take racism seriously, have also sacrificed business partners or employees who likely did nothing wrong. David Shor, for example, was until recently a data analyst at a progressive consulting firm, Civis Analytics. (Emerson Collective, the majority owner of The Atlantic, is an investor in Civis Analytics.) Shor’s job was to think about how Democrats can win elections. When Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton, published a paper in the country’s most prestigious political-science journal arguing that nonviolent civil-rights protests had, in the 1960s, been more politically effective than violent ones, Shor tweeted a simple summary of it to his followers... Because the tweet coincided with the first mass protests over the killing of George Floyd, it generated some pushback. After a progressive activist accused Shor of “concern trolling for the purposes of increasing democratic turnout,” a number of people on Twitter demanded that he lose his job. Less than a week after he tweeted the findings of Wasow, who is black, Civis’s senior leadership, which is predominantly white, fired Shor... his 24-year-old daughter admitted to him that she had written a series of deeply racist and anti-Semitic posts on Twitter and Instagram starting when she was 14 years old until she was 18. An activist had drawn public attention to these posts after stumbling across an especially noxious one. That same day, Wadi did what he describes as “one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do in my life”: he fired his daughter from her position as the company’s catering director... Cafferty was punished for an offense he insists he did not commit. Shor was punished for doing something that most wouldn’t even consider objectionable. Wadi was punished for the sins of his daughter. What all of these rather different cases have in common is that none of the people who were deprived of a livelihood in the name of fighting racism appear to have been guilty of actually perpetuating racism... it would be a big mistake—especially for those who deeply care about social justice—to dismiss the fate of people such as Cafferty, Shor, and Wadi as a minor detail or a necessary price for progress. First, these incidents damage the lives of innocent people without achieving any noble purpose. Second, such injustices are liable to provoke a political backlash. If a lot of Americans come to feel that those who supposedly oppose racism are willing to punish the innocent to look good in the public’s eyes, they could well grow cynical about the enterprise as a whole. Third, those of us who want to build a better society should defend the innocent because movements willing to sacrifice justice in the pursuit of noble goals have, again and again, built societies characterized by pervasive injustice. One of the core tenets of liberal democracy is that people should not be punished for accusations against them that are unsubstantiated, for actions that are perfectly reasonable, or for offenses that were committed by others. No matter how worthy the cause they invoke, you should not trust anyone who seeks to abandon these fundamental principles."
Opinion | 10 Theses About Cancel Culture - The New York Times - "1. Cancellation, properly understood, refers to an attack on someone’s employment and reputation by a determined collective of critics, based on an opinion or an action that is alleged to be disgraceful and disqualifying.
2. All cultures cancel; the question is for what, how widely and through what means.
3. Cancellation isn’t exactly about free speech, but a liberal society should theoretically cancel less frequently than its rivals.
4. The internet has changed the way we cancel, and extended cancellation’s reach.
5. The internet has also made it harder to figure out whether speech is getting freer or less free.
6. Celebrities are the easiest people to target, but the hardest people to actually cancel.
7. Cancel culture is most effective against people who are still rising in their fields, and it influences many people who don’t actually get canceled.
8. The right and the left both cancel; it’s just that today’s right is too weak to do it effectively.
9. The heat of the cancel-culture debate reflects the intersection of the internet as a medium for cancellation with the increasing power of left-wing moral norms as a justification for cancellation.
10. If you oppose left-wing cancel culture, appeals to liberalism and free speech aren’t enough."
Meme - Jonathan Kay @jonkay: "delighted to hear that social-justice enforcers have set down a statute of limitations on blackface -photo outrage, because I've been sitting on some *dynamite* 35mm pics from my 1980s-era solomon shechter purim parties. y'see, I was a *big* Sidney Poitier fan"
Birgit Umaigba Omoruyi @birgitomo: "I don't know who needs to hear this - posting a 30year old picture of the PM wearing a blackface is racist and disrespectful to the Black community. If you think you're scoring political points by doing this, you are not. You're arrogant, and insensitive towards the Black people who have repeatedly told you this is harmful to us. I can understand mindless bots using this to spread hate, but shame on the so-called leaders/professionals doing the same. You will be blocked every single time because you are racist."
Calling out racism is racist when you're threatening the liberal agenda
Katharine McPhee breaks silence on Russell Brand interview and insists he was 'harmless' - "Katharine McPhee has slammed claims she looked "so uncomfortable" in a resurfaced clip of her sitting on Russell Brand's lap. The singer-songwriter, 39, has spoken out about the incident and said it was "harmless". In the clip, which comes from an episode of The Tonight Show in 2013, host Jimmy Fallon looked shocked as Russell grabbed Katharine and bounced her on his lap. The comedian, now 48, continued to flirt with Katharine before joking that he had to leave the stage after discovering she was married. The clip was shared on Instagram, where Katharine took to the comments to deny speculation she felt uncomfortable. "I know nothing what you are trying to claim here but this specific incident was over 10 years ago and it was harmless. Please don’t try and use me for whatever purpose you are trying to serve," she wrote. During their appearance on The Tonight Show, Russell failed to move out of the chair which was meant for Katharine. Instead, he grabbed her and she sat on his knee. The comedian told host Jimmy: "She's welcome to sit here." Shocked, Jimmy responded: "No Russell, don't even say for the Queen, you can't." The resurfaced video comes after Russell was accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse between 2006 and 2013 in a documentary. During this time, he was working for the BBC and starring in Hollywood films. Brand vehemently denies the claims."
Apparently there's no statute of limitations here, even if you make women feel uncomfortable seeing the "sexual assault"
HowlingMutant on X - "A black woman invented the telescope. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over? A black woman invented the telescope."
Alan Titchmarsh interview: ‘I’m terrified of being cancelled’ - "He’s particularly upset over what has happened recently to several prominent personalities he knows in daytime television who, for a variety of reasons, have recently been hounded out of their jobs. “It’s heartbreaking. Particularly for their families. As you get older you realise it’s an increasingly fragile path, because you can so easily be misconstrued. There are days when I think, do I really want to be putting my head up this parapet? I’m 75 next birthday.”"
