What Is Cancel Culture? (Part 1 of 3)

When does firing someone for their political views constitute standard business practice, and when does it become an example of cancel culture?

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About the Author

Julian Adorney is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving and protecting Western civilization. You can find him on X at @Julian_Liberty.

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There’s a lot of confusion about what cancel culture is and is not. This confusion is exacerbated by the tendency of some folks to say that everything they dislike is cancel culture. It’s fueled by partisans on every side too willing to dismiss their opponents’ views as hypocritical, rather than looking for the nuance or philosophical through-line in those views. The conversation is further muddied because some examples of cancel culture have even been prosocial, though this is far more rare than proponents of cancel culture would like to admit.

In this series, we’ll look at different facets of cancel culture and how those facets differ from traditional and prosocial actions undertaken by individuals or businesses, in order to provide a fuller answer to the question “What is cancel culture?” and why it’s (almost always) bad.

Last month, conservative commentator Candace Owens left The Daily Wire. When asked about her departure, Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro explained that there was a certain “Overton Window” of allowable views at the conservative institution. He stressed that The Daily Wire is a “publisher” with a “very strong editorial position on a wide variety of issues,” as opposed to a “platform” (like X or Locals) which “should have a very broad range of speech that it allows.” The implication is that The Daily Wire fired Candace Owens for holding or expressing views that were at odds with those of the editorial team or Shapiro himself.

Shapiro, an outspoken critic of cancel culture, faced accusations of hypocrisy following his comments. For example, in a video titled “Glenn Eviscerates Ben Shapiro’s Hypocritical Defense of Candace Owens’ Ouster,” liberal firebrand Glenn Greenwald said that people like Shapiro “make me sick. They cannot think in any form of principle whatsoever.”

I admire Greenwald, but I think he’s wrong on this one. There’s no hypocrisy in Shapiro both opposing cancel culture and also founding a media company that espouses a particular point of view.

There are significant differences between what Shapiro did and cancel culture. In this piece, however, I want to focus on the ideological question: When does firing someone for their political views constitute standard business practice, and when does it become an example of cancel culture?

I believe what Shapiro did is a cut-and-dry standard business practice. The Daily Wire was founded as a conservative outlet whose mission is to champion specific concrete beliefs and values. It’s not hypocritical for them to support free speech while severing ties with a commentator who promotes conflicting values. Would anyone accuse Mother Jones of engaging in cancel culture if they refused to hire someone who is pro-life and who wants to cut the social safety net, or if they fired a staff writer who developed those views?

Some time ago, I was let go by a libertarian think tank because my views had evolved to the point where I was no longer very libertarian. I was writing for them, my views changed, and at a certain point they stopped agreeing with what I was writing. This organization strongly opposes cancel culture. Is it hypocritical for them to stop funding a message they don't believe in? Of course not.

So, when does cutting ties over politics become cancel culture? I believe it occurs under one of two conditions.

First, it’s cancel culture when someone is fired for views that have no bearing on their work. For example, in 2020, bestselling children’s author Gillian Philip was fired for adding the hashtag #IStandWithJKRowling to her Twitter handle. Did her support for Rowling hamper her ability to write children’s books? That seems unlikely. Similarly, in 2021, actress Gina Carano was fired from The Mandalorian after making a social media post comparing being a Republican in Hollywood to being a Jew during the Holocaust. Agree or disagree with her sentiment, but did it interfere with her ability to act in The Mandalorian? Again, that seems unlikely, especially since Lucasfilm had planned to give her a spinoff show before her tweet and others like it surfaced.

In these cases, the underlying message was not, “Your political views are infringing on your ability to do the job for which we are paying you,” which would be justifiable. Rather, the message was, “Your political views are outside of our cultural milieu, so we’re firing you even though they have no bearing on your ability to do your job.” That’s cancel culture.

The second condition that qualifies something as “cancel culture” is related, and occurs when big-tent organizations fire or deplatform people for espousing views that many Americans hold. A prime example of this is when Bari Weiss was forced out of The New York Times due to a hostile work environment. She was a self-styled “centrist” whose primary sin seemed to be expressing support for Israel. If she had been forced out of National Review for being pro-choice, that would be one thing; nobody expects National Review to hire pro-choice commentators. But The New York Times promotes itself as a big tent, and Weiss had been initially hired to make it bigger. As she wrote in her resignation letter to The Times, “I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home.”

When The Times bills themselves as a big-tent organization but then creates a chilling atmosphere that discourages diversity of thought and subjects those who don’t toe the leftist line to harassment and bullying from colleagues and bosses, it represents a violation of their promise to their readers. “All the news that supports the left” would be a perfectly fine slogan for an openly leftist publication; but that’s not what The Times is selling.

This second condition is also met when universities chill speech and punish professors who don’t toe the ideological line. For instance, in 2022, law professor Ilya Shapiro was hired by Georgetown Law School as Executive Director of the Center for the Constitution. But when President Biden announced that he would only consider black women to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat, Shapiro took to Twitter to express concern about such blatant affirmative action. Georgetown Law’s response was swift and brutal. They launched an investigation into Shapiro’s offending tweet and placed him on administrative leave. Although they ultimately did not fire him—citing that he was not yet an employee when he made the tweet—they warned him that similar tweets in the future could get him fired.

Just like with The Times, Georgetown Law positions itself as a big-tent institution. Its goal is to train the next generation of lawyers, which necessarily involves exposing them to diverse perspectives and spirited debate. If Georgetown Law explicitly stated that its only purpose was to train leftist activists, then there would be no problem with its punishment of Shapiro. While the decision may be unwise, it wouldn’t be an example of cancel culture.

This second condition isn’t met when an organization has a narrow Overton Window and then operates within that window. It’s only met when an organization professes a large Overton Window and then fails to honor that promise.

But even when it’s not cancel culture, I’m not convinced that we need more conservative publications with narrow Overton Windows. When we create too many publications with narrow Overton Windows, we can inadvertently contribute to some of the same problems as those who participate in cancel culture.

Last month, Axios released a report titled “Shards of glass: Inside media's 12 splintering realities.” The report warned that the days of all Americans being bound together by a common media experience are long-gone. Instead, “America is splintering into more than a dozen news bubbles based on ideology, wealth, jobs, age and location.” The danger of all of these bubbles isn’t trivial. Axios warns that, “instead of Red America and Blue America, we’ll have a dozen or more Americas — and realities. This will make understanding public opinion, and finding common agreement, even more complex and elusive.” When we all retreat into our media bubbles, we lose the ability to talk to each other because we lose the common ground of shared facts and news stories that makes those conversations possible. As Axios warns, these media shards make it “much harder to make sense of the realities around you.”

Cancel culture (and while the above examples single out leftists, it’s worth noting that cancel culture is practiced by both left and right) is a big part of why a media ecosystem that once looked like a single bright mirror now resembles shards of broken glass. When big-tent institutions become hostile to non-leftist voices, we lose part of the common ground that used to bind us all together. When non-political institutions fire people for their political views, even our commercial landscape begins to come apart at the Red-Blue seams.

Instead of more shards of glass, I think we need more big-tent organizations founded by conservatives. Conservatives are justly wary of running afoul of O’Sullivan’s First Law (“All organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing”), and nobody wants to see The Daily Wire or National Review slowly morph into Mother Jones. However, there are ways to prevent this. For example, Braver Angels, a nonprofit where I volunteer that aims to reduce toxic polarization, prevents leftward (or rightward) shift by implementing a rule that every alliance, team, and committee has to be co-chaired by one Red (a Republican or someone who leans right) and one Blue (a Democrat or someone who leans left). Perhaps similar operating principles could allow the development of media publishers that don’t drift leftward.

Conservatives, libertarians, and other non-leftist thinkers should create more big-tent organizations willing to publish any idea as long as it’s interesting and well-reasoned. We need more institutions where people from across the political spectrum can hear their viewpoints both reflected and challenged. While cancel culture may be abating, building these institutions is still necessary to provide a voice for intellectuals and academics who have been punished for their political views. It would also help to undo some of the media fragmentation that cancel culture has contributed to.

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