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.
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?
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