Katha Pollitt writes:

Cancel culture—which I’m loosely defining here as a climate that encourages disproportionate social and/or work-related punishment for speech—doesn’t exist. Well, OK, it exists on the right: Look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks and Colin Kaepernick and that assistant principal in Mississippi who read the picture book I Need a New Butt to his students. Conservatives are always canceling people. But on the left? That’s just people holding you accountable for some awful thing you said. What could be wrong with that? Besides, no one is seriously, irreparably hurt. Look at J.K. Rowling: Despite the best efforts of Twitter, she’s still a billionaire and one of the most popular writers ever.

Those who argue that cancel culture is a myth claim that no one has really been injured by it. A few people might lose their jobs, but they get new ones. Bari Weiss claimed she was bullied out of The New York Times, and now she’s the Queen of Substack. The columnist Suzanne Moore, who left The Guardian after 338 of her colleagues signed a letter clearly aimed at her, accusing the paper of producing “transphobic content,” soon surfaced at The Telegraph. Yes, someone might lose a prize or an opportunity to give a talk or be on a panel, but no one has a right to those things. After the lesbian memoirist Lauren Hough praised her friend’s forthcoming novel, which some tweeters accused of transphobia, and then got into an expletive-filled Twitter fight about it, she was either not nominated or de-nominated for a Lambda Award. But hey, she can always write another book.

The journalist Adam Davidson responded to a rather woolly New York Times editorial decrying cancel culture: “Can one of you believers in cancel culture just write one piece that gives evidence and doesn’t just speak to a feeling you have? Maybe some data that helps your readers know the size and scale of this problem? Also, some examples of people actually fired?”

It’s true that numerous writers have published pieces about “a feeling they have,” i.e., a fear of dire consequences for expressing themselves freely. A lot of people responded to Davidson with specific examples, though, including me. His response: The supposedly canceled are doing fine, and anyway there aren’t very many of them. But in fact, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has documented hundreds of cases across the political spectrum in academia alone—firings, demotions, lengthy investigations, and so on—which is more than enough to make others wary. And pace Davidson, not everyone sails happily on. [Continue reading…]