In Praise of Cancel Culture
Well, not praise, but acceptance
Cancel culture.
I’m sure you’ve heard of it.
And if you’ve heard of it, you’re also aware that it is divisive. Some think it goes too far. Others, not far enough.
I agree that cancellation places a lot of power in people’s hands. Sometimes — many times — that power is abused, by the right and the left.
But that doesn’t mean the banishment of certain words is wrong.
Former CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin (who has, shall we say, rubbed against cancel culture himself) cataloged, in a recent New York Times article, some of Donald Trump’s outrageous legal defenses, saying
Mr. Trump’s adversaries often look to the courts for relief, but there’s no remedy there for his tirades. The First Amendment protects all but the most explicit incitements to violence, so Mr. Trump has little reason to fear that prosecutors will bring charges against him for those remarks.
Later, Toobin gives a more serious example of this principle: Timothy McVeigh. He points out that, before his attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he was a devotee of The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel in which Earl Turner, the main character, sets off a truck bomb next to the F.B.I. building in…
