Why Does Nobody Care About the Power Dynamics?

It would be amusing, the American Right fully embracing cancel culture, if it weren’t so dangerous.

I have been reading lately about how the same people who championed “free speech” during the moral panic over left wing “cancel" culture” are now championing that very same social pressure they once objected to. (I have to read about this because I have removed myself from most social networks and so don’t see as much of this stuff as I used to. I am on the social network that is supposedly the most cancelly of them all, Blue Sky, and don’t really notice it so much as I notice people mocking it. But I likely tune a lot of people out or don’t follow the “right” people.)

I particularly liked Jeremiah Johnson’s take, “Everyone is pro-Cancel Culture.” Because it’s true, everybody has a line. Everyone at some point thinks somebody else should be censored and censured.

Virtually nobody is pro absolute free speech, where anyone could say literally anything in any situation and face zero consequences. I bet even the most libertarian libertarians or anarchist anarchists have lines they don’t think should be crossed, they just aren’t self-aware enough to know what they are. (And if you think you’re a free speech absolutist, ask yourself if you think somebody should be allowed to point at your child and tell a group of angry people your child should be tortured or killed or some other awful thing. Of course you don’t think that should be allowed. But that’s what absolute free speech entails. Absolute individual rights are extremist and stupid and have no place in society.)

Anyway, I’ve appreciated the push-back I’ve seen from some (mostly on the left) to those on the right and in the centre claiming that what is happening in the US right now is not “cancel culture.” If what happened in the 2010s and into the 2020s was cancel culture, this is cancel culture but a much worse form of it. (It’s also naked hypocrisy.)

But one thing I think is missing in the takes that I’ve seen pointing out how this is indeed cancel culture is a discussion of power dynamics. And I find that frustrating. So I will talk about it.

The Public is Always Intolerant

A number of years ago, I remember a graphic that captured online outrage really well, I think it was from The New York Times. It was 365 different images, one image for each day of the year, representing what was the thing giving the most offense on social media that day. And this was years ago, arguably way ahead of its time.

But the thing is, the internet didn’t invent people being angry about some perceived norm violation in society.

Rather, it’s literally how humans behave. Every society throughout history has shamed people for perceived norm violations. We have all experienced shaming at some point in our daily lives offline and it is something that everyone (or nearly everyone) who has ever lived has experienced. Sometimes it comes from family or friends, but sometimes it comes from society at large.

And once publics can be said to exist, “the public” has indeed participated in this. Arguably, once “the public” became something tangible through mass media, the public became the primary means through which shaming for perceived norm violations could be enforced.

But there’s a key difference, as far as I can tell, between traditional public intolerance and intolerance online. Prior to the internet, shaming for perceived norm violations was a means of enforcing the status quo much of the time. Mass movements began to change this - by attempting, not always successfully, to appeal to different norms than those of the status quo - but it was always an uphill battle.

But the internet lets anyone get publicly upset about anything and to share their outrage with thousands of other people across the entire world. The internet lets people who have little to no real world power or influence unite together, especially in their outrage. (Social media obviously encourages uniting in outrage.) And it lets those with little to no real world power or influence shame people for norm violations. Only now, those norms are not necessarily the norms embodied by the status quo.

And I think this change is very hard for people to accept, especially elites. Elites have traditionally harnessed public intolerance to their own ends. (It has also been directed at elites on occasion but, mostly, public tolerance has been a force for preserving the status quo, which benefits elites.)

And that brings me to the “cancel culture” of the 2010s and early 2020s.

Was 2010s “Cancel Culture” Really Such a Big Deal?

You may or may not agree with me that the concern over left wing “cancel culture” in the 10s and early 20s was a moral panic. But I believe it was a moral panic for a number of reasons:

• Many of the people who were “cancelled” just got yelled at on the internet and otherwise didn’t experience serious real-world consequences to their lives and careers. Of course some people did, but that’s why I think it the extent of the it was exaggerated. We could list out all the celebrities who were “cancelled” and see how they’re doing now. It’s the regular people who sometimes faced real world consequences that were hard to overcome. (Someone I went to high school with lost his job, I believe, due to saying some things on Facebook. But he worked for the government, if I remember correctly, and he was talking about taxpayers. Publicly. So…) Why I think it was a moral panic is because I don’t know how many regular people actually had their careers and lives ruined by “cancellation.” Because if it’s tens or hundreds or, get this, even thousands, that is way out of proportion with the degree of moral panic we all had to listen to. (There are 1.5 billion English speakers in the world.)

• A number of people who were “cancelled” successfully or semi-successfully had actually committed real crimes which had been ignored by police and their social circles. So, in very specific instances, there was an actual reason for people to be upset on the internet and to be calling for heads. Does anyone think the people who got upset about Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein and publicly demanded consequences for them went too far?

• The size of the impact was hugely exaggerated by nearly anyone who discussed “cancel culture” online. To pick one area where it was really popular to talk about how the kids were out of control, there are nearly 5000 colleges and universities in the US, with faculties of varying sizes but some of which are in the thousands. As far as I can tell, there have been 1600 incidents of attempted cancellation of American academics over the last 25 years. Is that a big enough phenomenon to justify the panic that we all had to live through? Really? (The rate of “cancellations” of faculty per any given year in the United States is [cancellations that year, which is more or less than 133, depending on the year]/(5000*[average faculty size of an American university or college]), which is not a very big number, folks.)

• Finally, the wrong people were often blamed for “cancelling” people and brands. So often institutions and companies reacted to a little bit of bad press on social media or a small protest like these people represented a large share of the population and would fire someone or what have you. There used to be this old adage in radio (I believe), where, if you received one complaint letter you treated it as if it represented 10,000 listeners. This was ridiculous then but it’s far more ridiculous now that people don’t have to physically mail their complaints. It’s so much easier to complain directly now! Brands and institutions are incapable of understanding what social media attention represents. (This is true in marketing as well where, for too long, people got excited about impressions and likes as if they were somehow going to lead to sales.) If you think cancel culture from the left was a real problem worthy of correction, the people you should be mad at are the decision makers in the institutions and companies that looked at Twitter rage and decided it was real enough to overreact. People say insane things all the time. Now they say them on the internet where they are echoed and repeated by others. Nobody is under any obligation to listen.

You can disagree with this characterization. Maybe you feel like “cancel culture” really was out of control, that nobody was safe if they had said anything remotely controversial on social media in the past, or looked the wrong way at a woman, or said the wrong thing about genetics or whatever. To me, that is a separate conversation, though, than what I want to talk about right now. I just wanted to be clear that I think it was a moral panic and I think there is evidence for my belief. Also, if there is one thing humans do well, it’s moral panics. If there’s one thing Americans do especially well, it’s moral panics. If there’s one thing that social media really makes it easier to do, it’s spread moral panics. I think this is relevant, specifically because The Right in North America has a new moral panic every day.

(Before I get to my main point, I do want to mention that I am very grateful that social media launched just as I was graduating university and Twitter came well after I finished grad school. There were things I did and said that absolutely would have presented problems for me. But they were undocumented. One thing we have to reckon with as a society is that the folly of youth is now documented for the vast majority of youths. How much do we want to punish these young people for being young people when we were able to escape that attention?)

“Cancel Culture” Was Bottom Up

As far as I could tell in the moment, the vast majority of people initially making noise about “cancelling” someone from the left during the height of this era - the so-called Social Justice Warriors - were just young adults on the internet. Many of them were students, and many more were pseudonymous young working adults. They had basically no power but Twitter (it was mostly Twitter) gave both them and their followers the illusion of power.

At least part of the problem, to the extent that there was an actual problem, is that these SJWs were amplified by people who had some power or online (and sometimes offline) clout and were even occasionally amplified by people with a lot of power. Then the institutions or brands would react.

To me, I think this is different than what happened in 2020 with the protests and the subsequent fairly ridiculous images of police and politicians kneeling in solidarity with protesters. (To be clear: the police are never in true solidarity with protesters.) Those were real protests in the real world in response to real world events with actual real world consequences. Though lots of people conflate what happened in the summer of 2020 with “woke” and “cancel culture,” I don’t think they’re exactly the same thing.

When talking about “cancel culture” I am talking about the online stuff before that summer - the attempted cancellations of famous and regular people for perceived norm violations (and, occasionally, real crimes) due to minor acts or jokes or whatever. The dog-piling. As far as I could tell, so much of it was done by regular people, and then famous or powerful people would sometimes weigh in. And then sometimes a brand or institution would get involved, depending on the situation.

(The police shooting/killing black Americans at a much higher rate than other Americans - and doing so on camera - resulting in mass protests is very different than someone making a joke on Twitter about AIDS/HIV on a plane and losing her job over it. Conflating these is not helpful.)

Dog-piling is bad. You shouldn’t do it. I am unclear as to real world consequences of the dog-piles from The Left, in terms of scale. (Individually, I have a hard time imagining that most people who have been dog-piled online have deserved it.) Everything I’ve ever seen about this supposed problem is anecdotes and solitary stories. I never saw enough evidence to believe that anything broad and widespread enough to actually have been a national or international problem actually existed.

(I should also mention that the person I went to high school with who lost his job due to “cancellation” would likely have lost his job if he had said what he said directly to taxpayers or to the wrong boss. The thing about social media that so many people struggle with is that it’s public but that users behave as if they are in private with their friends. That, to me, is a fact of social media and not some kind of proof of a new culture of intolerance.)

I think this is yet another testament to how people who are terminally online cannot separate the online world from the real world. If people are getting “cancelled” through dog-piles or whatever every day on Twitter, and you’re on Twitter all the time, eventually you start believing people are constantly losing their jobs due to “cancellation” whether or not there is actually a widespread trend. (For a similar phenomenon, see how horribly the US media is covering Trump right now because so many journalists and editors are still on Twitter and don’t seem to understand what’s really happening and how people actually say they feel…in real polls!)

2025, um, Hits Different, As the Kids Say

To me the 2025 version of cancel culture is so very different. Sometimes the people leading the calls for cancellation are now members of the US government. In some cases it’s literally the President of the United States of America saying people should be cancelled.

Regardless of ideology, this is a massive difference. I can’t begin to quantify the difference in soft power (and real power!) between some constantly slighted Twitter user who has some small role in some big company or institution somewhere who cannot stop yammering on about micro-aggressions and the President of the (formerly?) world’s most powerful country. They are not the same thing!

Moreover, theses people are not just demanding cancellation. They are literally cancelling visas of people whose speech they don’t agree with and using the regulatory power of the US federal government to lean on corporations to fire people they don’t agree with. There was no similar behaviour I am aware of by Democrat sitting politicians (or major donors to those politicians) during the cancel culture moral panic. This is entirely new and so much more dangerous. This time, it’s real.

I am very sure, that if you took every incident of “cancellation” from The Left that people were so upset about and then looked at every incident of “cancellation” since the end of January when Trump took power again, you would see a massive power difference in those leading the charge. Moreover, prior to this Trump term, the government used to stay out of it. The government is the most important actor here, as it has the most power and is the institution we should all be most afraid of. (Even us non-Americans.)

In 2025, cancel culture is much closer to the old public intolerance, only it feels like a pre-liberal democratic form, or one from its earliest days, before norms (and, sometimes, laws) prevented those in power from getting too involved.

Even During the Moral Panic, There was a Power Imbalance

Ken White, aka Popehat, makes the extremely valid point a few weeks ago that free speech, as it is understood traditionally in the United States, includes the rights of people to respond to speech with speech. One of the things that was so frustrating about the moral panic about cancel culture in the teens was that it rejected the rights of people (especially people with little to no power) to respond to what they saw as transgressive speech with their own speech. If you believe in free speech, you should believe in the right of someone to say they object to someone else’s free speech and you should believe, for example, in the right of someone to protest a speaker they don’t like by carrying a sign and shouting about it. The “woke mob” was just expressing their rights to free speech when it called for cancellation. (Again, if you think there was a real, serious problem with this back then - with institutions caving to those expressing their rights - it’s the institutions and companies that fired people you should be mad at, not the people who were upset and expressing themselves online or in small protests at universities.)

Once again, in 2025, there is a qualitative difference. The people who now want to “cancel” people for their speech are in political power (or have massive economic power and real political influence) and are the very same people from years ago who didn’t think the SJWs (a lazy shorthand, I know) should be able to express themselves on the internet about speech and behaviour they didn’t approve of. They still feel this way, and now they’re using their power to try to “cancel” people, many of whom are saying things even more innocuous than which caused Twitter rage back in the teens. (Nobody could even figure out what Jimmy Kimmel said that was worthy of his show getting suspended.)

The Road to Hell is Only Paved with Good Intentions Some of the Time - It’s Often Paved with Bad Intentions

And then there’s a point about intentions. I have long been a believer in the phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” To me, it captures so much about the dangers of revolution and it also captures the dangers of technocratic top-down planning.

But I also think that phrase, and the idea behind it, can way to easily be used to defend the status quo. People love to trot out this phrase, or some version of it, to claim that reformers shouldn’t reform. And that’s absolutely ridiculous. (A more popular version now of the same idea is Chesterton’s Fence.)

Reform is always necessary. The struggle, throughout human history, is figuring out what change is an improvement and what change is a risk. But we can’t have an adult conversation about that if everyone thinks anyone trying to improve the world is a dangerous radical.

But in the States, everyone trying to improve the world is a dangerous radical until enough decades go by that, if they succeeded in some recognized way, they are a saint. (Though that’s changing a little bit now.)

The US does not have a long history of rebellions or revolutions. There is, of course, the big one, the American War of Independence, which is often called the American Revolution, though lots of people quibble about whether or not it was a “revolution” in the strictest sense. But there’s not a lot else. And that revolution, if it was one, was 250 years ago. There is not a long history of attempts to violently overthrow the government by mass movements of those advocating for reform from the left. The US isn’t France. The US is a conservative country.

But there is a long history of being excessively worried about radicals. I once wrote an essay in university of the very real topic of the perceived threat of socialist revolution during the Great Depression and how FDR’s policies supposedly staved it off. (I concluded, as most historians have, that it was extremely unlikely there would have been a revolution with a different, less progressive government in power.)

What seems to happen in the US, and to a lesser extent in Canada, is that reformers call for change, the elites find the most extreme people who are part of or adjacent to the reform group, and the elites then claim violent revolution is not far away if we make any changes to the status quo. This goes on for some time. In some cases, reforms happen after decades of this process. (In many other cases, they don’t happen.)

Personally, I see the “cancel culture” moral panic of the 2010s as a continuation of this dynamic:

• the oppressed want reform but now they can demand it online rather than muttering to themselves at home and in bars or marching in the streets

• some of them (not many) have extreme views that likely wouldn’t be acceptable to most people but these people are almost always the loudest voices on social media

• the nature of social media results in the extreme views getting the most engagement

• some elites, who genuinely are interested in reform, get caught up in social media, not understanding it is not real life, and think that the extremist views might represent a lot of people and so endorse some of them

• other elites see those extremist views getting engagement and endorsements and feel like they finally have proof of the vast left wing project of destroying the United States (or Canada)

• moderate reformers get little attention

• the reform/reaction push-pull seems less likely to happen because both sides are now overly represented by extremists.

But this is not what is happening now. The calls for “cancelling” people, for ending people’s jobs, careers and even lives, are coming from the side that, in the US, controls all three branches of the federal government and plenty of state and local governments.

Unlike the SJWs (again, apologies for using this shortand), they do not want to make the world a better place. In fact, they’ve stopped hiding behind the claims of trying to make the US a freer, better country. Many of them are doing what some have called “vice signalling” - showing just how nasty they can be online. Others are now just entirely open about how all of this is a grift.

I know that, sometimes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sometimes, reformers have bad ideas that end up harming people. Revolutionaries routinely do - almost as a matter of course.

But I will take those who want to improve the world over those who want to rip everyone off or want permission to be as cruel as possible on the internet without repercussions. Especially if the former people are not currently in power. Sure, the barely left wing Democrats have done bad things, have overreached when in power. (It’s impossible not to when you run the US government, which consistently violates peoples rights every single day, especially those of non-Americans.)

But they, and those to the left of them who were supposedly a danger to society during the 2010s and into the 2020s, at least have good intentions. They were trying to fix real (and perceived) problems with their country and make it better. That should have to count for something, right? (And many of them were truly not powerful. Though there’s a whole other conversation of performative allyship that I am avoiding.)

The people leading the cancel culture change in 2025 appear to not only have bad intentions, they’re not even worried about hiding them any more. That’s way more of a problem than some nobody leftist demanding some person’s head on social media for some perceived norm violation. Much more of a problem.

The Elites Are Out of Touch

But not enough people seem to care about any of this. There are still plenty of people implying or outright stating that what is happening in the US right now is an entirely or at least semi-justified reaction to The Left’s “overreach” during the height of “woke” and “cancel culture.” I think this is preposterous.

One reason I think it’s preposterous is that many of the people who suffered consequences during the moral panic were extremely powerful/influential people who lost opportunities to make more money or get more gigs or whatever. Meanwhile, so much of “free speech” discourse is aimed at defending people who appear to believe certain people shouldn’t have the same rights as them, or shouldn’t even have the right to exist, in the case of trans people. There is a qualitative difference between somebody advocating for someone to face consequences for their (real or perceived) norm violation and somebody saying “these groups of people should be stripped of their rights because: The Bible.” (To be clear, the state should not be the one determining that qualitative difference if possible.)

The power dynamic is at work here, too. So many of the people who have publicly expressed “concerns” over cancel culture are people who are elites in their society - losing a speaking gig at a university, or not having a TV show now or not getting another book deal (or having to go to a lesser, fringier publisher) are the kinds of things they’re worried about. Meanwhile, those who are the targets of the free speech absolutists - and now the US government, whom they have empowered despite all sense - are sometimes in real physical danger. (Aside: imagine believing the Republicans - the party of the religious right - and, especially, MAGA - the “lock her up” people - would actually be on the side of free speech.)

Why Do I Care?

You might be wondering why I care, given that I’m Canadian and Canada is, so far, relatively immune to this stuff. (Also, aren’t I always going on about how Canadians pay too much attention to American politics? Why yes I am.)

Unfortunately I think that Canadian culture and even political culture is often downstream of American culture. Similar things happen here years after they happen in the US, though always with our own unique spin and always in a less extreme manner.

I can’t help but worry that our inept governing party will continue to fail to improve the lives of Canadians enough that people will vote in some aspirational MACAs supported by Canadian DOGE tech bros (who do indeed exist here). I don’t want that.

So I would really like it if the people of the United States could wake up a little more to what’s happening and do something about it. (I wrote plenty of this before No Kings Day. I await hopeful consequences of No Kings Day and the White House innovation.) I would like the media elites to stop equivocating and understand that this is not a reaction to “woke” and overreach of The Left but rather a transparent bid to seize and keep power by a small group of people who have conned the Republican half of the country into thinking they are on their side.

Anyway…

The Free Speech Vs. Public Intolerance Battle is Never Settled

I don’t have the right answers about where free speech bumps up against other rights, nor does anyone else. Part of living in a society is understanding that there will always be trade-offs between rights but also that the conversation about those trade-offs is never-ending.

Personally, I think it’s for the best that a bunch of oppressed people I was unaware of existing got to shout loudly on the internet about stuff they saw as bad. I learned things. As the man once said, the civilized person is the person who can put themselves in another’s shoes. I am better at doing so - still not great at it! - because of “woke.” I also do not agree with so very much of what people identified as “woke” say or or believe. But I don’t have to. I am happy they have now have platforms to they didn’t have in the past. I think it’s a good thing, long term. But I also don’t want the most extreme views from any side, including the wokes, becoming policy.

I think everyone needs more time to understand what social media is and isn’t. (There’s a separate conversation about fixing it so that it isn’t so ragebait driven.) No social media network - especially in 2025 - is a good sample of what the public actually thinks. It likely never will be. No institution or company should ever treat any social media network as if it is a representative sample of the public.

But more than anything, I think it’s important we all remember that the biggest threat to freedom of speech specifically, and civil liberties in general, is your government. It will always be your government. No matter how many people on Twitter (or Blue Sky) are demanding someone get fired for some perceived norm violation or thought crime, the biggest threat is the government.

And you know what the second biggest threat is? The gigantic corporations we’ve allowed to amass so much money and power they think they can and should control governments. The tech companies that enable and promote cancel culture are far more dangerous that the regular people online yelling at celebrities, brands, institutions and anyone they think they can hurt.