She identifies as conservative, and talked about being punished for being conservative, but does anyone think she would have been fired if she had said, like Chait, that being a conservative in Hollywood today is like being on the blacklist in the '50s? Or even if she has said that it was like being a dissident in Nazi Germany, as opposed to being Jewish? That construction would have been no less insulting to her liberal countrymen (who are still Nazis in this analogy), but wouldn't have triggered bipartisan taboos on antisemitism specifically.
Taken together with the problematic Instagram post linked above, those counterfactuals think this isn't a case of _left-wing_ reaction at all. For pretty understandable reasons given the history of the 20th century, conspiracy theories involving Jews get stricter scrutiny than other right-wing conspiracism from both sides of the aisle, and comparing oneself to Jewish victims of the Holocaust is dicier than claiming the mantle of other victims of political repression.
Not a coincidence that the few conservative or libertarian actors who are public about their politics tend to either be at the absolute top,such as Clint Eastwood,or are has-beens,such as James Woods.Very rare for those in between to be public about their conservative politics because it's a known fact that being publicly conservative can be a career killer in Hollywood. This is the same hollywood that does not have a problem lionizing Trumbo,a man who was a fervent suppporter of one of the worst genocidal dictators in history.
"Rather than jumping to the conclusion that vital institutions like the Times are under siege by an internal woke insurgency, I think it’s more realistic to guess, based on my own experience and countless stories from friends with jobs in places with de facto age-segregated hierarchal structures (i.e., nearly every workplace), that younger staffers have totally legit grievances, management has been ignoring or slow-walking them, but they’re in the sort of institution where changing norms around race, gender, etc. give them some leverage, so they’re using their leverage."
I didn't "jump to a conclusion" on this so much as watch James Bennet get forced out, watch Bari Weiss describe an internal woke insurgency, watch her get denounced for doing so, receive back channel messages from NYT staffers who say she's right but they're afraid to say it, and then watch Adam Rubenstein and Andy Mills and McNeil leave the Times, and have more Times staffers send me unsolicited messages lamenting a change in the culture there. But to be fair, your speculative account is *young staffers use woke issues for leverage on other things because they can*, which overlaps a lot with the people who think there's an *internal woke insurgency*
In my mind, there has always been a "cancel culture." In the pre-social media it was mainly used for things like discrimination in the workplace for being a woman, part of the LGBT community, not being white, etc. Any arena really where power dynamics disfavored an outgroup where people got canned for lots of unfair reasons. The channels for complaining about all kinds of people were incredibly narrow too. What were you gonna do? Try to get your thing published in the letters to the editor? For both bad and good, the power to influence who gets fired or hired is a lot more dispersed with online discourse. For example, Twitter has given marginalized folks a power and a voice that were just not possible before. Hashtag activism is not for real and it gets results.
I think I basically agree with you on all the substantive points. But I think that the fact that it is *possible* to list three prominent cases that all happened in the last few weeks, of people being fired for a type of reason that didn't exist a decade and a half ago, suggests that there really *is* such a thing as "cancel culture". But the first, abstract, theoretical half of the post points out what we have to think about to evaluate this "cancel culture". Has it largely been a tool for getting companies to fire people who deserve to be fired? Or has it largely been a tool for getting companies to fire people who didn't deserve to be fired? If a tool is causing a large amount of justice that wouldn't have been done otherwise, and also a large amount of injustice that wouldn't have been done otherwise, we do want to see if we can measure that balance.
I think I agree that it's doing more justice than injustice, but I also think that it's not quite as clear cut as, say, #metoo (which was prompting similar sorts of recriminations three years ago, and which some might want to assimilate to this).
“This strikes me as way more realistic than the notion that Millennial and Zoomer radicals are mounting an internal coup for the greater glory of critical race theory. That strikes me as an ax-grinding ideological fever dream. Still, I’m 92% making things up. So why do people with a less realistic, more ideologically conspiratorial hypothesis think they have the right to be so confident? Probably because they’re committed to a narrative they were never justified believing in the first place.”
This paragraph is the perfect distillation of “cancel culture”. Also, and equally important, I laughed out loud 3 times while reading this.....thank you!
What about these trends on campus? Greg Lukianoff, who worked at FIRE, showed how it was only until very recently that the students started calling for censorship and that claims have skyrocketed. Among the general public, free speech is also polling at one of its lowest rates in history.
Also, how do you feel about Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed?
I get the sense with McNeil that it was also about certain attitudes that seeped into his prior work too. E.G. the "careless who they cavort with" paragraph and turn of phrase in here about people in Haiti who died of cholera. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/weekinreview/21mcneil.html
It sure looks to me like Carano wasn't even "cancelled" in the strict sense, so much as fired for antisemitism. https://twitter.com/elivalley/status/1360348953942884352
She identifies as conservative, and talked about being punished for being conservative, but does anyone think she would have been fired if she had said, like Chait, that being a conservative in Hollywood today is like being on the blacklist in the '50s? Or even if she has said that it was like being a dissident in Nazi Germany, as opposed to being Jewish? That construction would have been no less insulting to her liberal countrymen (who are still Nazis in this analogy), but wouldn't have triggered bipartisan taboos on antisemitism specifically.
Taken together with the problematic Instagram post linked above, those counterfactuals think this isn't a case of _left-wing_ reaction at all. For pretty understandable reasons given the history of the 20th century, conspiracy theories involving Jews get stricter scrutiny than other right-wing conspiracism from both sides of the aisle, and comparing oneself to Jewish victims of the Holocaust is dicier than claiming the mantle of other victims of political repression.
Not a coincidence that the few conservative or libertarian actors who are public about their politics tend to either be at the absolute top,such as Clint Eastwood,or are has-beens,such as James Woods.Very rare for those in between to be public about their conservative politics because it's a known fact that being publicly conservative can be a career killer in Hollywood. This is the same hollywood that does not have a problem lionizing Trumbo,a man who was a fervent suppporter of one of the worst genocidal dictators in history.
"Rather than jumping to the conclusion that vital institutions like the Times are under siege by an internal woke insurgency, I think it’s more realistic to guess, based on my own experience and countless stories from friends with jobs in places with de facto age-segregated hierarchal structures (i.e., nearly every workplace), that younger staffers have totally legit grievances, management has been ignoring or slow-walking them, but they’re in the sort of institution where changing norms around race, gender, etc. give them some leverage, so they’re using their leverage."
I didn't "jump to a conclusion" on this so much as watch James Bennet get forced out, watch Bari Weiss describe an internal woke insurgency, watch her get denounced for doing so, receive back channel messages from NYT staffers who say she's right but they're afraid to say it, and then watch Adam Rubenstein and Andy Mills and McNeil leave the Times, and have more Times staffers send me unsolicited messages lamenting a change in the culture there. But to be fair, your speculative account is *young staffers use woke issues for leverage on other things because they can*, which overlaps a lot with the people who think there's an *internal woke insurgency*
In my mind, there has always been a "cancel culture." In the pre-social media it was mainly used for things like discrimination in the workplace for being a woman, part of the LGBT community, not being white, etc. Any arena really where power dynamics disfavored an outgroup where people got canned for lots of unfair reasons. The channels for complaining about all kinds of people were incredibly narrow too. What were you gonna do? Try to get your thing published in the letters to the editor? For both bad and good, the power to influence who gets fired or hired is a lot more dispersed with online discourse. For example, Twitter has given marginalized folks a power and a voice that were just not possible before. Hashtag activism is not for real and it gets results.
I think I basically agree with you on all the substantive points. But I think that the fact that it is *possible* to list three prominent cases that all happened in the last few weeks, of people being fired for a type of reason that didn't exist a decade and a half ago, suggests that there really *is* such a thing as "cancel culture". But the first, abstract, theoretical half of the post points out what we have to think about to evaluate this "cancel culture". Has it largely been a tool for getting companies to fire people who deserve to be fired? Or has it largely been a tool for getting companies to fire people who didn't deserve to be fired? If a tool is causing a large amount of justice that wouldn't have been done otherwise, and also a large amount of injustice that wouldn't have been done otherwise, we do want to see if we can measure that balance.
I think I agree that it's doing more justice than injustice, but I also think that it's not quite as clear cut as, say, #metoo (which was prompting similar sorts of recriminations three years ago, and which some might want to assimilate to this).
Nice article, is this your way of saying internal politics at Niskanen were the root cause of your dismissal?
“This strikes me as way more realistic than the notion that Millennial and Zoomer radicals are mounting an internal coup for the greater glory of critical race theory. That strikes me as an ax-grinding ideological fever dream. Still, I’m 92% making things up. So why do people with a less realistic, more ideologically conspiratorial hypothesis think they have the right to be so confident? Probably because they’re committed to a narrative they were never justified believing in the first place.”
This paragraph is the perfect distillation of “cancel culture”. Also, and equally important, I laughed out loud 3 times while reading this.....thank you!
What about these trends on campus? Greg Lukianoff, who worked at FIRE, showed how it was only until very recently that the students started calling for censorship and that claims have skyrocketed. Among the general public, free speech is also polling at one of its lowest rates in history.
Also, how do you feel about Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed?
I get the sense with McNeil that it was also about certain attitudes that seeped into his prior work too. E.G. the "careless who they cavort with" paragraph and turn of phrase in here about people in Haiti who died of cholera. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/weekinreview/21mcneil.html
Were the stock photos of people sadly leaving their workplaces just ripe for the picking, or did you have to really dig for them?