Cancelling Cancellers vs Cancelling Cancellation
An overview of the debate over Right Wing Cancel Squads
Out of a combination of a desire to avoid audience capture and incorrigible ADHD, I don’t usually like to revisit the same topic twice in a row. My qualified endorsement of Right Wing Cancel Squads last week, however, kicked up a storm of controversy ... or at any rate got used by multiple authors as an exemplar of that storm of controversy. Since most of you probably aren’t on Notes, and/or do not subscribe to the many writers who weighed in on the question, I thought some of you might be interested to see what others have been saying, both those who approve of cancelling the cancellers, and those who don’t.
Before going any further, I’d like to encourage anyone who decides to comment, whether here or on one of the linked blogs, to keep it calm and respectful. Many of those urging restraint are friends of mine. The overall tone of the discussion has remained collegial, and we should all want it to stay that way. It’s entirely possible to disagree with one another without becoming personally vituperative. So let’s keep it classy, okay? Good? Good.
A second note: I’ve endeavored to summarize the following pieces, but it’s entirely possible that I’ve overlooked key aspects of the various arguments due to my own laziness, or misrepresented some aspects of them out of my own stupidity. So, again, if you feel like responding to one of the linked essays, I strongly encourage you to read the original first, and not assume my short precis is accurate.
As a model of the sort of calm discourse I like to see,
has a good roundup of the pro- and con- side of things from some of the main personalities on Xitter:
Dudley himself is extremely uncomfortable with the idea of using cancellation against the enemy, but this does not stop him from showing both sides. He even sat down with shampoo warlord Charles Haywood of The Worthy House – who is quite firmly in the ‘hang the bastards with their own rope’ camp – for a friendly chat on the subject.
Charles’ main point is that we are not (yet) in power, and should therefore avail ourselves of whatever tactical opportunities present themselves. He responds to the argument that we should ignore easy targets, obese middle-aged cashiers for example, in favour of high-value targets such as, say, Harvard presidents, for the simple reason that we do not (yet) have the power to go after the latter. To insist we limit ourselves to sniping at generals who remain well behind the front lines, while holding our fire on the cannon fodder, is in essence to argue that we do nothing at all. Now, one could point out that we did, in fact, take down the president of Harvard ... but Claudine Gay is still a professor at Harvard, and getting paid nearly a million dollars a year, no less: her humiliation is purely cosmetic. As Haywood notes, despite the Bud Light boycott absolutely wrecking the sales of Anheuser-Busch’s former flagship beverage, so far as we know not a single person has actually been fired over the debacle. Since we cannot (yet) impose corrective action on the elite, we must, for now, focus our opprobrium on the vicious little goblins that form the main body of the leftoid horde, making examples wherever and whenever we can, pour encourager les autres.
With all that said, Haywood also notes that when we are in a position to enforce our will at the institutional level, of course the little people should be ignored. They are, for the most part, just going along with what they have been indoctrinated to believe is right and good; provide them different programming, and they will go along with that, instead. Haywood emphasizes that there’s no risk of looking unseemly, of bad optics: for one thing, normies do not pay attention to Internet drama; for another, they will as always go along with the strong dog, whoever that may be.
Also coming down hard in favour of using the left’s weapons against them is the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters, as you can see in this clip on YouTube. As often happens with the Lotus Eaters, they say a lot of the same things I do, which I’m sure is pure coincidence, but which is also why I like them, because who doesn’t like people that agree with them? The Lotus Eaters team get in some good digs at the people wringing their hands at winning in the wrong way, and a good time is had by all.
For his part, like Chris Rock commenting on OJ’s, ah, excitable way of handling his divorce proceedings,
does not condone getting the Home Depot cashier cashiered, but he understands. What goes around comes around, as the English proverb has it; “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” as the King James Version states it; and as the Bhagavad Gita puts it, “Karma’s a bitch”. thinks we should win the fight, and not worry about how we win the fight.
The left has littered the field of battle with weapons of mass societal destruction, and they’ve fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. We can either keep getting cut down or pick some of those weapons up and fight back to establish parity. If you tell someone that their actions have consequences, and then refuse to enforce the consequences when you have the chance, then the rules don't matter. That's why we are here.
Vagrant suggests that conservatives are trapped in a permanent nostalgia for the 1950s, imagining that we are still playing by the Marquess of Queensbury rules, while the left is throwing molotovs. Conservatives, he says, have the complacent and cowardly mindset of civilians, when what our historical moment calls for are warriors. Unfortunately, the comfortable conditions created by technology tend to encourage the civilian personality type.
, who has some direct experience with cancellation, having gotten doxxed out of his comfy finance job for trading memes in a right-wing Mormon group chat, does not think there is any moral equivalency between right and left. For one thing, he says, the right is not in power. The left retains absolute control over every institution that matters. We are still guerrillas hiding in the shadowed forests of the back country. When we do it, we are enforcing social standards from the bottom up – that’s why our opponents only get cancelled when there is a critical threshold of popular outrage against some particularly egregious public statement. When the enemy does it, on the other hand, they act with the full force of the regulatory state ... which they retain full control of, something we would be well-advised to remember.
Somehow, Scott Alexander took interest in my essay, and addressed it at length. I’m not deeply familiar with Alexander, aside from a vague awareness that he’s a big deal in the rationalist community, to say nothing of being a much bigger deal than I am, and that he’s dealt with lying journalists and hysterical wokoids enough himself to have a healthy distaste for them. Alexander is characteristically calm and thorough, starting with a selection of screenshotted posts on Notes from various writers and commenters who take the pro-fight-the-enemy side, before presenting an extensive set of excerpts from my own essay.
Scott sidesteps the ethical question, to focus instead on the practical considerations, on the grounds of which he comes down (as expected, given his ideological niche) on the don’t-cancel side. He enumerates a series of objections, which can be approximately summarized as1:
1) cancellation will not, in fact, teach anyone anything – after all, just look at how eager the right is to cancel;
2) this has been going on forever, e.g. the Red Scare, so one more whirl ‘bout the merry-go-round isn’t likely to stop the wheel a turnin’;
3) If you act like the woke, you are the woke;
4) Most cancellations have been of liberals, by liberals, so if the right starts doing this it is likely to turn on itself;
5) cancellation destroys competence, because avoiding cancellation takes on a higher salience to people than doing their damn jobs;
6) embracing cancel culture has ruined the left’s name, which is why it is struggling despite holding all of the institutional power;
7) going mad with power before you actually have power is probably stupid;
And finally
8) there are better options.
The better options Alexander describes are mostly at the policy and tech level, such as better moderation tools that take the personal politics of platform moderators out of the equation, or dismantling those aspects of the regulatory state, such as the sillier and more self-contradictory elements of Civil Rights law, which nourish cancel culture in the first place. Alexander’s policy proposals are all great, and I completely agree that the most effective long-term solution is to tear the legal basis of cancel culture up by the roots, set those roots on fire, and salt the earth in which they were planted.
Regarding power, and the simple fact that the right does not have it in any formal sense, Charles Haywood and Bennett’s Phylactery made the same very cogent point. I don’t think any sane person could disagree.
I’m not convinced by some of Alexander’s other points. For instance, the right is an extremely contentious place, with the modal rightist being pretty low in agreeableness, which probably makes it hard for circular firing squads to be terribly effective. That isn’t to say that rightists don’t have strong beliefs – there are fanatics all over the place – but those beliefs are so contradictory between the various factions that the ideology of the right is infamously difficult to describe. Just look at the perennial holy war between Christians and pagans/Nietzscheans/vitalists.
As to the Red Scare, it’s probably worth pointing out that McCarthy was actually right: there really were communists trying to infiltrate the Western social order; tragically for us, the communists succeeded, which is a large part of the reason why we are where we are now.
As to the unpopularity of the left, I do not think this is only because of their po-faced censoriousness, although there is no question that that contributes. It probably also has something to do with their vicious racial and sexual hatred, their contemptuous hostility towards Western civilization, and their propensity to emotionally abuse children to the point that those children demand that they be allowed to mutilate their genitalia, amongst a great number of other horrors.
Finally, as to Alexander’s first point, that cancellation does not teach anyone anything. Au contraire. Look around at how society has changed in just the last decade. Sure, if you’re an autistic rationalist, a contrarian ideologue, or a Bohemian free spirit, cancel culture has only made you hate the left more. But this is a fairly small fraction of the population. What about the normies? In a remarkably short period of time, they went from opposing gay marriage, to supporting it. Why? Because examples were made of a few people who opposed it, and the rest got into line. Most people are basically NPCs: they don’t follow a praxis emerging from carefully thought out philosophical systems, but simply go along with whatever they perceive the prevailing morality to be. They are not rational, nor are they principled. They simply respond to incentives, which is to say, to rewards and to punishments. Put a few heads on pikes to demarcate new social boundaries, and the normies will in general respect them.
There are limits to the ability to enact social change via incentive structure manipulation, because if the social boundaries you establish don’t map to the eternal verities of human nature, the resulting social order will generate a lot of friction and consequently destabilize … as our society observably is. However, the social boundaries the right intends to enforce do, in fact, map to human nature. The left has been figuratively beheading the people who object to the surgical genital mutilation and chemical sterilization of children; the right intends to metaphorically behead the people who have been advocating and carrying out that child abuse in the first place. There’s a profound moral asymmetry there, but I think there’s also a practical asymmetry, because the right isn’t demanding that everyone publicly agree sadomasochistic psychosis is healthy.
The first direct response to Right Wing Cancel Squads was from the
, who thinks that, quite frankly, we should be better than that, that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard, that cancel culture is a thing of the mob, unclean and democratic, and therefore at variance with the aristocratic ideals the right aspires to. He’s got a point there. The Librarian also makes the important point that a great degree of the power of cancellation – not, by any means, all of it, but certainly not an irrelevant portion – comes from agreeing with the mob’s moral priors. He uses the example of space scientist Matt Taylor, highlighted in my own essay, to illustrate this point: Taylor was devastated by the mob because he was a good liberal, and agreed that making frumpy women feel bad by showing pictures of hot women with ray guns was, for some unfathomable reason, a bad thing.
There’s certainly something to the Librarian’s argument that agreeing with the left’s moral priors gives them power over you, although I’d gently point out that plenty of right-wing people have been cancelled quite viciously and very effectively by the left despite rejecting leftists pseudomorality in its entirety.
The Librarian doesn’t rule out retributive justice entirely, though he thinks that ammunition should be saved for high-value targets ... purging institutions of higher education, for example, when they collude to destroy the lives of innocent college boys over trumped up sex scandals. But, as Haywood noted, until we have the power to do that, setting that as the standard is to advocate quietism.
In general the Librarian thinks that we should focus more on building than on destroying. I prefer creation to destruction, too. Then again, look at what just happened to Peter Brimelow’s VDARE. If you’re not on Xitter and can’t watch the video, the video is Brimelow’s explanation of how VDARE has been completely ruined by New York Attorney-General Leticia James’ lawless campaign of lawfare, combined with relentless financial deplatforming which Brimelow suspects originates with hidden pressures within the federal regulatory layer. Brimelow and his team spent twenty-five years patiently building VDARE into the immigration-patriot powerhouse that it is was. Now it’s gone. It’s hard to build things when your enemy keeps breaking them; at a certain point, you need to break the enemy, before you can build anything.
Ultimately, Sawyer thinks that cancelling cancellers will be counterproductive, and that we should pursue leadership instead ... though he’s a bit vague as to what, specifically, this actually looks like. He does say that rulers should exercise clemency, in order to forestall revenge cycles ... which, in fact, I was at pains to emphasize in my own treatment of the subject. But mercy before victory is a fool’s game, and we haven’t won yet. Caesar did not forgive his enemies until he had vanquished them, and held their lives in his palm, to crush or to release as he saw fit. In general, too, Caesar forgave his enemies only once. If they betrayed him a second time, he treated them ruthlessly. But he did not always forgive: Caesar nailed his share of Celtic insurgents to crucifixes, and had Vercingetorix strangled in front of a cheering crowd.
Moreover, it is worth remembering how Caesar’s enemies in the Senate ultimately rewarded the Clementia Caesaris.
You can forgive a crocodile all you want. That isn’t going to stop the crocodile from trying to bite your head off. It’s a crocodile: it doesn’t understand what forgiveness even means.
sees both sides of the debate, and while he tends to see cancel culture as mean girl snitching (he’s right, it is), he makes the important point that whatever your personal position on the matter, there isn’t actually much you can do about it.This is something I wish I’d emphasized more in my own post. The left’s egregious impositions over the last generations, and its crescendo of tyrannical obscenity in the last decade, has generated an absolutely volcanic emotional charge. There are huge numbers of people who are absolutely boiling with pent-up fury. They want blood, hopefully figuratively. There is a cthonic hunger for vengeance, and as the woke left stumbles and shows weakness for the first time in a generation, that hunger will demand satiation. Whether you like it or not, things like this are going to happen a fair bit in the coming years. All that emotional energy is going to need to go somewhere.
Like Bennett’s Phylactery,
has been cancelled herself, and does not think it is psychologically healthy to become part of a mob ... this debases the spirit, reduces one to something of an animal. Afterwards, one feels guilty, knowing that one has done wrong; to avoid confronting this unpleasant revelation of character, many will instead pour the discomfort over their own actions into an intensified hatred of their targets. She thinks we need to interrupt the dynamic by showing compassion, because these people just don’t have real friends, and they’re dealing with their anomie by seeking to fill the hole with the mob. Provide them real human connections, and they’ll come to themselves.
Duncan uses the metaphor of a hydra, and argues that we should strike for the heart, and not the head ... although I’d note that this is not how Hercules actually killed the hydra. Instead, he systematically crushed each of its skulls with his club, while his nephew cauterized the stumps to keep the heads from regrowing.
Finally, there’s this deeply personal narrative from
, which resonated with me because I could relate to it so easily. Bensen describes how the publishing industry, and his friends within it, grew steadily more deranged over time, making increasingly insane demands to conform with the escalating madness of the left’s fluid orthodoxy. At first Bensen kept his head down, avoiding social media, focusing on his work. That was exactly what I did, for years, after the Matt Taylor incident spooked me. Surely it would blow over? As the psychosis spread like an oncological cloud, he withdrew even more, avoiding sci-fi conventions. Gradually he drifted to the literary right, just as I ultimately found my home within the dissident network. But now he wonders, will the same thing happen again? Will he get cancelled by the right just because he says the wrong thing? Has he gone from the frying pan into the fire?
I cannot speak for others, of course, but I certainly have no intention of cancelling Mr. Bensen, any more than I’m going to cancel anyone else who speaks truth in good faith. That said, one thing that has impressed me throughout this debate has been that people have remained, in general, respectful in their disagreement, whether on Twitter or here on Substack. As passionate as the right can become, there is in general a much greater tolerance for disagreement than we usually see on the left. So I don’t think Bensen, or anyone else who writes in good faith, has much to worry about.
As a final note, it’s been interesting to observe the cultural difference between Xitter and Substack on this question. My reading of the erstwhile bluebird site is that those in favour of beating the left with their own stick handily carried the day, with only a relatively small number of voices on the right objecting. Here on Substack it seems that those insisting on a more principled stance were the more numerous faction. Part of this might be that Substack is a much newer platform, and the culture that has developed here has been one blessedly free of arbitrary deplatforming, thanks entirely to the robust commitment to free speech of the founders. By contrast, Xitter’s lore runs deeper, and is marred by thick veins of resentment due to the arbitrary restrictions, and gaslighting about the very existence of restrictions, which conservatives experienced under the previous team.
Another factor, and probably the more important factor, is that Substack is for long-form writing, whereas Xitter is for microblogging. Nuance is essentially impossible on a microblogging platform, which leads to low-resolution hot takes and ragebait agitprop outcompeting more thoughtful forms of engagement. By contrast, essays running into the thousands of words rather than the hundreds of characters provide writers with the opportunity to explicate their ideas at a level of detail that reduces the probability of misunderstanding, which in my experience is at the origin of about 90% of Internet arguments. Long essays also act as an IQ filter, frankly. This means that the userbases of Xitter and Substack are quite distinct: the latter will tend to be a bit smarter, a bit calmer, a bit more thoughtful, and – for better or for worse – a bit less combative.
If Substack’s relatively respectful culture remains stable as the platform grows – and I’m a bit worried about the influence of Notes in that regard – that’s a hopeful sign for the future of our culture in general.
But for now, we do not live in a culture in which respectful disagreement is generally possible. We live in a cultural wasteland overrun by the spiteful, shrieking mutants of the psychotic left, and despite everything that has been said, I do not think that pity is a vice that we can currently afford to indulge.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you’re new to Barsoom, you can find a selection of some of my better work here, which spans quite a range of topics – neuroscience, philosophy, metaphysics, UAPs, WWIII, the fertility crisis, the DIEing academy, I go all over the place. There’s something for everyone.
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I skipped one in the middle because it looked redundant.
I have only two things to say:
Revenge /is/ justice.
This is an eternal, unavoidable Truth. That we (are forced to) defer to the state's enforcers for our revenge against someone doing us wrong changes nothing.
The line about "being better than the enemy" in reality simply means that the one saying it wants someone else to do the fighting for them, so they can sit on the fence of Virtue, their self-image of immacualte intellectual virginity/innocence intact.
Since the topic is cancellation, i.e. unpersoning, and that touches on inquisitorial tactics and practices, I have a third thing to say:
Calling for "dialing it down", "meeting half-way", "two wrongs don't make a right" is what bullies, tinpot dick-taters, petty desktop dominators and other such always say, when someone snarls and seems ready to fight back. It's a trick, always was and always is. They fear your counter-attack, because then the above-mentioned fence-post-slitherers must choose a side actively and publicly.
And that comes with a real cost, a cost they fear to pay - therefore they will bleat and appeal to saints and philosophers and pseudo-Christos-figures and whatever faked ideal they can, to get you to desist and put on the yoke of "being the better person".
Ever hear a (your?) teacher say that, when the bullied kid tried to fight back? Ever hear the teacher, parent, other adult say "shake hands and make up" when the designated victim actually managed to get the upper hand?
Yeah. Same thing here. The sycophantic enabling cowards wants you to crawl into your hole, let them speak on your behalf, make you feel shame in advance for wanting justice - all so they can go on to be pristine and clean, while letting you and others suffer.
Revenge is justice, and justice rests at spearpoints' end.
As my late father used to say, don't give a shit about people who don't give a shit about you.
If the "right" - which is really another term for "not fucking batshit insane" - needs to break a few eggs to create that civilizational course correction omelet, then so be it. The left's project is unlimited, ours isn't. When we finally achieve the "just leave us alone" state of a rational society, then we can stop going after idiotic cashiers and uni accounts-payable clerks who can't shut up on TikTok. Until then, do what needs to be done. If it's a bit ugly and dirty, well, it's not like the other side operates under decent restraints and traditional norms like we do. Marquess of Queensbury and all that.
I mean, just give me back the society I knew in, say, 1986, and I'll be happy.