The cancel culture fever that’s currently ripping through the American right like chlamydia through at ‘70s rock band resembles the post-George Floyd mania on the left to a shocking degree. It’s all there: Speech disliked by the in-group is being classified as “hate speech”, and the boundaries of that category are rapidly expanding. Online activists are ginning up posses to go after outlaws who have been caught unpopular-speech-rustlin’, and they celebrate when ordinary people get fired for milquetoast violations of the online vigilantes’ rules. Politics is being awkwardly shoehorned into sporting events, and Twitter’s flying monkeys are being sent after anyone who doesn’t participate. Really the only difference is that this time, the charge is being led by the most powerful people in the country — here’s Attorney General Pam Bondi using language that would have been right at home in a Michael Hobbes tweet from five years ago.
And here’s the Vice President encouraging us to become a nation of narcs.
I remember June of 2020 well; it was the moment when the liberal/illiberal split on the left became impossible to ignore. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking (and writing) about what that moment was. And one thing it was was an audit in which anyone who wanted to keep their Good Progressive Card had to stand up and be counted. You couldn’t merely be appalled by Floyd’s murder and have the event shape your opinions and actions going forward; you had to publicly broadcast your disgust or be suspected of being insufficiently committed to the cause. If you were any kind of pundit, the stakes were even higher: You had to howl and garment-render more dramatically than your competition or lose market share. Recalling that dynamic helps me understand why this morning, my Twitter feed looked like this: