It occurs to me that most disagreements about cancel culture aren't actually about cancel culture. I think there's broad agreement that bad enough speech ought to lead to professional consequences and that people should be free to express views somewhat outside the mainstream ...
... without undue fear of professional consequences. What people disagree about is whether particular speech instances are bad enough to justify such consequences. So if two people disagree over, say, JK Rowling's speech deserves such consequences, their disagreement is ...
... about that nature of that particular speech. That is, they don't disagree about cancel culture but about trans rights. And so there's not much point in disagreeing about cancel culture or debating it because it's almost never the real issue.
If hate speech were illegal in the United States, groups would fight to get speech that they found offensive banned. And naturally, groups would tend to try to get as much speech as they find offensive considered part of the speech that is banned. We don't have that ...
... in the United States. So instead, groups try to get as much speech that they find offensive deemed sufficiently offensive to cause professional consequences. The goal is the same -- silence truly awful speech. That's not an illegitimate goal. 2/2
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