Thread by @JeffreyASachs

I am firmly in the anti-anti-@OsitaNwanevu camp when it comes to that Cancel Culture piece. Sure it has problems, but much of it - most of it - is 100% correct. Don’t like it? Work harder on defining CC and do a better job policing those who invoke it in bad faith.

I mean, Osita didn’t force you to liken CC to Stalinism, McCarthyism, The Terror, or the Cultural Revolution. You did that all on your own (when libs do that, you call it “catastrophizing”, btw), so don’t go fleeing back to your motte just because the bailey has been overrun.

Are there terrible cases of professional destruction, ruined lives, and even suicide wrought by CC? Yes, and those are the ones you can and should bring out in response. That is your motte. But damn if you didn’t do yourself a disservice for using the term for Chappelle too.

Or any other similar cases. I don’t know if it was sloppiness, greed, or just plain confusion, but somewhere along the way you realized that CC was a term with legs. A tool you could use to transform into a pathology whatever speech you dislike. And you abused it. Of course.

This is the consequence, I guess.

So yeah. You can accuse Osita of bad faith, but be sure to look to your own side too. And you can hate us for being skeptics about CC, but you need to know we came by that skepticism honestly.