Thread by @DaveAlexanderID

@ConceptualJames The claim that cancel culture is just the “free market” runs against my lived experience. If you are the type of person who refuses to do business with an organization unless everyone there thinks and speaks the way you do, well, I’m sorry for you, but that is your right. 1/x

@ConceptualJames That is not the whole of cancel culture, however.

Cancel culture is also mobs who shame those they would never do business with anyway.

@ConceptualJames An institution I worked for was on the receiving end of such a mob once, whose sole aim was to annoy the administration and executives until they fired an offending employee out of sheer exhaustion.

@ConceptualJames The employee’s offense was to go hunting and put a picture with her kill on Facebook. I’m no fan of big game trophy hunting, and I would never want to shoot a giraffe. But to each his own.

@ConceptualJames The giraffe was selected for harvest by the professional biologists of a national park in order to preserve and improve the herd; the hunt was legal; she paid a lot of money for the right to be the shooter, benefitting the local economy; and the meat was fed to local villagers.

@ConceptualJames But she posted a picture of herself with the giraffe on Facebook.

A mob quickly organized for the express purpose of getting her fired from her job at an institution where no one in the mob would ever be a ”customer.” Facebook posts encouraged people to call the administration

@ConceptualJames to demand that she be fired.

Calls, emails, even real letters flooded in from the US (mostly the northeast), Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. Probably not one person who called in was a student, alum, or even potential student of this institution.

@ConceptualJames Death threats that included pictures of her house and the building where she worked were posted online. Nobody took them too seriously, but we had to take them somewhat seriously.

@ConceptualJames Some of the calls came to me. I tended to enjoy that. I remember one from a nasally, low-T man from Connecticut. I answered and his first words were “when are you going to fire that woman?”

“Who’s that?” I asked innocently.

“That huntress.”

@ConceptualJames “Why would we fire her?” I asked.

“She’s a hunter!” he said. I think he was expecting a response like, “You’re concerns are noted and we are looking into them. I’ll pass your message on to HR.” He didn’t get it.

@ConceptualJames “This is Idaho,” I replied. “Everybody’s a hunter. I’m a hunter. Most of the faculty are hunters. The president is a hunter. Did she break any laws?”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Then I doubt we’re going to fire her. Thanks for your call.”

@ConceptualJames I never passed his message on to anyone. The administration dealt with it in exactly the right way. Everyone put up with a few days of phone calls, but in a week or so it had all faded away (except for some laughable snail mails from Denmark).

@ConceptualJames That is cancel culture, in my experience. Not a refusal to buy a company’s products, but a concerted effort to harass an employer into firing an employee out of fear and cowardice.

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