The Daily Signal - New Database Documents Campus Cancel Culture

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

Cancel culture is endemic on college campuses. Every day come stories of professors, speakers, and students who run afoul of the radical left and suffer the consequences. With the frequency of these incidents, it can be difficult to keep track. The College Fix, the news site dedicated to providing a conservative perspective on news from campuses across the nation, now offers what it calls the Campus Cancel Culture Database to document many examples. "If you want to know the truth, if you want to know how America really used to be ... come to the database and we'll list everything that used to be there," says Jennifer Kabbany, editor-in-chief of The College Fix. Kabbany joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to talk about the database as well as offer solutions for those getting canceled at their universities.   We also cover these stories: The number of Americans quitting their jobs has reached record levels, the Labor Department says. To address bottlenecks in the global supply chain, the Biden administration announces that Walmart, FedEx, and UPS will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The drugstore chain Walgreens announces the closing of five more stores in San Francisco because of organized shoplifting. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, October 14th. I'm Mary Margaret Ollahan. And I'm Doug Blair. As you may have noticed, we have a new voice here on the Daily Signal podcast. It is my great pleasure to introduce you all to Mary Margaret, the Daily Signal's newest reporter. Mary Margaret comes to us from the Daily Caller News Foundation and will be joining Virginia and me periodically on the show. Welcome, Mary Margaret. Thanks so much for having me, Doug.

Of course. So with that in mind, cancel culture. is endemic on college campuses. Every day there are stories of professors, speakers, and students who run afoul of the radical left and suffer the consequences. With the frequency of these incidents,

it can be difficult to keep track of them all. The campus cancel culture database from the college fix seeks to document these incidents. Jennifer Kobani, editor-in-chief of the college fix, joins the Daily Signal podcast to talk about the database, as well as offer solutions for those getting canceled at their universities. Don't forget, if you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe.

And now on to today's top news. According to Department of Labor Data released Tuesday, the number of Americans quitting their jobs has reached record levels. 4.3 million people or nearly 3% of the workforce left their jobs in August, shattering the previous record of 4 million people back in April. The industries that lost the most workers are the food service industry with employee losses of almost 6.8%, the leisure and hospitality industry with losses around 6.4% and the retail industry with losses around 4.7%. Many economists point to the 10.4 million job openings at the end of August as one reason for the mass exodus of workers from their old jobs. However, per the Washington Examiner, Republicans are theorizing federal benefits, including boosted unemployment benefits, as well as expanded child tax credits, are playing a role in the phenomenon.

Americans might be scrambling to buy Christmas presents this year, according to the White House. In efforts to address global supply chain bottlenecks, which reportedly may lead to supply shortages and higher prices as we head into the holidays, the Biden administration said Wednesday that Walmart, FedEx, and UPS will be switching to working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. combined UPS and FedEx shipped about 40% of American packages in 2020. A senior administration official told the Hill today that the supply chain is essentially in the hands of the private sector,

so we need the private sector to step up to help solve these problems. Three of the largest good carriers in the country, Walmart, FedEx, and UPS, will make commitments towards moving to 24-7 working during off-peak hours. Target, Samsung, and Home Depot may move in the same direction, the official said, adding that the move is intended to urge the rest of the supply chain to, quote, step it up. The Port of Los Angeles will join the Port of Long Beach in beginning 24-7 services, and the International Longshore and the Warehouse Union has promised to staff 24-7. Labor has pledged that they'll be there, the official said. Walgreens announced Tuesday that it plans on closing an additional five stores in San Francisco

due to organized shoplifting efforts. The company has already closed 10 of its stores. stores in the city since 2019. In a statement announcing the store closures, Walgreen spokesperson Phil Caruso said, retail theft across our San Francisco stores has continued to increase in the past few months to five times our chain average, despite large increases in security. Critics attribute the increase in shoplifting to a 2014 statewide referendum that downgraded property theft of items valued $950 or less to a misdemeanor. Per SF gate, the five stores will close next month.

Now stay tuned for my conversation with Jennifer Cabani, editor-in-chief of the college fix. We talk about the campus cancel culture database as well as solutions for those getting canceled at their universities. Conservative women. Conservative feminist. It's true. We do exist. I'm Virginia Allen, and every Thursday morning on problematic women, Lauren Evans and I sort through the news to bring you stories and interviews that are of particular interest to conservative leaning or problematic women. That is women whose views and opinions are often excluded or mocked by those on the so-called feminist left.

We talk about everything from pop culture to policy and politics. Search for problematic women wherever you get your podcasts. Our guest today is Jennifer Kobani, editor at the College Fix and Visiting Fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. Jennifer, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Excellent. So College Fix recently released the campus culture database, which is described as a one-stop shop

to monitor, chronicle, and remember the effect of cancel culture on higher education. How did you come up with the idea to catalog all of these incidents of cancel culture on college campuses? Yeah, great question. So the College Fix is a daily news website. So we're constantly reporting day after day, week after week about the shenanigans. the culture wars on college campuses. So we've been covering these examples one by one. But as the weeks and the months and the years go by, they just become these headlines that you kind of see and forget

and see and forget. We don't want to forget. We want to remember. We do not want to let this Orwellian trend just leave a gaping hole in our shared history. So at the start of 2021, my boss had suggested, He's like, hey, you know, like, what's all the art that we've lost? And I said, you know, what's all the art that we've lost? Yeah, what's all the paintings and the statues and the building names and the professors and the student groups and the disinmitations? And it just sort of snowballed into this massive project that we felt really was worthy of our time and intention to chronicle, quantify, and remember everything that's been canceled.

On college campuses. Yeah. On college. Yeah. Specifically higher education in this case. Right. And so your list counts more than 1,400 incidents of cancel culture that have taken place on college campuses. Does that number surprise you? Is that higher or lower than you expected? Where does that place in your sort of idea? Absolutely. It's the minimum, okay? Because we, you know, we're actually a small operation, you know. So we went through all of our archives and we found all the examples of successful cancellations and attempted cancellations. And we put them into our database. And then I checked out, you know, like-minded groups like the National Association of Scholars or Fire.

And we kind of saw what they've done. And we, you know, we fleshed out our database as best we could, you know, some Google searches, et cetera. So what we presented is sort of the minimum amount of what we could find and what we were able to put together here on our initial release. But the beauty of the database is moving forward, it's going to be crowdsourced. So folks can go to the website and add an entry that, we vet before we posted or publish it as part of the database, but essentially things that we might have missed, things that are happening now this week. We just had a huge cancellation at MIT two days ago. So 1,400 is the minimum, and it's just going to grow from there. Right. So there's

probably more out there that are just, you know, they've been lost to time or they're lost in the ether, but hopefully some of these things will be captured by sort of the crowd as time goes forward. given that you've been listing all of these incidents of cancel culture, would you be able to give our listeners maybe some of the more egregious ones that you found on the list as an example? Sure, absolutely. In fact, I just recently came up with a list of the 10 most outrageous campus cancellations in the last decade. And a couple of those on the list that stand out to me was one is a Princeton Acapella group, stop singing the Little Mermaids, Kiss the Girl. Oh, no. And that's a victim of the Me Too movement.

right? Because, you know, they apparently, you know, all you want to do is kiss the girl. That is not allowed anymore, apparently. So, I mean, silly stuff like that. We had another example where an all-female college, all-female college canceled a production of the vagina monologues, a very famous, you know, long-standing production. Because it was not inclusive to women without vaginas. So I hope I'm allowed. to say that here. I'm sorry, but that's the reason of what we're dealing with here, you know. So those are just two examples. We had a lot of examples of people who have gotten in trouble for Halloween costumes that they've worn. That was another big one. So silly stuff like that. A couple years ago, a screening of Zoolander 2 was canceled at a college in Southern California because it mocked marginalized identities. So even comedy is, you know, a target in today's day and age.

Right. We've had some people on the show who've, who, who've recently talked about some TV shows that would be unable to be made today or who had been canceled simply because the content would be offensive to modern sensibilities. One of the things I'm kind of curious about is you've done this massive collection of incidents of cancel culture. Is there like a pattern or a common theme that you find around maybe the cancellers or the cancellees? Like what do what patterns emerge in your research? You know, a pattern that I found has been almost chronological. So back in 2010, 2011, 2012, a lot of it was focused on cultural appropriation. That was the big ticket item back then. And so we saw Greek life parties being criticized. We saw Halloween costumes being criticized. We saw all you can eat taco bars deemed offensive. You know, so that was the kind of things that we were seeing. That was a merging trend with the cultural appropriation. And then over time, people took this idea of being offended and really just ran. with it. And roughly, I've been asked, you know, when did the term cancel culture? When was it coined?

And it's hard to pinpoint, but I'm going to say like 2017-ish, somewhere around then when, you know, we started deciding that every little thing that we didn't like offended us should not exist. Right. And popular culture went around. And it really took off speeches, disinvitations. I mean, to certain extent, it's always been around. But it became acceptable to cancel people. To cancel student groups, student events, we see pro-life flyers in 2015, 16, 2017. Pro-life flyers and crosses ripped up, vandalized groups like Yaf and Turning Point USA. I mean, they literally can't table out on their quad without people coming to flipping over their table or trashing their stuff or yelling in their face. Right. You know, we had obviously the drama of Milo Unopolis in 2017 with the Berkeley protest and that, you know, and there was also some big drama at Yale a few years back.

So it all sort of continued to snowball. And then more recently in the wake of George Floyd's death, what we saw was campuses, campus administrators trying to prove that they are actively anti-racist, right? So how do you show your actively anti-racist in the wake of George Floyd? You remove statues, you cover paintings, you rename buildings. And over the last 18 months since the death of George Floyd, that has been going nonstop, you know, at least one example a week comes down. And more recently, kind of interesting, I've seen now anybody who's been involved in eugenics

movement, that's a very kind of more recent target, but now that's the next on the list. Certainly there were victims of Me Too, Giuliani's being canceled. So, I mean, Cosby, he was canceled at every single, you know, college or university. So it's really a rainbow of reasons, themes, but essentially it all boils down to I'm offended, you did something wrong, goodbye. Right. It's interesting you mentioned the crosses. I remember, I'm going to date myself, but back when I was in college around 2015-ish,

I went to a Catholic school in Portland, Oregon, and I remember that there would be crosses up for, you know, anti-abortion pro-life movements, and people would just brazenly go and take them down, and it would just be culturally acceptable for that to happen. That was sort of the beginning of that. But on that note, so as I mentioned, I grew up in a blue state, did you find that there were any geographic themes in this list? Like this was happening more in red states. This was happening in blue states, rural places, urban places.

What was this sort of geographic themes of those? Sure. So certainly, you know, the coastal elites have a strong grasp of cancel culture. They're very good at it. You can do a keyword search in our database. So if you keyword search, you know, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, you know, any of the little IVs, I mean, there's just plenty of examples of these elite, coastal, you know, private uppity preppy universities really clamping down on free speech,

much more so than I think, you know, the state schools. But you have schools like UCLA and UC Berkeley, which have two dozen entries apiece easily. So, you know, their public universities are not immune, but they are more beholden than the First Amendment than some of these private schools. So, you know, definitely you're going to see sort of that red state, blue state geographic distinction. But that doesn't mean it's not like UT Austin, you know, plenty of examples there where you think, well, hey, Texas, you know, any, you can get away with anything, Texas, not at UT Austin. Interesting. You still see it. You'll still see it at University of Minnesota, University of Michigan.

Yeah, that's another big one. So it's happening because what's going on is these colleges and universities, they may be in a red state, but they're a blue dot in a red state. They're a blue stronghold in a red state. And so things that normally might not pass muster with the community standards, definitely they get away with it on campus. Right. Well, I'm interested that you mentioned a blue dot.

So one of the things that popped out to me while I was reading the information about the database was that you include cancellations from both the right and the left. And I mean, slightly biased here, but my gut instinct is that this really happens more on the left canceling the right than the right canceling the left. Is that a true instinct with your research, or where does this sort of play out? You know, certainly there are examples of the right engaging in cancel culture, and we would really be remiss not to include those. So we did. And a lot of times it's an example of a professor that really, says something so outrageous and it shows their bias. But at the end of the day, they still

have free speech too. And what students can do is look them up and not take their classes. I mean, that's part of, you know, their free choice. But we definitely want to do include that, but by and large, and I'm talking 90, 95 percent of the examples are coming from the progressive left, absolutely. Right. So in terms of the ways that we've discussed, somebody can be canceled. I know we've mentioned that people can be disinvited from, you know, campus, they can have their things torn down, people can scream in their faces. Is there a pattern about the most effective way that somebody's been canceled? Like, does one method of cancellation pop up more than any of the other methods? You know, petitions tend to have a strong impact, it seems, you know, when they get that

petition going. And see, the thing is, is with the petitions, there could be 20,000 signatures, but maybe a small percentage are really from folks, you know, stakeholders on campus, but a university bureaucrat could see a petition with tens of thousands of signatures and kind of freak out and look at it as a PR situation. Also Twitter mob's very effective, you know, you at a college and they, you know, they get notification after notification after notifications of outrage students who feel erased and marginalized and oppressed and, you know, unsafe, you know, then they're going to have to act because the whole nanny state on college campuses is we must protect these students from real life, apparently.

So, you know, those two examples of, you know, the keyboard warriors and the change.org petitions are very effective. Now, you've mentioned that it's less stakeholders on campus that it is maybe other people outside of the campus. Are you saying that there's like a lot of people that sort of like, hey, reach out to the your friend over in Boston about your school in Texas and get them to sign a petition? Like this is a sort of external factor as well? I do.

I think a lot of times a cancel culture campaign just gets folks revved up and they sort of crowdsource their outrage against a particular target. You see that on higher education cancel culture examples as well as I think just the mainstream examples where just everybody decides to get this is the target for the day. Let's grab our pitchforks and then tomorrow move on to the next victim. That's kind of brutal. So we have this database, and clearly there is a lot of data and a lot of research that we can delve into here.

What is the top line here? What is the lesson that you'd like people to take away when they look at this database? Well, we definitely felt that the problem needed to be quantified because, again, as I mentioned, you know, it's headline after headline after headline. You're reading, you're reading, you're reading. And it sort of becomes as malaise of cancellation. and you sort of lose track of everything that's been canceled. And by golly, we're not going to forget it.

We're going to list every single thing that has been erased, memory hold, censored, disinvited. Because if it just becomes sort of like this, you know, looking back, we can't even keep track of what we've lost, then I think it loses the impact. No, this is having an extreme effect on our culture, on our shared history, on our commonality. I mean, we are Americans, warts and all. And I think we should embrace that, learn from it, grow from it, rather than erase it and cancel it. So we want to make sure that we quantify the problem and track the problem. So it is not forgotten and that we can show how big of a problem it is.

But secondly, sort of like sort of philosophically, you know, I wanted to be the opposite of the ministry of truth that like erases things and changes history. We're going to stand to thwart that, right? If you want to know the truth, if you want to know what really, how America really used to be higher higher education in our case, come to the database and we'll list everything that used to be there. Right. So it seems like we are in a cycle of cancel culture.

Obviously, this database is documenting all of these cases. It's being very regularly updated, which means that this is not something that's going away or even reducing in scale. How do we get out of this cycle of cancel culture and outrage? Like, what are some concrete steps that we can take? You know, I think stakeholders in a campus community, and that's students, professors, trustees, alumni, donors, I mean, look, be the squeaky wheel and email the president and be like, look, don't cancel this. Don't be ridiculous. You know, we have a situation. The University of Wisconsin,

Madison, has this gorgeous, large statue of Abraham Lincoln. And did you know for the last five years there's been clamoring of students, including a resolution approved by the student government, as well as Black Lives Matter student protesters, to remove the Lincoln statue from campus. Now, granted, this is the same university that removed a racist rock that was like roughly two billion years old and a bit on campus, you know, since for 10,000 years, what have you. So we won't go down that rabbit hole. But the point is when Chancellor Blank said, no, we're not removing the Lincoln staff. you. We foiled her emails. It turns out several alumni and donors at email be like, look,

take a stand for Lincoln for goodness sake. And she did. So I think there's something to be said about, you know, pitching in. And when I, I'm a San Diego State University alumnus. And when they wanted to cancel the, the Aztec warrior, you know, as our mascot, I emailed in, you know, as an alumnus and a stakeholder, it said, yeah, that was the best part of the football game. The guy comes out. He's got his warrior staff and we all cheered and got excited. Like, come on. So I think there's something you said about, you know, putting your two cents in and letting the people in charge of campuses know that there's another side. Excellent.

So as we wrap up here, if our listeners would like to check out the database or more of your organization's work, where would you recommend that they go? So if you go to the college fix, FI-X.com, there's a link. right in the upper right hand corner that will take you to the database. And keep in mind, there's so many ways that you can search it. You can just search everything, everything that's been protested and canceled, or you can toggle and just look at what's been canceled or just looked at what's been protested. If you want to check out your university, you can do a keyword search or we even have it broken down by genre. So we have, you know, movies, theaters, statues, painting, buildings, names, guest speakers. So it's a lot of fun to kind of just poke around and

kind of daunting and scary to realize everything that's been, you know, taken away from. from us or deemed unacceptable. But you know, you just have some fun kind of doing those searches and seeing what you can find. And it can be quite a shocking eye-opener. Well, great. So our guest today was Jennifer Cabani, editor at the College Fix and Visiting Fellow at the Independent Women's Forum.

Jennifer, thank you so much for all of your time. Oh, my pleasure. Any sign. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts

and encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Virginia Allen and Kate Trinko, sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, please visit DailySignal.com.