The New Yorker Radio Hour - On Cancel Culture and the State of Free Speech

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

Every few weeks, it seems, another example of so-called cancel culture is dominating the headlines and trending on social-media platforms. The refrain “you can’t say anything these days” has become a slogan of cultural politics, particularly on the right. And yet there’s a wide gulf of opinion on what the term “cancelling” means—and whether the phenomenon even exists. In this special episode, we examine the issue with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the YouTube video creator Lindsay Ellis, the comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff, and the writers Jay Caspian Kang and William Deresiewicz. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. My name is Lindsay Ellis. I don't identify as anything right now. I used to say video essayist because YouTuber is such a dirty word, but it's also more honest. Lindsay Ellis was pretty early to YouTube. She started posting videos in 2008 when she was a film student, and her videos are a form of pop culture criticism,

commentary on everything from Marvel movies to Broadway musicals. But anyway, not every musical, even the ones with explicit revolutionary text, needs to be trying to tear down the system. But what would a revolution look like if it had been included in it? In her online world, and it's a pretty big world, Ellis was a celebrity, and she had more than a million followers on YouTube.

Then suddenly, last year, in a moment of real uproar and emotion, Ellis walked away from the career that she'd spent more than a decade building. And it was just, it's just so, like, just such a nightmare. And I'm just like this nightmare is never going to end. Like, I'm leaving. I quit. I give up. You won. Lindsay Ellis had been, to use the term of the moment, canceled. You know what I'm talking about. The idea that people are somehow waiting to punish anyone who says something,

something that's deemed offensive or mistaken, justified or not. And social media in its chaotic way is the judge and jury. The refrain, if you can't say anything these days, has become very, very common, and particularly on the right. It's an essential slogan of cultural politics. Are we going to tear the Washington Monument down? Are we going to rename it the obelisk of wotness? I'd say that among the crises facing our country, the pandemic,

income inequality, the attack on voting rights, structural racism, conflict with Russia and China, cancel culture is not the most dire among them. But to look away entirely from this clash on speech, over accusation and forgiveness, over social media itself as the public square, well, to ignore it all is to ignore a critical arena of public life. So what's at stake? What is cancel culture. Is it real and ruinous, or is it overstated and distorted? Is it a cudgel or is it a mirage? These are some of the questions we're going to try to tackle today. It's our entire episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. So back to Lindsay Ellis, the YouTuber. The events that made Ellis walk away start with a Disney movie, Raya and the Last Dragon, which came out last year.

Raya and The Last Dragon is this movie which is, I guess, at least aesthetically based on South Asian cultures. Kumandra. This is what we used to be when our land was whole and we lived harmoniously alongside. And I was thinking about how much it reminded me of. most of the YA fantasy books I had read in the last couple years. And, like, these authors are very unapologetically inspired by Avatar the Last Airbender, which is a cartoon from the mid-2000s. Both of those things, the new movie and the old TV show,

were influenced to some degree by Asian styles of animation and storytelling. And one night, she tweeted this. Also, watched Raya and The Last Dragon, and I think we need to come up with a name for this genre that is basically Avatar the Last Airbender Reduxes. It's like half of all YA Fantasy published in the last few years anyway. By the next morning, that tweet had gotten a lot of attention. And people were like, you know, you need to address this.

This is really racist. And I'm just very confused. And I asked one of them, I was like, explain your rationale. And they were like, well, it kind of implies that all Asian-inspired properties are the same. Lindsay says she only meant to make a comment about genre. But some people online felt that in comparing Raya to Avatar, she was somehow pigeonholing them based on their Asian influence.

I kind of just let it go for a few hours, but it just kind of kept building and building. And I think honestly the worst part was like my friends were just not on board with me. They were like, well, you're just not getting it. you're just, this is just a racial blind spot for you. And, um, well, basically, I kind of got defensive and that made it worse. Honestly, her follow-up threat somehow made me even angrier. Please check your quote retweets, Lindsay.

Asian folks have been explaining their rationality. Lindsay Ellis is trying so hard to double down on her racist comment, making her response. I've hated Lindsay Ellis for years. She's horrifically problematic. Weird how Lindsay Ellis and her friends keep getting called out for racism, yet every time it's cancel culture's fault. So I guess we have to be mindful of the fact that this was only a couple weeks after the spa shootings in Atlanta. And the conversation about what anti-Asian racism looks like and how bad it is in the U.S. was kind of ramping up.

And so people were really sensitive about this movie. Then people started dragging up every remotely problematic thing I had ever said or done over a period. of 13 years. I tried to unplug, but I just could not stop thinking about it. Like, I was just so angry, you know? And, and I forget, like, where I just decided, I was like, I'm going to address this. In April, she posted a video called Mask Off to YouTube, and it addressed the allegations that were being made about her.

We all make mistakes. So where I feel like an amendment or an apology is warranted, I will do so. It's more than 100 minutes long. 2018, transphobia via Tarzan. I genuinely honestly really do regret this one, and I have said so a few times. Why do they never screencap their retractions? Weird. When it was announced that LaFou would become the first. None of those apologies were accepted.

This was painful to watch. This was, I actually would not have watched. this if we didn't have a podcast. No, yes, I would have fully not watch this if I didn't have to now talk about it for an hour. But you know what? That's what we're going to do. I feel like it was honestly a mistake. And I think it made a lot of my colleagues uncomfortable. And I think that's a big reason why a lot of them just stopped talking to me.

On December 28th, Ellis posted a letter saying that she was walking away. And she hoped that this would put a little bit of her. that this would put an end to the entire affair. And then the whole, it just started all over again. The whole cycle, just the dragging, the thrill of humiliation, saying that, you know, how weak empathetic I was, that I was like throwing my million subs away because I couldn't take a little heat on Twitter.

I spoke with Lindsay Ellis a few weeks after all this happened. Now, Lindsay, you're suggesting, I think, that some people are insinceree. you're in their hatred and they derive some form of pleasure or entertainment from their performance of outrage. Well, yeah, and it, because it is personal. Like, you know, basically I have these Twitter follows that were these people that were just screencapping everything you say with the intent of bad faith reading because it is fun to

take people down that you perceive as having power. And, like, I know that, like, 1.2 million subs seems like a lot, but, like, on YouTube, it's really not. I think I'm, like, number 25,000. But a million, too, I hate to tell you, but the subscription base of the New Yorker magazine is 1.2 million, exactly. Oh, wow. And maybe several people, God willing, read that. I mean, but you're making a living from being on YouTube? Not YouTube.

Most of my money comes from Patreon. and sponsorships. YouTube is more just like a platform to deliver content than it is an actual generator of money. I ask you this about the economics of it because something's got to be worth it about this. In other words, you've been a target for harassment from the right before.

You're not new to this. And now you're getting, you got really, and it seems quite upsetting, a hell of a lot of criticism and abuse from the left as you see it. Why do it? It was not a healthy way to live. It was, I think some people, you know, they don't live in constant fear, but if you are filtering everything you say through the potential for the worst bad faith interpretation, you can't create, you can't write, you can't do anything.

So that was why I was just like, I'm done. I don't have anything left to say. And when you say fear, were you receiving threats? No. Incredible threats. No, it wasn't threats. I think that's what's hard to get people to understand is it's not threats, it's ostracism. It's shame.

There's a sort of dampening effect where if your name is so toxic, nobody wants to associate with you. So it's just so humiliating. On a very large scale, we've seen performers, artists, authors, others, who have gone through these passages. Think what you will about what they said and who they are. But Dave Chappelle say, J.K. Rowling. Chappelle's not going to stop making comedy. Rowling will continue writing novels.

Well, here's the thing about those. to, and that's why I feel like it's a really bad comparison. They are incendiary. They know what they're doing. J.K. Rowling wrote a, like, 2,000-word manifesto about why she opposes Scotland's gender identification law. Dave Chappelle has made two Netflix specials that are basically just fueled by his ire that trans people criticize his jokes.

And both of them have very effectively weaponized. the broad public sympathy for this idea of victims of cancel culture, comparing like both of them and me who's just been in flailing damage control for the last year over a misread of something so nothing, something so small and insignificant. Lindsay, let me ask you what can only be a tough question, but I have to ask it. how do you respond to those who would say, look, all this is Twitter, social media in general, is speech, free speech, more speech. And if you want to enter into the public forum as a YouTuber or writing for magazine or whatever it is,

and you can't take criticism, however abusive or nasty, then maybe you shouldn't be in the public forum. How do you respond to that? And what is to be done about? I quit. I don't know. That's what I said. Like, I mean, like, yeah, you're right. I quit.

I can't take it. I mean, obviously, this stuff can and has been exaggerated, especially by the right. But for every high-profile cancellation, of which there is at this point not a shortage, there are 100, say, low-profile cancellations that don't get picked up. And even more importantly, for every one of those, there are, let's say, a thousand people, and this is really where it matters, who just keep their mouth shut. That's a writer named William Derezowitz, and we'll pick up again with him in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Do you feel like people are too easily offended these days? Oh, that's a loaded question. Yes. No, I don't. Oh, Jesus Christ. I mean, compared to what? like all of human history. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. We're talking today about free speech and threats to free speech in many forms. And that includes so-called cancel culture, what it is and whether it even exists. That's a great question. And the answer, in my opinion, is absolutely. I don't know.

I think the word cancel is oversaturated and I just don't like that term. I think most Americans don't think about this. I hate it. Like, I hate people getting canceled, and I think they're always a couple sides. You can always catch people on a bad day. That being said, you kind of deserve what happens to you if you're a shitbag. Now, these are questions I think a lot of people have been thinking about lately, myself included.

And I was struck recently by an article in a journal called Liberties by William Derezzowitz, who taught at Yale and then at Scripps College in California. The article is called Birth Rights, and it talks about the author's upbringing, which was in an Orthodox Jewish community in New Jersey. I grew up in a world that was divided, as if by a thick black line down the middle of it, between us and them. Us was the Jews, them was the Goyim.

And the understanding was that there was an eternal, fixed enmity between the groups, that the volume were ineradically other, that they were alien, that they were hostile, that we were better than them, and that it was necessary to remain always within the group and to live by the norms that the group dictated in order, well, I mean, to be safe,

but also just to live the life that was appropriate for you. I think this has come. and among people who grow up in groups that are that self-enclosed and especially groups that are that embattled, as the Jews have felt embattled historically. I don't think groups are evil. I don't think that you can't be an individual and be a member of a group at the same time.

But groups often make extraordinary, and I would say excessive claims on their members in ways that prevent them from developing as individuals. When William Derezowitz looks at college campuses now, he sees a kind of us versus them thinking pervading students' lives, a concern, maybe an over-concern with identity versus individuality. And that, he says, affects the way students talk and write and ultimately how they go about learning. Now, Bill, you've spent a lot of your life in academia as a student, then as a graduate student, then as a professor. was there a moment when you felt like the rules around free speech started to change? What was it like before and what was the change?

Well, actually, that change happened after I left academia in 2008. But I did go back in 2015 to teach a course at an elite liberal arts college. Scripts College, in California. Right, in one of the Claremont colleges. And it was clear, I mean, I think maybe being away for that many years would enable me to see the situation more clearly because it was radically different. The first thing was that the person who had brought me there

was the head of the writing center and who was very militant in the new speech codes for lack of a better word, told me you're not supposed to say crazy anymore. You can't say crazy anymore because it signifies the mentally ill. And she had a lot of other strictures as well. And then once I met my students

and started to talk to them in my office, they, without me soliciting this information, because I really still wasn't aware of what the climate was, started to tell me how afraid they were really to say anything because they didn't know if they were going to say something that you weren't supposed to say anymore. Student of mine, I think she wrote on a paper

that she was surprised to learn that a fellow student who had been very close friends with her, for three years now, she was a junior, was religious and was not only religious, but went to church every Sunday. And my student said, why didn't I know this yet? And her friend said,

because I don't feel comfortable being out as a religious person at Scripps. You know, the university that you were out for a long time, Yale University, a long time ago, generations ago, had a young undergraduate and then graduate named William F. Buckley, who came along and wrote a book called God and Man at Yale.

And his argument sounds a little bit similar to what you're saying is that there was a liberal consensus at Yale. It dominated the students. It dominated the faculty. And conservatism was impossible. It was impossible to be a conservative at Yale. This is decades and decades ago. So what's changed?

Well, it may be that some things haven't changed, or it's certainly that this is a recurring problem. In fact, I don't think I was even aware of this, but when I was at college, surveys showed that conservative students actually slightly outnumbered liberals, but both were far outnumbered by moderate students. This was early Reagan. So it goes back and forth. It's, let's say, a perennially recurring problem on college campuses. I think right now we're an especially bad point. And as part of it also a reaction to the politics, the national politics that we've seen, after the Obama era with the ascendance of Trump. Oh, there's no question that part of what's changed is Donald Trump. And there's no question that Donald Trump and his movement embodies evil forces in American society, a recrudescence of evil forces, and that a vigorous response must be made.

The question is, what is that response going to be? Is it going to be the enforcement of a progressive orthodoxy, or is it going to be what colleges are supposed to do? which is to help students think better, not what to think but how to think. When you look at so-called cancel culture on social media, some argue it's effectively limiting people's free speech, but others argue it's just the opposites.

It's democratization of expression. Aren't students who protest college speakers just engaging in free speech themselves? When somebody you don't like comes and speaks on campus and you pick it outside and you protest, or you organize a teach-in in opposition to their views, that's more speech, that's great. When you blockade the building and don't let people in,

or when you flood the auditorium and then get up and march out or shout them down, that is speech or symbolic speech used to limit speech. So you and others have argued that the left is making academia inhospitable to certain ideas. And at the same time, on the right, there's a movement to limit what can be taught in classrooms. I'm thinking right now about the movement to ban critical race theory and certain perspectives on American history.

Are there similarities, do you see, between these two currents? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You know, when one side says that we need to limit what teachers can say, then the other side is going to feel greater licensed to do the same. William Derezoitz is a writer based in Oregon. Is it something that you personally worry about? Do you think about making sure that you say the right thing so that you don't draw a backlash? I do, yeah, sometimes.

I do. Yes. But I think part of that has been realizing that I'm not quite as blameless as I have been in the past. I think people in power have gone away with shit for a very long time, and they're the ones that are easily offended. You look at the rise of some of these, you look at the capture of power in the right wing, the assent of white nationalism, the concentration of wealth and as a consequence political power. And you cannot really animate or concentrate a movement like that without a sense of persecution or victimhood. And that is what the role of cancel culture is. Alexandra Acaccio-Cortez is one of the most influential progressives in electoral politics today.

And she's also a master of social media. So there's probably no better person to talk to in order to understand the position of the left on cancel culture. It is like the speck of dust around which the raindrop must form in order to precipitate, takeovers of school boards, pushing actual discourse out of the acceptable norms, like in terms of the 1619 project, for example, getting books banned from schools. They needed, and they need the concept of cancel culture to justify a political program of takeover

or really at least a further concentration of their own power. And so, you know, you talk about, cancel culture, but you notice that those discussions only go one way. We don't talk about all people who were fired. You just kind of talk about like right-leaning podcast bros and like more conservative figures. But there is also something to be said about the ferocity of what an internet-fueled backlash can do, that is unique. You know, and I think that that is in and of itself. I think that is a conversation.

But I don't think that that is what the cancel culture conversation is really about. That's Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. My interview with her, which covered a lot of ground in Washington and well beyond, will be at New Yorker.com on Monday. It's part of our first digital-only issue, a special edition we're calling The New Yorker Interviews. There used to be this conceit a few years ago. They're going to take your guns away.

They're coming to take your guns. And now it's, they're going to take your jokes away. They're going to take your comedians, you know? And it's the same sort of element driving the narrative. Cliff Nestoroff writes about the history of comedy. Comedy and comedians are loved. universally by right-wingers and left-wingers alike. But if you could demonize one political persuasion and say they're out to get the comedians, it's a great tactic for demonizing your

opposition. I really believe there's a concerted effort on the part of think tanks and propagandists to create this illusion that the liberals are out to get the comedians and that they're the new censors. In the debates about free speech, it's useful to consider consider comedy for a couple of reasons. For one thing, jokes at the expense of other people are a big point of contention here. How free do we want free speech to be when it comes to vulnerable or marginalized groups? For another, people throw around the word censorship all the time now. But in comedy, there really was a time when a joke could land you in jail. Cliff Nesteroff gives the example of Lenny Bruce in the 50s and early 60s. His persecution by the

authorities is probably better remembered now than his jokes. The things that Lenny Bruce became notorious for and eventually was hounded for and arrested for were threefold. One, he talked about organized religion on stage and would criticize organized religion. They're taken out of the headquarters of Religions Incorporated and seated around the desk on Madison Avenue, sit. The religious leaders of our country. Religion, big business.

We hear age... Two, he would use what you might call salty language. He swore on stage in an era in which you could literally get arrested for obscenity and put on trial and sent to jail if you swore on stage. And it was left to local vice squads to determine what was or was not obscene. I would like an honest equation from any, at least grammar school graduates. Is the witch son of a bitch less obscene to you than motherfucker? Really?

And then the third thing that he was busted for was narcotics use. And if he toured across North America and a police department did not bust them, then the local clergy or the local civic officials would criticize the police for being derelict in their duties, even when a crime wasn't committed. So not only did Lenny Bruce get arrested for things that any of us could say today, he often got arrested simply because he was Lenny Bruce and had a reputation. Comedians just don't face that kind of censorship in clubs these days, not to mention on Netflix specials or YouTube or podcasts and all the rest.

The last bastion of government control, as Nestorov sees it, is on network TV where the FCC still still. hold sway. When people talk about cancel culture, they never seem to reference that. That's where most of the censorship is. There's more censorship on the late night talk shows in terms of what a stand-up comedian can and cannot say than anywhere else. And social media is not where comedy lives. That is not where stand-up exists. On the nightclub stage at the comedy store, at the comedy seller, at the Whitley, which is a popular club here in Los Angeles, you can say what you're want and audiences are having a great fucking time. I kind of push back on this idea because it's just being repeated over and over on social media. But if you get off a social media,

if you go to the live shows, you'll see the opposite thing happening. That brings us to the recent controversy of Dave Chappelle and Netflix and the feeling among some people, particularly trans people, but not only that he had transgressed in his jokes about trans people in a way that was unfair, illegitimate, even dehumanizing. And how do you look on that passage? Think of the Chappelle show in the early 2000s and think of Dave Chappelle today. So there's a 20-year difference between Dave Chappelle emerging as this nationally, or universally beloved comedian,

the Chappelle show, regardless of your political point of view, you like Dave Chappelle. Now it's 20 years later. He's still extremely successful, extremely popular, but polarizing. Bob Hope in 1949

was universally beloved. He was the top movie star in comedy, top radio star in comedy. Everybody loved Bob Hope, 1949. 20 years later, 1969. Bob Hope is still a huge star. He's still incredibly popular,

but he had been speaking out in favor of the Vietnam War against war protesters, against hippies, and in favor of President Nixon, and he became polarizing. And so I see Dave Chappelle today being rejected, not just by a large contingent of transgender, people, but younger people, and supported by people that are his age or older. I think that Dave Chappelle would probably take that as a crushing analogy.

You're suggesting that Dave Chappelle is lost as juice. I would say Dave Chappelle today, compared to Dave Chappelle 20 years ago, is square. He's a square. But on the other hand, some jokes become, in retrospect, not just bad taste, but really deeply wrong. The magazine that I work for, the New Yorker, ran cartoons in the 30s, you know, with black Africans in boiling pots surrounded by, you know, so-called white African explorers making stupid jokes. And if we ran that now, I think we'd be justifiably pillory. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting if you look at the 1930s, of course,

blackface was still prevalent and black stereotypes were prevalent. If you read the black press, which you can now do thanks to the internet, go back through the archives of newspaper.com, and read the New York Age or the Pittsburgh Courier or the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American or the California Eagle, the major black newspapers of the 1930s, you will see editorials and letters complaining about that shit all the time. Why are we being insulted? Why don't they stop with this hackneyed, tired, old stereotypes? We're beyond this. We're human beings.

And nobody listened because who was the demographic of the New Yorker in the 1930s? It was largely a white audience. So minorities and their concerns were very easily ignored in those days. I just came out with a new book recently, which is about indigenous representation or lack thereof. And I have an example in the book of a contingent of. Native American leaders in the year 1911, complaining about racist stereotypes in silent movies. The year 1911. Oh, you can't joke about anything anymore in the year 1911.

So that has gone on. Those grievances have been lodged for ages, but were willfully ignored as long as indigenous people. or African Americans did not have the purchasing power or the influence in the body politic to have their voices heard. So what I hear you saying is on the one hand, you are for a sense of freedom, artistic freedom, speech freedom for artists like comedians. And at the same time, an equivalent sense of support

for people standing up for themselves, whether it's a group or an individual, When... Well, standing up for yourselves is freedom of speech. Exactly. And so you're describing it not as cancel culture, but as itself debate. I mean, it's not even cancel culture. It's just culture.

That is culture. It's the history of America is a tug of war between opposing forces, powerful forces versus weak forces. But social media is sort of the new thing that makes everything seem new because it's in your face all day, every day. It's in your pocket. Every stoplight, you're scrolling through it. Every time you go to the bathroom, you're scrolling through it.

In the old days, people would complain about certain things. They would say, oh, Milton Burrell is in bad taste because he dresses up in drag. This is a bad example for my children. But you would read that letter in TV Guide once a month and never again. You didn't keep scrolling through the same TV guide reading that same complaint over and over and over and over all day every day. So it's just a different delivery system. Cliff Nesteroff is a historian of comedy and his most recent book is

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, the unheralded story of Native Americans and comedy. So do you feel like something new is going on around how outraged people seem to be getting or do you think that's just like an all-time human problem? I think it's been it's like a seat that's inside of us but we are exposed to the opinions of like millions of people at a time

and that's like a scale that we've never had to deal with. You're not safe, Ed. anywhere with TikTok and YouTube because it's viral. You have these out-of-context snippets that exist outside of you. Like this interview, I'm like, oh, my God, what's going to happen? Is ever good for people to get outraged about things that people say or do? Sure. You can be outraged. The thing is to control your rage.

And that, to me, is the root word, the rage. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Randall. Over the course of this program, we've heard a lot of competing ideas about the state of free speech. So to help me make some sense of it all, I reached out to Jay Caspian Kang, author of the loneliest Americans, and a columnist for the New York Times. Jay often writes about issues of identity and the cultural wars.

And in a time where things are way too often made out to be cut and dried, Jay lives in a world of nuance, even when the issues affect him personally. Right, when my book came out, there was a group of Asian American Studies academics who all said, we refused to read this book. Now, there are reasons for, like, you know, in my opinion, a little bit bizarre. Why did they refuse? Well, they said that, like, because part of my argument is that, like, well, Asian American is a pretty fraught term and it's not really a political identity. And like, there's a group of people, including Asian American studies professors who believe that this is a real term. But in reality, most people don't think it's a real term, right? So they said, we refuse to read this book.

It was maybe like five different people, you know. And then it got amplified to a point where everyone thought there was this huge backlash against this book. Right. You know? And every interview. Yeah. And every interview that I did about this book for the first month was about this backlash to the book. And each time I would explain, look, I don't think this is a real backlash to the book.

It's just Twitter. And, you know, there's no way for me to sort of express this in any sort of way outside, you know, because they would say, okay, but what about the backlash would be their next question? right? Jay, we heard earlier in the program from Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, and he pretty strongly made the argument that cancel culture is just an idea puffed up by powerful elements on the right to create a sense of grievance in their base, that in some sense the threat is just cooked up by reactionaries. What do you say to that? Well, you know, I think that she is describing something that is real, you know, that there is a way in which these crises do get weaponized to create a sense of grievance.

But what I don't understand is, you know, even if that is true, why that means that the only other option is for everybody to shut up about it and to just pretend like there isn't some sort of weight or some sort of pressure on people to not say the wrong things. And I think that by saying that there's no cancel culture, what you've actually done is you've made it impossible to talk about those people that you're concerned about on the left who are also being canceled. So then, like, you know, like what happens is that nobody cares about the people who on the left who are being canceled. And everyone who's on the right or center right that's being canceled is then just told, well, we can't talk about it at all. You know, so then in the end, you just have a bunch of people who are not talking about something. As we speak, as we speak. One of the big stories in the news, of course, is about Joe Rogan and Spotify. Several musicians yanked their music off of Spotify to protest Rogan's show.

And folks on the right are calling this an affirm. and an effort to just cancel Rogan. I do wonder why so much of our conversations around these questions these days are centered around basically asking tech companies to do something that tech companies don't want to do. Spotify just wants to make sure that this goes away and they're just going to do whatever they can

to make sure it goes away with the least amount of damage to them. I think the tenor of the conversations to try and have Spotify dictate what is acceptable. and what is not acceptable speech, right? And they're not asking the FCC to do something, right? They're not asking the government to do something. And I think that places these tech companies in this really sort of powerful role, right?

Like they can be the people who are enacting a type of political reality. And I think that when you are going to a company that has never thought about these types of things, really, I don't know. I think that's somewhat delusional. And I think that when we're just trying to push for those types of decisions from these types of companies,

we're just going to get things that are in best interests of those companies in the end. Now, Jay, I think you'll agree that one of the criticisms that's often lobbed at the idea of cancel culture is that, well, yeah, a lot of people are canceled and they end up, most of them rebuilding their careers and they don't starve to death and they're just fine. You hear this on, I hear this quite a lot,

and I'm a little startled by it. I don't know. I find that odd too, honestly. You know, like I was, Justine Sacco is the woman who tweeted that sort of her bad joke, you know, and racist joke about AIDS in Africa. And then she was hounded and she became like sort of one of the, I don't know, she just put on like the Mount Rushmore of like the canceled, right? And I just by random chance ended up doing an article about

daily fantasy sports. And I reached out to the company, one of the company's Fandul that is one of the big companies now in sports gambling. And their PR director was Justine Sacco, you know. And so in some ways, Justine Sacco is fine because Justin Sacco now has a job at this emerging kind of cool company. But, you know, what I found through talking to Justine Sacco on and off for like six or seven months is like, you know, she's not fine. Like, I mean, I don't know. Like I was talking to her and I said, look, we have to mention this in the article that like you're this Justine Sacco, you know? And like the terror that I could see come across her face was like amazing. You know, like, she's still scarred by this sort of thing. And so I don't really believe the argument

that everyone's fine after all these sorts of things. And I certainly don't understand it in the context of the prevailing idea that, like, online speech and online hate and online abuse leads all these sorts of bad effects. Like, I don't think you can have those two things, those two ideas in your head at the same time. How much does this permeate into life that's not the academy, that's not show business, it's not media and so on and so forth? I talked earlier with a former college professor who made the association, assertion that for every high-profile cancellation, there are many, many more cancellations of people

that we never hear about. You think that the average person walking down the street is affected by what's called the threat of cancel culture? I don't, I don't, I mean, absent any real examples, I'm not sure what that would be, you know, like I don't, I do think it is mostly a media phenomenon and a, you know, it also, I have to say, it does, you see it, cancel culture, became in the Trump rhetoric, like the first arrow out of his quiver at a certain point, the same with a trans swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, things that are really, really tiny in numbers, became an electrifying part of the Trump appeal and assured to be again. And you saw it again in the governor's race in Virginia.

Oh my God, critical race theory is affecting the school system. It wasn't even in the curriculum. It's very effective. Yeah, I think that if these things were more commonplace, if they were everywhere, then those more commonplace examples would become the ones that were talked about, you know? I don't think anyone on the right wants to use as their, you know, cost, lev, right? Like something that happened at Overland, right? And I think that if it was happening more to, in the broader public,

that certainly those would be the examples that were amplified. I don't, I think that by definition almost, it's going to always be difficult to describe this thing. It's more of a feeling, right, that is out there amongst people than anything else. And when you try and the trick that I think a lot of progressives have figured out and, you know, the sort of center progressives as well is to basically just say that if it doesn't pass some sort of legal doctrine, then it's not real. Well, if the government isn't sort of putting you in jail, then that means that cancel culture isn't real. You know, where there's like a lot of missing internal links in that type of argument, right? Now, I understand and share some of the concerns about ideological narrowness or intolerance on campus,

and yet it doesn't seem to me near the threat to democracy posed by a lack of voting rights or the influence of dark money on elections and many other things. Or am I missing something? No, I think you're right. And, you know, but I do think that that... I mean, not to dismiss the things that do happen when they're wrong, but it seems inflated. For me, you know, like, as somebody who, you know, does care pretty deeply about free speech issues, right? Like, the biggest threat is free speech without question is from right-wing state legislatures who are banning and making certain forms of protest illegal.

Right. Now, the question is really just like, so how do you address that, right? Like, how do you, how as people who are interested in free speech, how do you sort of fight that threat to democracy? And I do think that you have to basically address speech broadly. Because if you basically just say free speech doesn't matter, free speech doesn't matter, free speech doesn't matter, except right here, then I don't know if you're going to really mobilize people into caring about it right here. Right. My, in the instances where it should matter.

And I think that that sort of problem arises from the fact that the left just doesn't want to talk about free speech. generally, and that they only care about these types of laws in the context of pointing out the hypocrisy of people on the right. But I do think that the left should have a very robust defense of free speech, and I just don't see it ever. You don't see it ever? No, I don't. Do you see it? Well, I consider myself somewhere in there, and free speech means the world to me. The world to me. Do you not feel lonely these days, though? Or do you not feel isolated in these thoughts? Well, let me ask you with somebody that's very much on the left. And how do we get better at talking about this stuff?

How can we acknowledge, on the one hand, that something has changed and is changing and to try to understand what it is without becoming grist for somebody's political propaganda? This might be naive, right? But I just think that people are freaking out too much about it right now, you know? Like, I don't think that somebody talking about these issues, like, you know, whether professors are scared or whatever, or whether or not, like, you know, this particular cancellation was just or not.

Right. Like, I think that when people just say, well, it's all going to lead to X world, you know, or democracy is over if we have this conversation, I think they, people need to calm down a little bit, you know? And I think it's a form, I do think at some level for some of those people,

it is a form of bullying in a way, right? Like, it's a form of bullying to say, you don't get to talk about this or I'm going to ascribe the worst possible consequences as to what you just said. And I don't know, I just, I don't believe that. You know, I think that we can have these conversations as adults and that, you know, most people will think about them

in a thoughtful manner and that the number of people who try and actually weaponize speech in this sort of way, like, I don't know, like, you know, it's mostly politicians and everything. So why can't we as citizens and, like, writers and thinkers, you know, have these conversations like I think we can? Jay Caspian Kang, thanks so much. Thank you. You can read some of Jay Caspian Kang's reporting at New Yorker.com,

and he's on the opinion page of The New York Times. Today we've tried to have a thoughtful conversation about a complicated idea that sometimes spins into, let's just say, non-thoughtful conversations. It's much easier to fall back on platitudes like cancel culture doesn't exist or cancel culture is the downfall of American democracy. So as we should, finish up here, I just ask you to see if you can hold these two ideas in your mind at the same

time. Yes, something is changing around speech in this country. But that change is not always an apocalypse. And the more we can talk, the more we can understand what's changing and why, the less scary it will seem. Above all, we're grateful to you for listening, and we hope you'll let us know what you're thinking about on these subjects too. On Monday, come check out New Yorker.com for a series of in-depth conversations with people of note, including my interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which is also on our podcast feed. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Ave Corrio, Brita Green, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino,

with help from Alison McAdam, Harrison Keithline, and Meng Fei-Chen, and guidance from Emily Boutin. Original music in this week's show was composed by Alex Barron. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.