Rep. Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican, thinks “cancel culture”—the ill-defined practice of punishing people for saying stupid things—has gone too far. For an example, he cited Congress’s vote on Thursday to strip QAnon-promoting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–GA) of her committee assignments.
As someone who has written frequently on the subject of cancel culture—popularizing the term in my book, Panic Attack, and on cable news— I believe that there are many sympathetic victims of this impulse to sic social media mobs on the undeserving. But I admit I’m both mystified and dismayed that the concept is now being used to excuse behavior that is absolutely worthy of condemnation.
Greene previously promoted conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings; she claimed the Democratic Party was run by a cabal of pedophiles; she even suggested that the California wildfires were started by Jews. Should a political figure be held responsible for expressing insane political views as recently as two years ago? Not according to Jordan, who thinks this represents some kind of slippery slope.
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“So, who’s next?” asked Jordan from the House floor. “Who will the cancel culture attack next?"
Who indeed? Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–FL) has found another prominent victim: He recently tweeted that the impeachment of former President Donald Trump represented the “zenith of cancel culture.” These poor, poor politicians. They just want to say crazy things and not suffer any consequences: Is that too much to ask?
Democrats and Republicans have different understandings of what constitutes crazy, though most reasonable people would probably agree that it’s perfectly appropriate to punish a member of the government for asserting the U.S. government orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as Greene did. The interesting wrinkle here is that Republicans like Jordan aren’t actually defending Greene’s comments—they are asserting that it’s nevertheless wrong to sanction her because this is an example of “cancel culture” run amok.
Greene herself clearly feels this way. “Cancel culture is a real thing,” she said during her speech on the House floor on Thursday. “It is very real.”
But this is an abuse of the term, which should not apply in situations like Greene’s. Conspiracy-theory-spouting member of Congress should certainly be sanctioned for promoting vile lies. That’s not unfair, it’s not inappropriate, and importantly, it’s not cancel culture.
The term’s misuse is in part due to the lack of a widely agreed definition. Cancel culture is a relatively recent concern. It emerged in recent years following various kerfuffles, chiefly on social media and on certain elite college campuses where the harms are low-stakes, but average sensitivity is high. At its most basic, cancel culture describes the sometimes over-the-top reactions when a person is discovered to have said or done something offensive.
Consider a noteworthy example. In 2019, a 24-year-old security guard named Carson King went viral during ESPN’s “College GameDay.” King appeared on camera asking audiences to Venmo him beer money. Anheuser-Busch saw an opportunity and partnered with King to raise over $1 million dollars for charity. This feel good story came to a swift end after a reporter for The Des Moines Register discovered that King had sent a racist tweet years ago, when he was just 16. As a result of the reporter’s article, King was promptly canceled—the beer company dropped him as a partner, bringing a swift end to the bewildered football fan’s unexpected success. Social media sleuths then avenged King by digging up the reporter’s old tweets and getting him fired.
It’s this sort of experience that gave rise to concerns about cancel culture, which I define as possessing the following elements: a relatively obscure victim; an offense that is either trivial, or misunderstood, or so long ago that it ought to have been forgotten; and an unjust and disproportionate social sanction. Not every alleged cancellation includes each of these components, of course. Kyler Murray, the 2018 winner of the Heisman Trophy, is not an obscure person. Nevertheless, the flurry of news articles that dug up several homophobic tweets he had sent as a 14-year-old count as an attempt to cancel him, I argued at the time.
The ubiquity of social media has made it trivially easy to drag people for stupid comments they made eons ago. Everyone who passed through their teenage years before the era of smartphones (circa 2008) dodged a proverbial bullet. Today’s kids have grown up in a world where their every utterance is recorded in a text, tweet, or snap.
Consider what happened to Mimi Groves, a Virginia teenager who said the sentence “I can drive” followed by a racial epithet—a deeply offensive and ill-advised choice of words, though not directed with malice at anyone in particular—and then watched her life be destroyed when the footage leaked during her senior year of high school. Not only was Groves de-admitted from the University of Tennessee, The New York Times even covered the story, subjecting her to further humiliation.
In a sane world, Groves could have faced a less severe punishment. Instead, her entire future was ruined. That’s cancel culture.
This sort of thing has become routine. An art curator had no choice but to resign after he joked during a meeting about diversifying the museum’s collection that he would still accept some art from white people. A Palestinian man who ran a catering business lost all of his customers, not because of something he said, but because his daughter had posted anti-Semitic comments on Instagram when she was 14 years old.
These are troubling situations that should prompt sympathy. We are becoming more addicted to outrage, and less forgiving as a society.
But if there’s one domain where this trend does not hold, it’s the political sphere: If anything, the likelihood of a politician being held accountable has fallen over time, since increased partisanship makes it all but impossible to break ranks and call out a member of one’s own team. Indeed, Republicans who have criticized the GOP’s Trumpian drift are far more likely to face cancellation than members of the party who spout nonsense about stolen elections.
Which brings us back to Marjorie Taylor Greene. If Greene were not a public figure—if she were, say, an auto mechanic rather than a member of Congress—I’d call it excessively cruel to try to get her fired for having promoted conspiracy theories some years ago. All sorts of people hold all sorts of kooky views, and everyone has done or said things they regret. But Greene is an elected member of the House of Representatives, an elite lawmaking branch of the U.S. government. There are only 434 other people in the country who hold this position. If it’s wrong to punish her for the views she expressed on political subjects, then democracy itself is wrong: Picking and choosing leaders who have sound opinions is the whole point.
Greene shouldn’t be threatened or harassed for her comments. She can’t be fined or jailed (the First Amendment protects even odious speech). But Congress is well within its rights to hold her accountable in the manner it has chosen. Greene is not a victim of cancel culture, and to treat her as such would render the entire concept meaningless. Elected officials must be held to a higher standard than random citizens, especially when it comes to their political opinions.
Pity the common people who are caught up in social-media-fueled drama over trivial mistakes—don’t pity the member of Congress who got down with QAnon. If she’s changed her mind about these conspiracy theories, and is sorry for spreading them, that’s great. It doesn’t make her qualified to represent the people of Georgia.
