We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emilgasanski, culture
editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show at
radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and over at the Federalist
dot com to the premium version of the site. We are joined today by
Evan Narman. He is the co author of the new book The Cancel Culture
Curse. From Rage to Redemption in a World Gone Mad. Evan is founder
and CEO of Red Banion. Evan, thank you so much for joining us,
Emily, it's good to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Now, somehow you snagged the u r L Cancel culture dot org right,
cancel culture dot com. That's even better than it's even better than that,
even better. How did you get cancel culture dot com? That's incredible.
Well, you live in a capitalist society and certain people like to buy domains
and then just sit on them and resell them to people. So I found
that someone had the domain, they weren't doing anything with it, and so
I approached them and asked if I could purchase it. And they agreed,
So that's how I wound up with it. Well you can, that's simple.
You can get your copy of the Cancel Culture Curse at that incredible domain,
cancel culture dot com. Evan. Before we dive into the books,
have a lot of questions about you know, you do this pretty broad survey
of everything that's happened over the last couple of years. So I'm excited to
get into it. Tell us a little bit about how you ended up writing
this book, and if you can't, it's your first time on the show,
just maybe a little bit about how you ended up where you are right
now too. Sure, Well, I'll take the second part of the question
first, And how did I end up where I am today? I went
to school in Washington, DC at George Washington University and a colonial. Hi
Hi right. Indeed, Well, we're colonials at least for the next couple
of months until they rebrand us as something. I don't know what canceled canceling
the Colonials. It certainly appears that way, although I guess we'd have to
run it through the framework of the book to see if in fact that's the
right verb. But we'll get into that perfect. So I was at GW
Learning Communications. One of the cool things about GW is you don't have classes
on Fridays because they encourage you to get internships and take advantage of the fact
that you're in Washington, d C. So I had a number of internships.
I learned a lot about what I didn't want to do. I also
found some things I liked. Ended up working in politics and policy in DC
for about seven and a half years. Left a nonprofit advocacy organization promoting the
USS or a relationship to go work at a high stakes crisis PR firm,
and that was where I really decided this was going to be my path.
I wanted to help good people and good organizations who find themselves in complex or
challenging circumstances. But at the time I was working for someone else, and
while I liked the work, the type of work, I even enjoyed some
of the clients, I was thinking to myself, you know, if this
were my company, I'd do it one hundred eighty degrees differently. I do
the complete opposite. One day, I'm going to have my own firm,
and I'm going to do that. And so fast forward twenty years and here
I am. I've got my own firm. So that's how I wound up
where I am. Any questions there before I answer the first part of the
question, No, that's super helpful. And the sort of crisis PR background
is such a seamless transition into cancel culture, actually, definitely, And I
have a team of about thirty people across the country, and we have a
dedicated group of eight or nine folks who only do high stakes and crisis PR.
Last year we worked on about one hundred different instances and so many of
them were cancel culture related. So after spending the last year seeing this dramatic
influx in people facing really tough challenges, I started to identify some recurring themes
and some elements that seemed to repeat themselves time after time. And I also
got a window into how destructive cancel culture can be, not just for big
companies or high profile celebrities, but for average men and women, for private
individuals, people who are small business owners, etc. And so I wrote
the book because I wanted to share what I had been exposed to, which
was understanding in a real visceral level the damage that cancel culture causes, but
then also to teach people what is cancel culture versus what isn't because we hear
the term bandied around a lot. I also wanted to give people suggestions for
what to do if they end up on the receiving end of a cancel culture
attack, and also give them a lot of very concrete, real world advice
on how to not end up being canceled in the first place. So that's
the genesis of the book. And at the end of the day, if
I can prevent someone out there from having to go through this, or maybe
they do go through it and they're able to navigate it successfully by drawing upon
some of the strategies and the tactics outlined in the book, well then I've
done my part to hopefully make the American society and beyond a little bit kinder,
more forgiving, and a little bit more generous of spirit. So that
was really the story where the book came from. Now it's really interesting and
there's a lot to go off of there. And actually, right before we
get to the definition, it may seem like I'm asking these questions in reverse,
but I feel like your definition actually has a lot to tell us about
the evolution of cancel culture. In general. So I want to ask this
a very basic question and just if you could do you know, maybe like
the elevator pitch type answer of where cancel culture stands today, Because about a
year ago this time, there were all of these pieces about, you know,
the so called vibe shift, and we have seen obviously alternative platforms,
you know, whether it's Rumble or whatever, start at sub stack, you
start to flourish, and obviously the sort of business structure of some of this
stuff has shifted a little bit. But I imagine Evan you and you maintain
that cancel culture is still very much with us. So what is the kind
of state of play when it comes to cancel culture today. It's a great
question. It's still, unfortunately, very much with us. My hope is
that, you know, maybe you'll have me on your podcast a year from
now we could talk about the death of cancel culture and how it's been completely
relegated to the dustbin of history. I don't expect that will be the case,
but it's a noble goal to shoot for, and I'll certainly do what
I can to make that a reality. But I think really with what we've
seen over the last number of months, even is a dramatic shift. I
think people are understanding better what cancel culture is and rejecting the premise that all
mistakes should be permanent and that unelected people, outside of any sort of due
process, can determine the fate of their fellow men and women. And I
do see dramatic changes taking place in terms of people rejecting cancel culture. You're
seeing more people on the left say no to cancel culture and be willing to
speak out against some of the activists coming from the hard left. You're seeing
alternative platforms. You mentioned substack, which is a great example, and Rumble
other media. It's providing an opportunity for people who had been canceled, or
there had been attempted cancelation of these people and they were left sort of without
a home or a soapbox or a platform. And now what we've seen is
a proliferation of means by which people can still connect with audiences and share their
ideas, regardless of how popular they may be or whom they may happen to
anger or disappoint. And I think we're also seeing for the first time,
and this is really the most exciting, is that universities are recognizing that they
need to do a better job of creating places where discourse can flourish and where
people students who go to colleges and universities under the premise of being challenged and
opening themselves up to new ideas. Cancel culture really emanated to a large degree
on the campuses, and so I think it's important that now we see at
universities around the country then making a concerted effort to reverse that trend and appointing
people to make sure that there is diversity of thought and different views on campus.
So, while I still think the impact of cancel culture is very much
with us, and a lot of people are still facing the prospect of having
their lives ruined on a day to day basis, there are lots of reasons
to be optimistic and hopeful. And here one of the most interesting things you
do in the book is actually dip into history, dip into the pre existing
literature and cancel culture from other people who've been ruminating on it in the last
several years, come up with a set of criteria for when something is as
you alluded to in our colonial back and forth a little bit earlier, what
constitutes cancel culture, What makes something an example of cancel culture. Can you
tell us a little bit about where you land on that very central question.
Yeah, absolutely so. In the book, my co author and I define
cancel culture as quote, the use of intimidation by a morally absolute coalition to
isolate and disproportionately punish an alleged transgressor. And I think it's important to define
cancel culture because in order to defeat it, you first have to define it.
And I think there's been a tendency in recent years for folks on the
political left to deny that cancel culture exists or to downplay its impact, and
then on the political right you have a tendency to call everything cancel culture.
And so I felt like it was very important right out of the gate,
and this is in the very first chapter of the book to talk about what
the definition is of cancel culture, and to also introduce this framework, which
I describe as the condemn framework, and that's an acronym for C N D
em And these elements are aspects that you see raising their heads a time and
time again when there are instances of cancel culture. And I think the condemned
framework provides a roadmap for determining whether or not something is cancel culture. If
five or six of the elements are present, then you know you've got a
bona fide case of cancel culture. But if you've only got a couple,
then it may be a pr crisis, or it may be something that a
company or an individual is grappling with, but it's not necessarily cancel culture.
So I'll take you very quickly through if I can the the framework of condemn
I'll go through it very quickly, and then if you want to dig into
any of them in more depth, we can. But the c is that
a collective is considered a victim of the crime. And that's important because what
cancel culture is predicated upon is that someone does or says something that's objectionable to
a larger community. So in other words, if I were to get into
an argument with you, for instance, Emily on this podcast, then it
wouldn't just be that Emily and Evan had a disagreement and I told you something.
It would be well, I would have to apply that to a larger
collective. So you happen to be a woman, so maybe it's you know
that I'm speaking in a way that's offensive to women writ large, maybe you're
from a certain part of the country, and therefore I'm denigrating Northerners or Southerners.
You get the idea. So the C is that there's a collective that's
considered a victim of the crime. The A is that it arises and accelerates
quickly, which we can only happen in the age of the Internet, where
people are prone to outrage and things accelerate fast. The N in the condemned
framework is that the nature of the offense is actually trivial or it's manufactured even
and so we would see that time and again when we were helping people through
cancel culture crises. Is the actual crime that they were alleged to have committed
was on its face really quite minor, but it was this additional value that
it was almost like trumped up charges related to the nature of their offense because
they defended a collective. And so you would see this time and time again
dealing with these clients. And then the D is that it prompts a disproportionate
response goes well beyond what you would think. So if you and I back
to the analogy of you and I having an argument and I said something offensive
to you, it wouldn't be enough that it would just be a call for
me to apologize to you. It would be I'd need to lose my job.
I'd need to have terrible one star reviews on my book. You need
to look for ways to hurt me financially or reputationally. The e in the
condemned framework is that everyone's afraid to get involved, and the reason is they
don't want to defend the accused because they're frightened that the mob of cancel vultures
may come for them next. So people who end up being the target of
cancel culture often find themselves at a time of real weakness and they're being attacked
and it's very disorienting, disorienting and disconcerting. And then they can't rely upon
their friends and their family necessarily or their employers because everyone's running scared because they
don't want to get targeted. And then the m the final element is the
moral absolutism of those doing the canceling. And I think that self righteous nature
is something that's really come into the public zeitgeist in recent years. And the
people who are who celebrate cancel culture and enjoy and relish the opportunity to take
other people down. They truly feel like they are on the side of the
angels and they're doing God's work and that anything they do is justified because they
think they've got the moral high ground to go after the person they're canceling.
So again, if you take these as a whole, this condemned framework,
you can apply it to most instances of a disagreement or a bruhaha that's happening
in the news and know with certainty very quickly whether or not you're dealing with
the circumstances that could accurately be labeled cancel culture. And yeah, there's a
theme in the condemn criteria that I want to pick up on, because you
say nature of the offense is trivial or fabricated. That's under the end.
And then the D is disproportionate response. And that's really interesting because the question
of proportionality is really central to the question of cancel culture, because you know,
you'll see an example where something somebody does something genuinely wrong, and then
you know, the Left could argue all day about what happened to Al Franken,
or they could argue we could all argue all day about any of the
me two examples, probably or Woody Allen, because we have different standards for
politicians and different standards for artists, and you can't adjudicate everything in the court
of public opinion, etc. Etc. But it does seem cancel culture is
very much a phenomenon of social media, and I wanted to get your take,
especially somebody who does crisis pr on how it seems to me. I
mean, you talk about witch hunts, you talk about maoism, but it
seems to me that this iteration of cancel culture is very much facilitated by the
kind of fundamental structure of Twitter, in particular in the way that you can
just pile on and are incentivized to pile on. Maybe that's off base,
but I'm curious what you think about that question. No, it's actually very
much on point. And part of the reason why we haven't had cancel culture
until recently is because we couldn't. But it's the nature of social media lends
itself to exactly this, because you have people who are incentivized for bad behavior,
and we know that negative news travels much faster than positive online. We
know that in a world in which people derive a lot of their self value
by how many likes or retweets, or cliques or comments they get when they
post to social media. They're looking for social approval from some critical mass of
people. So therefore they're incentivized to both look for the outrage of the day,
which is often trending on Twitter, and then to pile on and get
involved. It also gives people. The Internet gives people a sense of power,
especially people who have never before traditionally held what we think of his power.
So the internet is really the great equalizer every single person, from a
president to a senator, to a CEO to a guy who lives in his
mother's basement and plays video games all day, they all have an equal opportunity
to go online and to transmit their thoughts, their feelings, their views to
an unlimited audience. And so what you have is a lot of people who
don't necessarily have the facts, they don't have the context. And you mentioned
Twitter. Twitter. Twitter is a great enabler of cancel culture, and traditionally
has been because the platform itself, with its limited character account, the nature
of the beast is such that you can't provide a lot of context all you
can do is provide a quick talking point or a sound bite, and so
people rush to judgment of their fellow sent a sins. They don't have all
the information, and it leads to this this mob justice pileon event. And
the term that we introduce in the book to describe the people who get involved
in this is canceled vulture. And it's not merely because vulture runs with culture.
Therefore, hey, that's really clever, although that is a nice aspect,
but it's it's the fact that, you know what do vultures live upon?
They live upon roadkill. They prey on the pain and the death of
others, and so they swoop down, they feast on the carcass, and
then they fly off to get their next meal. And that's really a perfect
analogy for what happens with so many of these cancel culture attacks. There's an
outrage of the day, people read about it on social media, their networks
and their echo chambers start to mobilize. They get involved, they feel like
they've they've done their bit too. They go crazy. They aim for whatever
kind of retribution or vengeance they deem as required in that instance. They try
to take somebody down and then a couple days later, they've moved on to
the next outrage. And what people don't understand is on the receiving end of
that are real people who then are rendered damaged, unemployable in many cases,
psychologically wounded, financially harmed, and really with very few prospects for recovering in
the future. And that's a scary prospect because what that does is it fundamentally
changes our society into one where people don't enjoy some of the aspects that have
made America such a beacon of freedom for countries and people around the world.
You know, we celebrate freedom of expression, freedom of thought, the ability
to also extend due process to people under the law. Cancel culture deprives people
of all of that because there's a rush to judgments. There is not a
requirement that someone approach it with independence or careful thought. And you can be
punished and punish permanently just for saying something that another group deems unacceptable. And
you'd be hard pressed to find something that's that's more Unamerican than that. Yeah,
and I wonder if, as you're saying that, it occurs to me
that perhaps what the future of cancel culture looks like is I don't know if
the right phrase would be like a scaled back version of what we saw at
the height of Me Too, or at the height of the cancel culture movement
in general, where it was like a celebrity a day was going down for
something. But it seems like it's possible that that's just happening now to regular
people going about their lives in the sort of Instagram, Twitter video viral explosion
culture, that people are just being like context context lists plucked from their environment,
put on the internet and then screwed. And can you talk a little
bit Evan about what happens, what you've seen happen, because that's one of
the things with cancel culture. A lot of people don't have sympathy, especially
on the left, and they don't want to talk a lot about cancel culture
because it's you know, well, what do we care about these rich celebrities
getting a little come up and so they're all fine at the end of the
day. What does that actually look like to people who don't have money and
power and all of that. Yeah, Well, there's this complete fallacy that
has taken hold in some quarters that it's only rich, powerful white men who
get canceled and there's actually nothing further from the truth. It's just call out
culture. They'll say, yeah, well, look, we don't need cancel
culture in order to hold people to account. And so what a lot of
people often point to, and you raise the issue of me too, is
they'll point to someone like a Harvey Weinstein and say, see, Harvey Weinstein,
that's a great example we need cancel culture, to which I would say,
well, actually, no, Harvey Weinstein sits in a prison cell because
he was convicted in a court of law. He was extended due process.
People brought evidence against him, people testified against him, and a jury weighed
all of the arguments on both sides and convicted him based on evidence in fact,
having not prejudged the outcome. So he was he was put behind bars
by the American judicial system, not by cancel culture. And you see that
time and again where proponents of cancel culture they think that prior to the advent
of cancel culture, there was no way to hold people accountable. But that's
that's simply not the case. If an average person suffers some sort of injustice
in their in their workplace and in a give you an example if it doesn't
have to rise to the Harvey Weinstein nightmare example, where you're talking about someone
who's raping women and assaulting them and abusing power in that way. But if
someone does or says something inappropriate in the workplace, there are mechanisms by which
you can pursue justice. And so there are HR departments, there are policies,
there are handbooks, employee handbooks and protections of workers rights. There are
all these different things that are available to us. And so this argument that
we somehow have to rely on cancel culture to hold people accountable is nonsensical.
And the assertion that it's only the famous, the rich and the famous and
the powerful and they kind of deserve it because the people who are canceling them
have been somehow suppressed by them and they're finally getting their come uppants for trying
to keep the people down. It's just doesn't add up. Because I've worked
with so many people in recent years who have been none of those things.
They've been neither rich, nor white, nor male, nor famous or celebrities,
and yet they've had their lives completely shattered by cancel culture. And so
we really, I think it's important to push back against this notion that you
cancel culture is reserved for only one subset of society. It's not. And
if you look at the book, I have case studies in the back,
and it just so happened that three of the four case studies then I chose
to highlight in the book they're actually women. They're not men. They're women
whose careers and livelihoods were thrown into question by cancel culture. And unfortunately,
like you said earlier, there's often a lack of empathy, total lack of
empathy towards someone because people saw a snippet of a video or that taking perhaps
out of context, or they received information that they didn't independently verify or vet.
And so it is the average person who is most at risk because politicians,
celebrities, CEOs, they have teams, they have staffs, they have
resources that the average person doesn't have to come and stand at their side if
they get into trouble. Largely it's the average person who doesn't know what to
do and has a much harder time rebounding in the wake of a scandal.
Yeah, and I like that you also invoke, you know, the kind
of historical potential parallels in the age before social media, because social media does
is just amplify some really bad human impulses. And if you look at what
Silicon Value was saying about it in two thousand and eight versus what they're saying
about it now, one of the fundamental things they think they got wrong was
just sort of overestimating human nature. Is sort of hilariously enough, but isn't
that is there maybe a cancel vulture inside all of us, And the problem
is that we have these tools that are unprecedented that allows that that that sort
of encourages the cancel vulture that really needs food that needs to score points,
because it's not getting that kind of moral that moral food elsewhere, the food
that you really truly nourishes its soul. It's just sort of you know,
looking for the scraps of the roadkill along the highway. As you mentioned.
Yeah, well, look, humans have been treating other humans terribly since time
immemorial and that hasn't changed. It's just the tools by which we use to
do it have changed. At the same time, I think there's a lot
of people who have a propensity to do and say terrible things about other people.
There's also a critical mass of people who I think don't want to live
in a world where every mistake is permanent and where every punishment is eternal.
And I think, you know, one of the things that we need to
fundamentally rethink about cancel culture. And all the people who say, oh,
cancel culture is good or here's I'm going to make a case for cancel culture.
Well, it's all well and good when you're pointing a finger at someone
else. But the problem is, every single person who walks this planet makes
mistakes. We all do things that we ultimately regret and are not correct.
Every single one of us is fallible. And so the problem with endorsing cancel
culture is you're saying it's okay to do it to someone else today, but
I suspect you'd feel very differently if you were the target tomorrow. And too
many people lose sight of that and they get amped up and again they feel
this moral absolutism, and it's a scary thing because we need to get back
to a time where people don't think that their way is the only way.
And that's really you know, one of the things that we talk about in
the book also is why is cancel culture happening now? And I think it
really is a perfect storm of a lot of different factors, and it's the
power and pervasiveness of social media. It's also the breakdown of an editorial process
in a lot of mainstream press, and so the nature of the news business
has changed so much that you're under pressure like never before to crank out stories,
to seize on these hot topics of the day, don't necessarily pause to
run things through an editorial process. You've got this commingling between social media and
mainstream media, feeding off of one another and looking to each other for story
ideas and validation, etc. You've got people inclined to activism as a consequence
of movements like meat, and you've got just a critical mass of people who
are more politically polarized than ever before. They're seeing what's going on in Congress
from Washington and beyond and the partisanship and the rancor and the tribalism, and
they're choosing sides. And I think it's all of this. It's the perfect
storm of all of these things coming together that have made cancel culture take root
right now at this moment in time. Yeah, And that's I think kind
of where the rubber meets the road, like cancel culture, is this explosion
of I think elite sentiments that it became disproportionately powerful over culture. But what's
so rancorous about it, or what's what's been so divisive about it, is
that we have this uneven I guess moral code now, like to get to
the m in condemn you have the moral absolutism of a few that is being
used to dominate I guess the morality of the rest. You know, so
many of the examples to the point of, you know, their trivial.
The offense is either trivial or not an offense at all. As you right,
Um, you know, someone didn't do anything wrong. They were just
sort of politically heterodoxy. They were you know, maybe conservative or J.
K. Rowling is a great example, somebody who is completely progressive but bucks
the sort of far left on a couple of different aspects of ideology, and
it just explodes. So I guess the question that I wanted to pose is
is this partially also exploding right now because we no longer agree. You know,
there were times when we agreed on some really bad moral codes. Um,
you know that there are sometimes when we had consensus on you know different
parts of the South where there was consensus, and Jim Crow that that's the
that is our moral code when it comes to these issues. At the same
time, you do have to have a consensus on a positive morality, and
right now it seems we have no consensus. And if anything, the elite
consensus is incredibly divisive because it's being used to apply universally around the country when
other people just don't agree with it. I think that's true, and I
think JK. Rowling is a great example to point towards, because I agree
with you in most aspects. She's quite progressive, but she got cross wise
of a critical mass of the populace who labeled her at trans fogue and said
that she was anti trans rights, when really, if you go back and
you look closely at what she was talking about, she wasn't talking about depriving
anybody of their rights. She wasn't talking about harming anyone, She wasn't speaking
out against any group. She was sharing her belief that there are physiological and
biological differences between men and women, and she was pointing out what she felt
was a ridiculous aversion of not just recognizing science and so for having those views
which a small but vocal group seized upon. That's how quickly it can become
a matter of cancel culture. And hers is you know, look at look
at what she's had to endure as a as a perfect example of cancel culture.
It was against a collective, So her saying she believes you're either a
man or a woman. You can't wake up one day and say you're one
thing and then wake up the next day and you're something else. So a
collective was harmed by her views, allegedly, and that was the trans community.
It accelerated, and it rose quickly, and it became very, very
big online, and every time she would say something else it would reignite.
The nature of the offense was largely minor. I mean, all she was
doing was expressing her views. It prompted a disproport response, we need to
cancel Harry Potter, or we shouldn't buy her books. She shouldn't be able
to make movies out of her books anymore. Everyone was afraid to defend her.
I mean, look, a lot of the actors who participated in her
movies were scared of the mob, and they came out and actually spoke out
against her. And then the moral absolutism of the people doing the canceling.
I mean that goes without saying, but I think one of the things that
we should draw from the JK Rowling example, and I think people are really
waking up to this, and this is probably the secret to breaking the cancel
culture curse is she refused to be canceled. And increasingly, I think organizations
and people are learning that you don't necessarily have to count out to the mob,
and just because they want you to go away and stop talking doesn't mean
that you have to. And so there have been numerous examples since JK.
Rowling of people who the mob has tried to destroy, tried to take down,
tried to cancel, and these people have said, I'm not going to
go away. I'm going to continue to have my views and to share my
views. And now they have mechanisms by which they can do so. So
the Internet which allowed a group of people to coalesce and to take collective action,
the Internet also ironically provides other avenues for people to share their views and
to get messages out. And I think people are seeing that a cancel culture
sentence doesn't necessarily have to be a permanent one, right, And that is
a perfect segue because what I don't wanted to ask next is kind of a
two part question. You address obviously what can be done all the way to
parenting. In the book you talk about a lot of different things that can
be done. So that's the part one of the question, and then part
two is what does the future of cancel culture look like? If you had
to make a prediction right now? Well, the parenting piece, you know,
it hits very close to home for me. I'm the father of two
children, a sixteen year old boy a thirteen year old girl. I've actually
had some pretty spirited debates with my kids because for a time, my daughter
and I were at odds and she really believed that cancel culture was a good
thing. And we would have these discussions as I'm driving her to school,
and you know, she would ask really, I think, pretty smart,
probing questions, and you know, she said, well, Dad, don't
you think it's important that people are held accountable? And I said, absolutely,
I believe in a culture of accountability. And then I walked her through
some of the things that we've talked about, the idea that there are mechanisms
by which we can hold people accountable for bad behavior, and that we don't
need to rely upon cancel culture per se as the great as both, because
ultimately what happens is it's trial by mob with cancel culture, and the cancel
culture has become judge, jury, and excutioner before you've even to have the
chance to present your opening arguments. So it's a complete inverse of the kind
of justice that we believe in as Americans. Now, I think we as
parents have a responsibility to educate our kids about how to safely use the Internet
for their own sake, for their own good, because one, we don't
want them becoming targets of cancel culture, nor do we actually want our kids
to become cancel vultures either, and so I think we have to There's been
so much talk in recent years about bullying and especially cyber bullying, and how
dangerous it is, and not all cyber bullying is cancel culture, but all
cancel culture certainly is bullying, and I think we need to talk to our
kids about the concept of cancel culture. We need to shine a light on
it as a form of bullying. We need to let them know about the
consequences that it can have when people are bullied and they're attacked, and how
harmful it can be. I think we have to help teach our kids concepts
like reasoning and how to debate ideas, and how to allow their preconceived notions
or their views to be challenged and to be open to learning and growing and
hearing other perspectives, and we have to normalize that. We also need to
teach our kids about how vital it is that they don't make preventable mistakes that
could end up in them getting canceled. And that includes saying things online which
are all but guaranteed to anger or trigger or set off a cancel culture mob.
And if they do things like use social media responsibly by sharing with care
and posting with purpose, they can avoid a lot of that. We really
need to have these uncomfortable conversations with our kids about what they say online,
the types of content they share. We need to remind them about not stepping
into super radioactive topics, other basic things like safety of not showing their location
in real time. There's just a whole lot of conversations that have to happen
with kids around usage of the internet and also teaching them the difference between credible
information and information that's meant to incite, and giving them some guardrails and some
guide posts for how they should think about what they see and read online.
And I think the future of canceled culture, my hope is that people are
coming to their senses and they're seeing that this is not actually a world in
which we want to live. I think anyone who's reached any level of maturity
knows that we've all experienced things in life that we've learned from. And you
know, we as kids made mistakes, but you learn more from your miss
stakes then you do never having them, and there's a lot of personal growth
and development that comes from that. And we need to normalize again the idea
that people can make a mistake and that they can recover from it, and
that they can learn from it and become better. And we have to destigmatize
mistake making and also remind people that, you know, things happen, but
people need to have another chance. Yeah, that is a great point.
Where do you think cancel culture goes from here? Do you are you optimistic
that it's kind of fading? Do you think it will be around with us
so long as the people who are raised in the era of cancel culture,
are in the workplace and in charge of culture. What does it look like?
Unfortunately, it is going to be with us for some time. How
long? Who knows. I think we're chipping away at it, and so
I think it's going to take a long time because I think that there's been
this this gleeful celebration by so many people who participate in these takedowns and again
for a variety of reasons, that they feel empowered, they feel like activists.
But I think when we start to really educate the public about how damaging
this practice is and how it really is self defeating, it does nothing to
advance dialogue or discourse in this country. I do think that ultimately Americans are
going to grow to reject cancel culture. And I think some of the people
who have been targets of cancel culture but have refused to bow and have refused
to go away, are the best evangelists for explaining to people the dangers of
cancel culture and just showing by example that there is life after cancelation. And
I look to people in the comedy sphere lately, because that's been one area
where comics have come under heavy Fire, Dave Chappelle refusing to be canceled.
Chris ro He titles his Netflix special Selective Outrage and talks about a lot of
the themes of cancel culture and Netflix refusing to cancel them. That's right,
Netflix refusing to cancel them, Spotify refusing to cancel Joe Rogan because of a
couple of things that he had done and said that piss people off. And
so companies are growing to see that they don't necessarily just because there's a brew
aha in the press or there's some subset of the society is calling for their
heads, it doesn't mean they have to just give in. And I think
corporations growing a backbone and being willing to stand up to cancel vultures is also
a fundamental thing that has to happen to really move past cancel culture. But
if we as individuals and also the business community decides we're not going to let
this persist, We're done with cancel culture, We're going to retire it as
a practice, then all of a sudden we take away so much of the
coercive effect of the people who want to use cancel culture. The book is
called The Canceled Culture curse, from rage to redemption and a world gone mad.
You can get it over at canceled culture dot com. Evan Nierman,
thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thank you
for having me. Of course, you can follow Evan on Twitter. Its
name, it's it's just his name, first name, last name. It
should be easy enough. I'm Emilyasnski, culture editor here at The Federalist.
We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and
anxious for the fray right.