The expression "cancel culture" has mostly negative connotations and is used in debates on free speech and censorship.
Criticism In a speech at the
Obama Foundation's annual summit in 2019, former U.S. President
Barack Obama criticized the role of "call-out culture" and "
wokeness" among young activists on social media. U.S. President
Donald Trump criticized "cancel culture" in a speech in July 2020, comparing it to
totalitarianism and saying that it is a political weapon used to punish and shame dissenters by driving them from their jobs and demanding submission. He was subsequently criticized as being hypocritical for having attempted to cancel a number of people and companies in the past himself. Trump made similar claims during the
2020 Republican National Convention when he stated that the goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated, and driven from society.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors, the co-founder of the
Black Lives Matter movement, states that social activism does not just involve going online or going to a protest to call someone out, but is work entailing strategy sessions, meetings, and getting petitions signed. Philosopher
Slavoj Žižek states that "cancel culture, with its implicit paranoia, is a desperate and obviously self-defeating attempt to compensate for the very real violence and intolerance that sexual minorities have long suffered. But it is a retreat into a cultural fortress, a pseudo-'safe space' whose discursive fanaticism merely strengthens the majority's resistance to it."
Lisa Nakamura, a professor at the
University of Michigan, describes cancel culture as "a cultural boycott" and says it provides a culture of accountability.
Open letter Dalvin Brown, writing in
USA Today, has described an open letter signed by 153 public figures and published in ''
Harper's Magazine as marking a "high point" in the debate on the topic. A response letter, "A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate", was signed by over 160 people in academia and media. It criticized the Harper's
letter as a plea to end cancel culture by successful professionals with large platforms who wanted to exclude others who have been "canceled for generations". The writers ultimately stated that the Harper's'' letter was intended to further silence already marginalized people. They wrote: "It reads as a caustic reaction to a diversifying industry—one that's starting to challenge diversifying norms that have protected bigotry."
Criticism of "cancel culture" as a concept A number of professors, politicians, journalists, as well as other citizens and activists have questioned the validity of cancel culture as an actual phenomenon. Connor Garel, writing for
Vice, states that cancel culture "rarely has any tangible or meaningful effect on the lives and comfortability of the cancelled". Danielle Kurtzleben, a political reporter for
NPR, wrote in 2021 that overuse of the phrase "cancel culture" in American politics, particularly by Republicans, has made it "arguably background noise". Per Kurtzleben and others, the term has undergone
semantic bleaching to lose its original meaning. Historian
C. J. Coventry argues that the term is incorrectly applied, and that the label has been used to avoid accountability for historical instances of injustice. Another historian,
David Olusoga, made a similar argument, and argued that the phenomenon of cancellation is not limited to the left. Indigenous governance professor and activist
Pamela Palmater writes in ''
Maclean's'' magazine that "cancel culture is the
dog whistle term used by those in power who don't want to be held accountable for their words and actions—often related to racism, misogyny, homophobia or the abuse and exploitation of others." Sarah Manavis wrote for the
New Statesman magazine, "For the better part of the last decade, we have given a label to something that has existed for the length of human history. Some might call it criticism, others might call it backlash." Additionally, she observed that many opponents of so-called cancel culture had drawn upon the arguments of
Jon Ronson's book, ''
So You've Been Publicly Shamed. However, noting that Ronson himself remarked that the term cancel culture'' is "not useful at all" since it "encompass[es] wildly different people and situations", Manavis wrote that "Ronson himself believes that the 'public shaming of civilians' which Ronson wrote of in his book 'doesn't apply' to the social phenomena labelled as cancel culture." To Manavis, the public shaming of "non-famous people" is not essentially about lack of "free speech", but about "how little power normal people have". To Manavis, "[s]ocial media can be intimidating when you have thousands of people disagreeing with you," but the "right to free speech is not the right to have your unfiltered thoughts published without critique. It’s likely [that,] if you feel this way, you hold more power than most of the world."
Consequence culture Some media commentators including
LeVar Burton and
Sunny Hostin have stated that "cancel culture" should be renamed "consequence culture". The terms have different connotations: "cancel culture" focusing on the effect whereby discussion is limited by a desire to maintain one certain viewpoint, whereas "consequence culture" focuses on the idea that those who write or publish opinions or make statements should bear some responsibility for the effects of these on people.
American public opinion A survey conducted in September 2020 on 10,000 Americans by
Pew Research Center asked a series of different questions in regard to cancel culture, specifically on who has heard of the term cancel culture and how Americans define cancel culture. At that time, 44% of Americans said that they have at least heard a fair amount about the new phrase, while 22% have heard a great deal and 32% said they have heard nothing at all. Attitude towards the practice was mixed, with 44% of respondents saying they disapproved of cancel culture, 32% who approved, and 24% who did not know or had no opinion. Furthermore, 46% believed cancel culture had gone too far, with only 10% thinking it had not gone far enough. Additionally, 53% believed that people should expect social consequences for expressing unpopular opinions in public, such as those that may be construed as deeply offensive to other people. A March 2021 poll by
Harvard University's
Center for American Political Studies and
the Harris Poll found that 64% of respondents viewed "a growing cancel culture" as a threat to their freedom, while the other 36% did not. 36% of respondents said that cancel culture is a big problem, 32% called it a moderate problem, 20% called it a small problem, and 13% said it is not a problem. 54% said they were concerned that if they expressed their opinions online, they would be banned or fired, while the other 46% said they were not concerned. A November 2021
Hill/
HarrisX poll found that 71% of registered voters strongly or somewhat felt that cancel culture went too far, with similar numbers of Republicans (76%), Democrats (70%), and independents (68%) saying so. The same poll found that 69% of registered voters felt that cancel culture unfairly punishes people for their past actions or statements, compared to 31% who said it did not. Republicans were more likely to agree with the statement (79%), compared to Democrats (65%) and independents (64%). In a January 2022
Knight-
Ipsos study involving 4,000 participants, most Americans surveyed said that some speech should be prohibited. Specifically, they stated that "a variety of private and public institutions should prohibit racist speech". However, most also noted that these same institutions should not ban political views that are offensive. A March 2022
New York Times/
Siena College survey of 1,000 Americans found that 84 percent of adults said it is a "very serious" or "somewhat serious" problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism. The survey also found that 46 percent of respondents said they felt less free to talk about politics compared to a decade ago, and that only 34 percent of Americans said they believed that all Americans enjoyed freedom of speech completely.
Usage by the political right Activists on the right have also attempted to and sometimes succeeded in canceling various people. Historian Nicole Hemmer finds historical "cancel culture" on the right before the term was coined, in various movements.
McCarthyism and the
Lavender Scare of the 1940s and 1950s aimed to get people suspected of
communist sympathies or homosexuality fired from their government or private-sector jobs, including the entertainment industry through the
Hollywood blacklist. The
Save Our Children campaign in the late 1970s was a movement to legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation legal, and ban gay and lesbian people from school employment. Conservatives angry at various comments were able to secure the cancellation of
Bill Mahr's show
Politically Incorrect, and the resignation of
Van Jones and
Shirley Sherrod from the
Obama Administration. Attempts to ban
LGBTQ-related books (e.g.
Heather Has Two Mommies,
And Tango Makes Three) in the 1990s and 2000s have continued in the 2020s with groups like
Moms for Liberty. The right has also been criticized for supporting cancel culture in regards to Israel and Palestine. For example, during the
Gaza war, Republicans held Congress hearings in which they accused university leaders of not doing enough to silence what they perceived as antisemitic speech on campus. In another example,
New York University withheld the diploma of graduating senior Logan Rozos, in retaliation for his criticism of US support for the
genocide in Gaza during a graduation speech. Some activists who present themselves as defenders of free speech engage in cancel culture directed at pro-Palestine activists, also known as the
Palestine exception to free speech. Other critics of cancel culture have also supported
book bans in school and public libraries or censorship of school curriculums. In the aftermath of the
assassination of Charlie Kirk, some conservatives who had previously criticized cancel culture pushed for the firing of people who criticized Kirk after his death. Vice President
JD Vance called on Americans to report those allegedly celebrating Kirk's killing to their employers and promised to use the federal government to investigate and punish liberal organizations and donors. Adam Goldstein of the
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression described the shift as a form of right-wing cancel culture, noting that people were being targeted for simply quoting Kirk or failing to mourn his passing adequately, comparing government involvement to McCarthyism.
The New York Times described the campaign as morphing into "a conservative version of the cancel culture that only a few years ago was wielded by the American left", and evidence of the rise of a "
woke right". Some conservative voices also objected to the Trump administration's efforts to police speech surrounding Kirk's death, with
The Wall Street Journal running an editorial saying: "The squeeze on Disney looks to be a case of cancel culture on the right." == In popular media ==