Cancel Culture

Gina Carano is the latest public figure to discover that free speech has consequences. Some thirty years ago, it was called "political correctness." For a while, people who objected to offensive speech were derided as snowflakes, an insult that has its origins in the misogynistic and dark movie Fight Club. Whatever it's called, it pops up with regularity. Gina Carano, an actor in the popular Star Wars television series The Mandalorian, posted something transphobic on Twitter. In response, she was fired from her role. I found out about it yesterday on Facebook, and the comments were rapidly sorting themselves out with some predictability. Conservatives were saying that Carano's firing represents "cancel culture," which means that anything that offends liberals gets canceled, rubbed out, erased from the popular landscape. Which is, of course, untrue. Carano is still capable of looking for other roles. Her filmography still stands. The undertone to these comments was a complaint of one-sidedness. Only conservatives are victims of cancel culture, they said. Liberals enact cancel culture on anything they dislike while the liberals themselves are allowed to say whatever they want. Really? One might ask Steve Biko or Harvey Milk if that is true. The secret is that there is no cancel culture. Speech has consequences, as it always has. I have known co-workers to lose their jobs for speaking disparagingly to and about the clients, regardless of political outlook. The most noticeable recent example of the absence of cancel culture is probably the former president. For four years he romped on social-media platforms, notably Twitter, pouring out insults and reversing decades of foreign policy in 2 a.m. postings. It was only after the events of January 6 that Twitter banned him from the platform. Is this cancel culture? Of course not. He has multiple avenues with which to express himself. But Twitter has guidelines, which apply even to presidents or former presidents. When his predecessor took office in early 2009, he was parted from his BlackBerry, which he reportedly used frequently and to great effect. For eight years, Barack Obama did not make a single social-media post. Yet somehow he managed to communicate with the nation and make his opinions known. One consequence for the 45th president of his free-ranging speech, of course, is that he lost the election. Some of his followers have discovered that speech has consequences as well. The attempted insurrection of Jan. 6 was well documented, and as a result a number of people are losing their jobs when it is discovered that they participated. Over the last decade or so, as social media has gained prominence, one occasionally reads of a teacher or law enforcement officer or pastor -- someone in a position of public trust, usually -- losing his or her job because of something they said. For legitimate cancel culture, we probably must look to the former Soviet Union. Writers who spoke out, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were sent to the gulag for years or perhaps decades. In the Argentina of the 1970s, under Augusto Pinochet, people were "disappeared" for their opposition to the regime. In this country, people like Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor and Freddie Gray are true victims of cancel culture. Recently, conservative commentators are losing sponsors over some of their more egregious remarks. They are not being sent to gulags, disappeared, or dying while in police custody. They are experiencing the consequences of free speech. There's a difference.