Toward a non-constant cancellation function

It now seems the switch of Cancel Culture has only two settings:

1. everything is cancellable—including giving intellectual arguments against specific DEI policies, or teaching students about a Chinese filler word (“ne-ge”) that sounds a little like the N-word, or else
2. nothing is cancellable—not even tweeting “normalize Indian hate” and “I was racist before it was cool,” shortly before getting empowered to remake the US federal government.

How could we possibly draw any line between these two extremes? Wouldn’t that require … judgment? Common sense? Consideration of the facts of individual cases?

I, of course, survived attempted cancellation by a large online mob a decade ago, led by well-known figures such as Amanda Marcotte and Arthur Chu. Though it was terrifying at the time—it felt like my career and even my life were over—I daresay that, here in 2025, not many people would still condemn me for trying to have the heartfelt conversation I did about nerds, feminism, and dating, deep in the comments section of this blog. My side has now conclusively “won” that battle. The once-terrifying commissars of the People’s Republic of Woke, who delighted in trying to ruin me, are now bound and chained, as whooping soldiers of the MAGA Empire drag them by their hair to the torture dungeons.

And this is … not at all the outcome I wanted? It’s a possible outcome that I foresaw in 2014, and was desperately trying to help prevent, through fostering open dialogue between shy male nerds and feminists? I’m now, if anything, more terrified for my little tribe of pro-Enlightenment, science-loving nerds than I was under the woke regime? Speaking of switches with only two settings.

Anyway, with whatever moral authority this experience vests in me, I’d like to suggest that, in future cancellation controversies, the central questions ought to include the following:

1. What did the accused person actually say or do? Disregarding all confident online discourse about what that “type” of person normally does, or wants to do.
2. Is there a wider context that often gets cut from social media posts, but that, as soon as you know it, makes the incident seem either better or worse?
3. How long ago was the offense: more like thirty years or like last week?
4. Was the person in a radically different condition than they are now—e.g., were they very young, or undergoing a mental health episode, or reacting to a fresh traumatic incident, or drunk or high?
5. Were the relevant cultural norms different when the offense happened? Did countless others say or do the same thing, and if so, are they also at risk of cancellation?
6. What’s reasonable to infer about what the person actually believes? What do they want to have happen to whichever group they offended? What would they do to the group given unlimited power? Have they explicitly stated answers to these questions, either before or after the incident? Have they taken real-world actions by which we could judge their answers as either sincere or insincere?
7. If we don’t cancel this person, what are we being asked to tolerate? Just that they get to keep teaching and publishing views that many people find objectionable? Or that they get to impose their objectionable views on an entire academic department, university, company, organization, or government?
8. If we agree that the person said something genuinely bad, did they apologize or express regret? Or, if what they said got confused with something bad, did they rush to clarify and disclaim the bad interpretation?
9. Did they not only refuse to clarify or apologize, but do the opposite? That is, did they express glee about what they were able to get away with, or make light of the suffering or “tears” of their target group?

People can debate how to weigh these considerations, though I personally put enormous weight on 8 and 9, what you could call the “clarification vs. glee axis.” I have nearly unlimited charity for people willing to have a good-faith moral conversation with the world, and nearly unlimited contempt for people who mock the request for such a conversation.

The sad part is that, in practice, the criteria for cancellation have tended instead to be things like:

• Is the target giving off signals of shame, distress, and embarrassment—thereby putting blood in the water and encouraging us to take bigger bites?
• Do we, the mob, have the power to cancel this person? Does the person’s reputation and livelihood depend on organizations that care what we think, that would respond to pressure from us?

The trouble with these questions is that, not only are their answers not positively correlated with which people deserve to be cancelled, they’re negatively correlated. This is precisely how you get the phenomenon of the left-wing circular firing squad, which destroys the poor schmucks capable of shame even while the shameless, the proud racists and pussy-grabbers, go completely unpunished. Surely we can do better than that.