Anatomy of a Cancellation by Scott Yenor | Articles | First Things
My speech proposed a more thoroughgoing conservatism. America stigmatizes toxic masculinity and endlessly celebrates careerist women. Universities, the citadels of gynocracy as I called them, are especially implicated in this disastrous system of honor and shame. I concluded by calling for institutions to adopt sex-role realism an unapologetic celebration of the fact that men and women want and do different things.
Weeks passed. Some former students told me over Thanksgiving break that a video criticizing my speech was trending on social media. I paid little heed, because I was not interested in the social-media world. But the social-media world was interested in me.
As I sat down early on Monday, November 29 to prepare to teach my classes at Boise State, five emails arrived in quick succession. They were full of name-calling, with quasi-threatening tones. I knew that a cancellation was on, since this was not my first. Four years earlier, a storm had erupted over an article of mine arguing that transgender rights, when promoted by school authorities, threatened parental rights a thesis that is painfully obvious now. The university complained. I got nasty emails and bitter phone messages. Student groups protested with signs saying that I had blood on my hands. The outcry went nowhere, for the most part. The faculty senate tabled the motions against me. I waged a successful public relations campaign to defend myself. Ben Shapiro and the late Mike Adams took up my cause. I appeared on Tucker Carlson.
My first was the boyhood of cancellation attempts. Both cancellations were coordinated, but with the second, the breadth expanded exponentially. Senders created email accounts with names like eatmyass@hotmail.gov and yourworstnightmare@gmail.com. They challenged my manhood and questioned my ability to reproduce. (I have five kids.) Phone messages were startling in their frequency, intensity, and vulgarity. People spiked Amazon reviews for my latest book, The Recovery of Family Life, and for my previous books. They spiked my teaching reviews on Rate My Professor and elsewhere. They signed me up for newsletters from Planned Parenthood, National Organization for Women, Them, and other left-wing groups. Someone sent on my behalf an application for admission to the University of Phoenix, and admissions counsellors hounded me to complete it. Attempts were made to hack my social media and financial accounts. Emails arrived daily, beckoning me to click on the link to the intimate photos I had, they said, asked for.
Scott Yenor tells his harrowing cancellation tale. He survived, but he was extremely well prepared. Read the whole thing, if you’re even a bit interested in this contemporary phenomenon. Scott had a record of everything — he had recorded all of his classes, had contemporaneous records of his every contact with students, and every word he had spoken in public. He was represented in his Title IX hearing by Samantha Harris, the same great and deeply experienced lawyer who represented me. One gets the feeling that any ordinary professor would have been done for.