Cancel Culture is happening on a historic scale, Part 1

People who say Cancel Culture is no big deal because the number of targeted people is just a couple thousand are showing a poor mastery of history. For example, while the Medieval period was formative for academic inquiry, laws and decrees against heresy established red lines that were deeply oppressive by modern standards. But, there are only about fifty known cases of academically related judicial proceedings for erroneous teachings throughout all of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This does not mean medieval censorship was no big deal . Indeed, it can often only take punishing one person to chill the speech of millions.   

  Jacob Mchangama, author of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media

In the scheme of history, Cancel Culture is&odd. It breaks just about every pattern of censorship in American history. By Cancel Culture, my Canceling of the American Mind co-author Rikki Schlott and I mean the measurable uptick, beginning around 2014, of campaigns to get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is or would be protected by the First Amendment.

Unlike most other mass censorship events, Cancel Culture wasn t spurred on by a large war, a national security threat, or a debate about pornography or obscenity which are the usual reasons. Cancel Culture is also strange in that it s happening in spite of strong legal speech protections. Keep in mind that until the First Amendment was incorporated in 1925, it had almost no meaningful legal force. Academic freedom only started to be understood as an area for special concern of the First Amendment in 1957.

Perhaps most significantly, Cancel Culture is also occurring at a startling scale when compared to previous mass censorship events. People often try to dismiss it by claiming that the number of people canceled is small. But that claim only shows a lack of knowledge of the history of freedom of speech and academic freedom in the US. In fact, many shameful censorial episodes involved only a relative handful of victims (think Lenny Bruce, Two Live Crew, or George Carlin).

But before we get into all of that, let s put modern Cancel Culture on campuses into context and give you a sense of its scale in the modern age of First Amendment protected speech.

via greglukianoff.substack.com

Greg Lukianoff.