Balkinization  

Sunday, January 24, 2021

Cancel culture comes for the moderates

Andrew Koppelman

The increasing tendency to interpret obviously sarcastic metaphors of violence as if they were real threats makes me want to kill somebody. Am I in trouble because I wrote that? That would be silly, wouldn’t it?   

If you read that sentence as an actual call for violence, you are at best a careless reader. It’s an obviously insincere, satirical claim about my state of mind. It doesn’t call for anyone to do anything. Does it mean that I’m threatening someone? Who? 

The pressure to cancel people because they have violated vague and unpredictable norms has claimed its latest victim in Will Wilkinson, who was vice president for research at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, and who (tenuously) remains a New York Times contributing opinion writer. His firing is particularly depressing, because Niskanen has been one of the most useful sources of independent, contrarian policy analysis. It was started by Cato Institute refugees who were disaffected with the Institute’s dishonest climate change denial. They thought, correctly, that libertarianism properly understood does not allow businesses to harm others, as the fossil fuel industry does. For Niskanen to join the cancellation bandwagon is a major disappointment.

I elaborate the point in a new column at The Hill.


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