Some Links, 9/21/2025
Rob Henderson on cancel culture; Helen Andrews on feminization; Tim Carney on partisan personal priorities; Zohar Atkins on digital alienation
Cancel culture has 2 components:
First, the penalty exceeds the severity of the transgression
Second, it is aimed at solidifying a norm that has not yet been established1
Critics say cancel culture is just a way of describing where you personally draw the line on acceptable speech. There is some truth to that.
But ask yourself: if someone attends KKK meetings, proudly supports their cause, and loses their job, is that cancel culture? No. The punishment fits the offense. Society has long agreed that membership in racist groups carries consequences.
He argues that firing someone for advocating a particular cause is ok, if it has been well known that the cause is offensive to most people. But cancel culture is an attempt by one group to stifle a cause that the general public has not agreed is offensive. Henderson credits Thomas Chatterton Williams for this distinction.
More recently, Thomas Chatterton Williams writes,
cancel culture goes beyond punishing people for doing something deemed inappropriate. It’s not just an internet pile-on. Cancel culture is more fundamentally about solidifying norms that haven’t yet been established. To lose your job for calling someone the N-word or saying that women are inferior to men is not true cancel culture, I would argue. Such a definition obscures too much of what the 2010s wrought.
At the most recent Natcon, Helen Andrews said,
But if you want to put it in a single sentence, you could say that feminization equals wokeness. Everything you think of as wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization. Think about all the things that wokeness means. uh valuing empathy over rationality, safety over risk, conformity and cohesion over competition and hierarchy.
All of these things are privileging the feminine over the masculine. So if you have ever wondered why wokeness appeared out of nowhere when it did, that is my hypothesis that all of the institutions that began admitting women in the 1970s eventually got enough women that they were able to reorient them. For example, women are consistently less supportive of free speech than men.
I read Joyce Benenson’s Warriors and Worriers as consistent with that. Nicholas Wade’s new book has a chapter that aligns with Andrews, also.
Among Gen Zers who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, a majority of both men and women picked “fulfilling job/career” as important. No other answer got a majority from any group.
In contrast, less than one-third of Donald Trump voters, both men and women, chose “fulfilling job/career” as important to success.
…What did Republicans pick? The most common choice among Republican men was having children. Combined, 30% of Republican men and women named children as important to a successful life, about four times the proportion of Democrats who named children.
…America’s future could be one party with all the money and the other with all the children.
Today’s AI relationships represent the perfection of Flaubert’s logic, a continuation of the novels that led Emma Bovary to self-destruct. We’ve created technologies that allow us to experience emotional satisfaction without any of the growth that comes from truly encountering another consciousness. We can feel seen without the ordeal of being known, loved without the work of loving back. The characters Flaubert diagnosed as symptomatic have become normative.
As a reminder, note that my excerpts are from essays worth reading in their entirety.
substacks referenced above: @
@
Henderson and TC Williams are making a really dumb and strategically unwise argument. "It's True Scotsman cancel culture when the other team does it because they are abusing the power of leveraging social power for coercive excommunication and they are bad people doing it for bad reasons, but, if you really think about it, it's not actually cancel culture when my team uses the power appropriately because we are good people doing it for good reasons." Well, not good, but 'well-established' which is of course totally uncontroversial, which couldn't possibly include well-established injustices which should be unestablished (but how?) which people won't just use the Royal Collective to assert brazenly even when faIse ("that's not who We are" - "these are Our values") and where debates are settled with consensus acheived easily and quickly and you can just look up the list of what's safe and what's not on the FCC Ministry of Cancelation's web page. Please. Nobody fighting the progressives should be doing apologetics for this stuff in anything other than the mood of being compelled by game theoretic considerations into doing so out of tragic necessity that penalizes unilateral disarmament, but with the ideal of reaching a credible agreement of mutual disarmament, the pluralistically tolerant truce at the heart of a free society.
Cancelation is simply one of many para-governmental social pressure tactics deployed in the perpetual struggle over the prevailing elite ideology and de facto state religion, as part of the endless cold civil war. It's true that a homicide in self-defense isn't murder, but it's absurd to say that "real homicide culture is only the bad, murder stuff, not the good self-defense stuff" and it's foolishly naive to think the left - which has been in the driver's seat of elite opinion making for a century - won't take this framework and run circles around the right with it when the shoe's inevitably on the other foot.
“Cancel culture has 2 components”
Actually, there is a third component that is more pernicious than the two listed.
It’s a complete *lack of forgiveness* in our culture that defines everything. If someone makes a mistake and is genuinely contrite about that mistake, then forgiveness and reconciliation ought to be an option. But, such forgiveness is completely lost in the present times. Say what you will about Christianity, but they got the concept of forgiveness mostly correct.