Boy, Do I Wish Centrist Substack Writers Would Shut Up About Cancel Culture Right Now

As the Trump administration continues its full and unapologetic assault on the First Amendment the usual suspects are forced to admit through gritted teeth that maybe Trump and his people aren’t the free speech absolutists they pinky-promised that they were. This has triggered so many Substack essays as the centrist types who form the backbone of the site try to parse this out, and their fans scramble to them for guidance.

 Though it’s not exactly a reactionary shithole like Rumble, the Substack ecosystem finds itself filling some of that niche as its reputation grows like moss on the pillar of its performatively apolitical founders. Look around at its best performing talent and you can easily come to the conclusion that it’s something of a country club for cancelled writers; a cozy mix of “heterodox” thinkers, “dark web” intellectuals, and sex pests. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of good folks too, but they don’t tend to be strongly associated with the brand.

 Unsurprisingly, the typical framing of these essays is something like “the left went too far” and even though Trump is now acting like Pinochet, what choice did he really have? His actions are the inevitable rubber-band snapback from the dreaded “cancel culture” that heterodox thinkers and sex pests somehow endured for a harrowing five or six years during Obama.

 Now, to be clear, I don’t really support “cancel culture,” as much as people assume I must, as a bog-standard, non-“heterodox” progressive. But then, I’m not convinced that “cancel culture” is an actual thing so much as it is a series of individual events connected only thematically by the existence of social media giving lots of people faster access to news. Some things that come under the wide umbrella of “cancel culture” are just basic online harassment, while others are pretty understandable widespread denunciation of something legitimately shitty.

 In 2021, sci-fi author and video essayist Lindsay Ellis got dogpiled and “cancelled” on Twitter for an offhand remark about the Disney film Raya and the Last Dragon feeling like a ripoff of the anime Avatar: The Last Airbender. I’m not so deep into anime that I understand even a fraction of what that was about, but I get the strong impression that the harassment Ellis endured was profoundly stupid and unfair and carried powerful Gamergate undertones. So does it really make sense that we put this in the same category of events as when Louis C.K. was exposed for serially whipping out his dick and masturbating in front of unwitting female hotel room guests?

 Nevertheless, a lot of folks figure that what the Republicans are doing to America is all, if not justified, then explainable. If those women had just waited patiently for Louis to get his rocks off without making a fuss then we wouldn’t have the president putting late night hosts on terror watch lists for making fun of his hair.

Noah Smith

 As recently as February the only thing I knew about Noah Smith is that his favorite word starts with an R, and he uses it like he breathes. This isn’t for lack of a vocabulary, but a performative thing, a virtue signal that people do to reassure that they’re not, like, woke or whatever.

Noah first jumped at the opportunity to point the finger at Bluesky for all of this, with his piece “The Bluesky-ization of the American Left.” He is, of course, one of many writers of his type (Jesse Singal, Matt Yglesias, to name a couple) who attempted to colonize Bluesky with “heterodox” views but couldn’t entrench themselves and now spend their time ranting about how Bluesky is simultaneously irrelevant and inconsequential but also it’s destroying America somehow.

Noah’s thesis seems to be that cancellation and social ostracism is the… purpose? of progressivism. That is, unlike centrists and liberals, and presumably conservatives, who enjoy robust debate, progressives just want to yell at people and get them fired and make them feel bad, and now since they’ve left Twitter and don’t have any liberals to cancel, they’re just sort of milling around in an ant spiral on Bluesky cancelling each other until the platform blinks out from heat death.

 Noah’s relationship with “cancel culture” is a common one among these kinds of liberal or centrist Atlantic contributor types who gained a foothold in media from being the Main Character on Twitter a few times: They need to keep denouncing it as a horrible and traumatic episode in western politics, while also downplaying it and reaffirming how easily it was defeated, while also avoiding the topic of how tremendously they benefited from it.

 This piece is written as a postmortem of cancel culture as this pathetic dead thing that Bluesky is hanging onto white-knuckled in the hope that this is a phase and they can go back to getting racists fired instead of the more virtuous method of individually debating them all out of their hateful views. Through the course of describing how very ineffectual and pointless it was, he also manages to compare cancel culture variously to the French Terror, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the Second Intifada.

He posits that progressives became “addicted” to cancellation because it was super effective, but he tries to have this cake and eat it by gloating about the fact that most of the people who were “cancelled” are now rich and famous because of it, most notably Bari Weiss. So… it wasn’t actually effective, now was it, Noah? It was never effective. This five or six year dictatorship of progressivism in what has otherwise been a fairly right-leaning culture never really existed, did it?

 Bari Weiss is an odd character to make the centerpiece of this argument to begin with—she knew the star-making potential of being cancelled, which is why she tried so hard to get cancelled! And when it didn’t really happen, she just kind of pretended it did!

 It's likely that Noah Smith already had this piece in the pipeline before the Charlie Kirk shooting because it doesn’t mention any of that and is more of a companion piece to Nate Silver, with whom he shares more than his initials, and who I’ll get to next, don’t worry.

 Later Noah posted Without free speech, America is nothing, in which he rails against the Trump administration’s hypocrisy in using government pressure to censor private speech, something they all sharply condemned as recently as a few months ago. He attacks Trump for about a hundred words before he gets to the real culprits in this situation: Progressives and cancel culture. He even drops the “debanking” hysteria pushed by Marc Andreessen. His sources are (1) himself and (2) the fucking Heritage Foundation.

Why were the MAGA folks talking so passionately about freedom of speech? Because for years, conservatives felt as if that freedom was under attack by the progressive movement, and later by the Biden administration.

 Since the mid-2010s, progressives on social media had tried to ruin the reputation and careers of people who said things they considered racist, transphobic, or otherwise problematic. Social media platforms were successfully pressured to “deplatform” various figures on the right, including Donald Trump himself after the January 6th attacks. Some rightists were even cut off from bank accounts and other essential services.

So yeah, it was the poison of those deep Obama years what done it. After decades of Reaganism culminating in eight glorious years where you weren’t allowed to say the word “French,” the left finally did a little bit of pushback and the right got spooked! And you shouldn’t’ve done that, progressives! Now you’ve made them mad. You’ve made them mean mad.

 I mean let’s face it, American (and, more broadly and maybe filtered down, Western) politics has leaned right forever and the spooky Obama years, which were evidently traumatizing for the center and the right, were a blip. After the Red Scare and Reagan the Democrats only succeeded temporarily by moving to the right with Clinton’s Third Way. Obama was an experiment in liberalism that ended catastrophically.

It’s likely that this right-wing grievance narrative does approach a literal description of what’s going on, but rather than point out how super babyish it is for Republicans to reflect on this decade of mild pushback as though it was their own 40 years in the Wilderness, Noah kind of sides with them in a strange olive branch sentiment like every character in The Matrix who tried to make a deal with the machines. Or, if you like, the sleazy guy from Die Hard, who is actually much closer to who I picture when I imagine Noah Smith.

Nate Silver

 The other N.S. enjoys the fame of making Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the entire world list by correctly predicting an astonishing 49 out of 50 states’ electoral results in the 2008 federal election (he fucked up Indiana). The fact that his defining achievement remains nearly 20 years in the past is something I will let speak quietly in the corner by itself because I don’t really want to attack Nate on this point. I’ve never done anything that would make a Time Magazine list. I did once throw a dart that embedded in the back of another dart but I don’t think everyone believes me and I don’t really blame them.

Silver has really had it in for Bluesky for a while, because he was really big on Twitter and got to be the main character a bunch of times but then Elon happened and all the progressives left and now it’s just a bunch of bots programmed to repeat the 14 words and this is Bluesky’s fault. Nate wrote a whole thing about a word he coined—Blueskyism—which, much like “woke,” is a word the meaning of which he says is obvious and then fails to really be able to define at all.

 It seems, though, that it’s basically “dogpiling.” He does say that it predates the existence of Bluesky but estimates it was invented somewhere around 2019-2020. Okay, champ. Nate might be interested in the book I’m writing that details how it actually came about a tiny little bit earlier than that. Now, to be fair, he does specify that he’s talking about progressive dogpiling, which is its own unique thing, apparently, even though every other characteristic he ascribes to it can every bit as easily describe, you know, Gamergate.

Anyway, Nate has also weighed in on recent significant events in holy fuck land. He correctly identifies that the Republicans were doing a cancel-cultury type of thing after 9/11 when you weren’t allowed to say the wrong thing about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but then he goes right back to talking about how crazy leftist cancel culture was back in 2020.

 But then he does something very strange: While taking care to dismiss allegations that Trump is authoritarian, he suggests that the right are basically just using the tools that the left forged, and it’s the left’s fault for forging them in the first place.

Progressive cancel culture vultures. What did y’all think cancellation meant? Did you not realize the very tools and techniques you championed could be turned against you? Do you even have the object permanence of a goldfish?

 Some years ago on Twitter, I questioned the tactics of progressive groups that were encouraging an advertiser boycott of Tucker Carlson’s show. I don’t care for Carlson at all. Still, it seemed likely to me that these strategies would eventually be turned against the left, as they had been in the past, while also discouraging corporations from placing ads against politically adjacent content of any kind, producing an equilibrium where there was less money flowing into the already-difficult economics of political news and commentary.

 Boy, that did not go over well on Twitter. So this is the point in the essay when I’m trying and failing to come up with a less annoying phrase than “I told you so”.

This is bizarre in at least a couple of ways. First of all, what exactly did the left invent in 2020 that enabled the right to do cancellations today that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do? They didn’t pass new laws, or amend the constitution. Trump doesn’t obey laws anyway, and the court says he doesn’t have to. Does Nate think that they’re consulting historical precedent? They just do things.

 But more baffling, this is the same essay in which he starts out detailing how the right started it. It’s literally titled “The political mood feels like 9/11 again.” I’ll venture that’s not even when they started it. Ever heard of McCarthy?

To the extent that leftist cancel culture was a thing, isn’t it just a case of the left temporarily picking up the tools that the right has used forever and were inevitably going to go right back to using the very second they reclaimed the power to do so? That’s not entirely coherent but it’s more coherent than whatever Silver is trying to argue here.

 I will note that the complaints of both of the N.S.s seem to focus strangely around progressives being unfairly critical of Ezra Klein, who I’ve somehow avoided knowing almost anything about, despite the fact that, to hear how these guys fawn over him, he’s probably going to be the next Democratic president. You know, when the next presidential election is allowed to happen, in 2060. (Sorry Nate! Catastrophizing, I know—it was a joke.)

Matt Taibbi

Aaargh, no! No! Am I really doing this?

 Okay, look, I thought I had a more robust piece without going here, but then Yglesias and Singal didn’t weigh in at all and I can’t end this without a third act. So here we go: What does Matt Taibbi, free speech hypocrite, make of all this?

 Taibbi has a complicated thing going on with the Jimmy Kimmel situation because he likes Trump, agrees with him about the media, and wants all these shows to go away anyway. As time goes on, I begin to realize that his reputation as the big “free speech guy” is mostly just kind of a misreading of his anti-vaccine activism. In reality he’s spent a lot of time trying to shut down research into subjects he doesn’t like, and thinks SLAPP-suits (frivolous lawsuits that are unwinnable but designed to bankrupt or intimidate the target into silence via the cost and stress of the lawsuit itself) are a legitimate tactic to use against media outlets.

  Being a victim of “cancel culture” himself, (and yes, I am saying victim, because I do think it was unfair—whether Matt likes it or not, and he probably hates it, which is good, I am putting him in the Lindsay Ellis bucket here) and, as is common, being extremely rich and famous either in spite or because of it, Taibbi has a massive hate on for the mainstream media. By mainstream I mean any media other than Substack newsletters, most of which he probably also hates.

 Still, he has to dislike the speech crackdowns that accompanied Kirk’s assassination. From the claims by the administration talking heads he’s long defended that “hate speech” isn’t protected by the First Amendment, to the government attempting, and to a limited extent, succeeding to “jawbone” individual people off the air, all of this is exactly what he raged against in his most famous project that didn’t reference any kind of squid.

 So, how did he play this?

 Well, first of all he posted and reposted a bunch of Twitter Files stuff about Twitter’s actions to moderate Charlie Kirk, which conclude mercifully with the determination that, although we can’t say the administrators of pre-2022 Twitter are directly responsible for Kirk’s death, “the episodes do play a part in the overall story.” (?????)

Then, an extremely brief “Note on Jimmy Kimmel,” who was suspended by Disney/ABC after an explicit threat by FCC chair Brendan Carr that directly violated the First Amendment. Taibbi’s note was mostly descriptive, taking Carr’s side due to his own blistering hatred of Kimmel, and lamenting that it’s simply bad optics to violate 1A so flagrantly.

 Then, a couple of days later, an apoplectic short article about how Jimmy Kimmel fucking sucks, and the disappearance of his show would be no loss because of how much he fucking sucks, mentioning how Kimmel is pro-vaccine. Here he also supports Giraldo Rivera’s assertion that the First Amendment doesn’t cover hate speech (putting aside how wacky that is coming from Taibbi, it’s worth mentioning that nothing Kimmel said even remotely approaches hate speech).

 Then, after he cooled down, a much more level-headed piece about how this isn’t good after all, but framed in a way that makes it obvious Matt is trying to avoid the Trump cancellation crosshairs, delicately portraying himself as a helpful advisor. He jokingly titled it “The Ultimate Reason Not to Censor,” and said reason is not because censorship is bad, (all of your enemies indeed fucking suck, Mr. President, sir, and you are always correct, Mr. President, sir) but because censorship robs Taibbi of the satisfaction of the natural self-destruction of all liberal media—the whole thing, all of it, which will occur within the next six months.

 And then, finally, a piece about how there’s really no free speech violations occurring under Trump that even approach the dystopia of the Obama and Biden years in which all of Matt’s anti-vax friends were silenced about Ivermectin.

 When I was a little kid I remember, in either kindergarten or very early primary school, being read a book about Five Chinese Brothers who each had a superpower. One of them could swallow the entire ocean, but only temporarily. In the story, he performs this task so that a fisherman can catch fish more easily, but the fisherman is a dumb asshole so he stays out in the seabed so long that the Chinese brother is forced to release the ocean and kill him. This book is probably cancelled now due to racism and woke, but I bring it up in the case of Matt Taibbi as I wonder how long it’s possible for a man of ostensible talent to carry such an unfathomable amount of water for a dumb asshole.

Hey by the way I’m writing a book about how reactionary geeks in the internet era got entwined with this anti-wokeness crusade and wound up accelerating the Western world toward Trumpism, shattering the precarious right/left truce and deciding to burn it all down instead. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: