State of the Debate: Matt Taibbi on the Madness of Cancel Culture

Matt Taibbi is a journalist covering politics for the Rolling Stone, a podcaster, and a columnist with his own self-published website. On June 12, Taibbi put out an editorial on his site the crux of which is to criticize “cancel culture” on the political Left.¹ In this context, “cancel culture” refers to attempts by those on the Left, particularly on social media, to block certain ideas or people by declaring them racist, sexist, and so on. To make his case that cancel culture is a threat to journalism, Taibbi cites numerous examples of journalists who, despite award-winning work, have been harangued online by leftists accusing them of racism. The consequences for targeted journalists go beyond just online nuisances. As the example of Lee Fang shows, Taibbi argues, the result is that important questions are not asked. Taibbi also highlights examples in which the rush to cancel a particular individual or article has caused some, even newspapers like the New York Times, to mischaracterize the argument being made by that individual or in that article. Taibbi argues that this rush results in a reduced public discourse, even when the opinions being expressed are widely popular. He touches on a number of other incidents in the article, too, but this is the core of his argument.

Taibbi is right that “cancel culture” does discourage some forms of speech; I’d imagine that many of those who participate in that culture would agree that that is the purpose. In that regard, it is a concern among those of us who support free speech and a free press. However, Taibbi’s argument here is not a new one; some form of it has been made consistently in the last few years by numerous commentators, left and right, disgruntled by or worried about the rise of “political correctness.” That the argument is not a new one is not an attack on the argument itself, but it does indicate a different problem. As a political discourse, our discussion around free speech and social justice is stuck. The same arguments are being made over and over again, apparently with little persuasion. Those of us who want to convince people on the left to abandon “cancel culture” have to acknowledge the broader context of threats to free speech and make more compelling arguments rooted in the Left’s historical support for free speech.

First, let’s look at the context. According to Pew polling, America is the country most supportive of free speech around the world. In its 2015 Global Attitudes Survey, Pew found that 71% of Americans believe “it is very important that people can say what they want without state/govt censorship in our country.” That’s compared to a global median of just 56%. Things get a bit messier when pollsters start to ask about censoring specific forms of speech, yet even there majorities of all groups take a free speech stance. For instance, in the same poll, Pew asked American respondents if they were okay with censoring offensive statements about minorities. While Millennials were most likely to support censorship, only 40% did to 58% that opposed. On the other hand, in a March 2018 poll, the generational divide is reversed with older generations more willing to support government and tech company censorship of “false” information online, even if it limits freedom of information. There was no hand-wringing about this poll in the press, presumably because it doesn’t fit into the neat narrative of “politically correct” liberal vs. “racist” right-winger. Remember when then-candidate Greg Gianforte body-slammed a reporter? 22% of Americans agreed that was acceptable in a poll following the incident, with Republicans most likely to support it. So it does not make sense to speak uniquely of progressives or college students or any other particular group as opposing free speech. All groups draw lines, usually influenced heavily by partisan or ideological leanings, yet, all groups overall remain committed to free speech. It is therefore myopic to focus so exclusively on cancel culture.²

In addition, it is hard to see how cancel culture is the predominant threat to a free press at this moment. Taibbi has nothing to say about the hundreds of attacks against reporters (mostly by the police, a few by protesters) at protests all across the country. Doesn’t this chill speech? Doesn’t this limit the acceptable bounds of discussion by limiting what information viewers have access to? Taibbi doesn't discuss the recent presence of armed protesters in Michigan opposing health restrictions to address the pandemic, when threats of violence caused the legislative session to end early, as a recent op-ed in The Hill discussed. Taibbi has nothing to say in this article about the campaign of threats against women and minorities online, despite recent attention brought to this issue by FreeMuse and Sir Tim Berners-Lee.⁴ Don’t right-wing threats effectively act as the equivalent to the Left’s cancel culture? Instead, Taibbi focuses solely on cancel culture as a threat to free speech and a free press. Why? It isn’t because he is racist or secretly a right-wing hack, as I imagine the backlash to this article has already claimed. It’s because he, like just about everyone, has bought into the framing of a media narrative that does not allow him to also explain these other facts. When a college student goes online and says “I’m tired,” one can expect editorials like Taibbi’s to pop up everywhere. When a woman is threatened online by a right-wing hack, you can count the number of editorials talking about free speech on a hand, if there are any at all.

If we are concerned about cancel culture, then, we should not be concerned about it in isolation, as if it is the only, or even the dominant threat to free speech or a free press, and as if threats only come from the online Left. Cancel culture certainly gets the most press attention, but only because it fits into the preconceived press narrative about free speech. Other threats, like privatization (which remove First Amendment protections and places restrictions on speech not conducive to maximizing profits), right-wing and religious censorship, threats against women or girls online (which absolutely chills speech), and so on are rarely mentioned.

The media narrative has a lot to do with the cancel culture that Taibbi, rightly, condemns. If the only model of free speech you see in the media is “racist right-wing person wants to say a racist thing,” you are not, if you are a millennial, as likely to support free speech or a free exchange of ideas in the press. If you’ve grown up seeing Milo and Richard Spencer cloak their odious ideas in free speech, you associate the two and become less likely to support free speech. Playing in to this media narrative, as Taibbi does here, does not help, it contributes to the problem. Those of us who want to raise the profile and stature of free speech would be better served by reminding young people over and over again of the long history of free speech, and free speech defenders, on the side of social justice. That will change the association they have in their mind when they think of free speech and lead them to be more likely to support it.⁵

The advantage of this view is that the debate around free speech and social justice can actually move forward. Progressives will more likely listen to an argument about their own history, than an argument which describes cancel culture as “counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.” This is not only presently false (think of the people who are going toe-to-toe with the police, literally. That is hardly refusing to stand up for oneself) but historically inaccurate (it assumes progressives have something wrong with them inherently, when they have often been on the forefront of free speech fights. This is an implication the right-wing editorial press likes to pick up on.)

Matt Taibbi’s right – cancel culture is a problem – but if he (and the rest of us who support free speech) wants to be persuasive, he has to present a different kind of argument. This argument has to acknowledge the long history of social justice advocates using free speech as a tool to uplift marginalized groups. To do that, this argument has to shatter the present media narrative around free speech, political correctness, and social justice.

• 1. I would recommend reading the full article.
• 2.For access to relevant links and for a description of these polls in greater detail, please see my other post here.
• I covered this in the most recent Free Speech News Round-up here. The total number of attacks, etc. as of June 16th is over 430.
• 4. I covered this report in an earlier Free Speech News Round-up here. You can find Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s concerns here.
• 5. I imagine some might object to this strategy, since free speech is often elevated to a "principle" for which support or opposition is supposed to be based on the concept, rather than on whose speech is being protected. But I view this as argumentatively weak. Free speech seems far too removed from any other moral axiom to be a bedrock principle in its own right. We might support it from the point of view of human rights or based on a utilitarian calculus, but not for its own sake. For utilitarians, like myself, the question of "what effects does free speech have" and "what sort of ideas does it tend to elevate" is completely germane to the discussion of support or opposition to it.