Cancel Culture Should Come for Hamas Apologists

Hamas support should be the rare case that is worthy of cancellation, or else civilization itself may be canceled.

C onservatives have railed a lot in recent years against the menace of “cancel culture.” Rightly so. Today, many conservatives are celebrating the consequences visited by employers and even some schools upon those who have publicly sided with Hamas since its barbaric assault on Israel. Is this a contradiction?

There is undeniable tension, but the extent of contradiction is far less than it might seem. One of the foundational concepts of conservatism is that, in the real world, there are always costs and tradeoffs to any good thing, and limits to every right, power, and principle. There are moral absolutes of right and wrong, but few practical situations can be resolved by references to absolutes because in the real world, we must often choose between greater goods or between lesser evils.

Free speech is good, and vital. The presumption in its favor, not only in law but in the broader culture, should be a powerful one. But it is not entirely unlimited any more than anything else is unlimited. Even the inalienable rights to life and liberty can be taken away, in a proper case – such as in cases when two lives collide, or where liberty is deprived after due process of law. The question is always how to draw safeguards and principled lines around the deprivation of some important right or value, so that the exception does not easily swallow the rule. Prudent distinctions are always needed.

The problem is two-sided. On the one hand, conservatives need to think through systematically what we actually believe about canceling people. On the other hand, we acknowledge that any standard that is reasoned and sensible rather than absolute will be exploited by bad-faith actors, and that progressives are nearly all bad-faith actors on this issue. If you concede that you could cancel Hitler, anyone can be Hitler.

Recognizing how progressives handle this issue, as well as the fact that they control the decisionmaking apparatus in the bulk of our institutions, tends to drive conservatives in one of two directions. One is the defensive crouch: endorsing unreasoningly absolute rhetoric against cancellation. The other is offensive retaliation: a desire for cancellations of the other side purely as retribution, or in the hopes of giving them an incentive to rethink their own bloody-minded tribalism.

Both are understandable reactions; neither is morally or philosophically satisfactory. It’s our role to stand for something, even when we stand alone.

Cancellation and Its Culture

What is a “cancellation?” A general, non-ideological definition should be possible. A person is “canceled” if he or she suffers concrete adverse consequences as a result of politically controversial speech or expression. “Concrete adverse consequences” means something more than just criticism or a loss of the good opinion of others; it is most sharply presented when people lose jobs, honors, educational opportunities, or access to platforms for speech.

The case against cancel culture has featured a rich variety of cases ranging from the dubious to the ridiculous. People lost jobs for advocating positions currently being debated in elections, litigation, or legislative debates — including positions supported by a popular majority. Oversensitive or under-intelligent people have misconstrued things or blown them vastly out of proportion. People have lost jobs and scholarships over things they said or did long ago, or when very young, or for momentary lapses of judgment. Others with prominent and distinguished records were sacked for taking stances that were unpopular within their organizations. In many of these cases, even when there was a legitimate area for disagreement or criticism, the punishments were disproportionate. People have even lost jobs for defending or lampooning other people in the sights of the cancelers. Some examples:

• In 2014, Mozilla forced out CEO Brendan Eich for having donated six years earlier to Proposition 8, a statewide referendum against same-sex marriage — one that passed with a majority of the vote in deep-blue California.
• In 2011, former solicitor general Paul Clement — one of the nation’s most elite Supreme Court litigators — quit King & Spalding after the firm tried to force him to drop representation of the U.S. House of Representatives in litigation defending federal legislation (the Defense of Marriage Act) that had been signed into law by Bill Clinton. In 2022, Clement again quit his firm, Kirkland and Ellis, when it tried to force him to drop clients defending Second Amendment rights.
• In 2022, the big law firm Hogan Lovells held a conference call among women at the firm to discuss the Dobbs decision. Robin Keller, a retired equity partner still actively serving clients, aired criticisms of abortion, noting among other things its disproportionate impact on unborn black children. The firm branded Keller a racist and fired her.
• In 2021, the New York Times sacked science reporter Donald McNeil, a four-decade veteran of the paper, for using the n-word — not as a slur, but simply in a discussion of whether teenagers should be canceled for using the word.
• In 2017, Google fired autistic engineer James Damore over a 3,300-word memo on a company discussion board arguing his opinion that the underrepresentation of women in engineering job was not due primarily to discrimination, but rather, “the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”
• In 2021, Gina Carano was fired from The Mandalorian for an Instagram post with a bad analogy, comparing the incitement of hatred over political differences to Nazi persecution of Jews.
• In 2015, Kevin Cochran, a former Obama appointee, was fired as fire chief of Atlanta for self-publishing a Christian devotional text endorsing the biblical view of marriage as between a man and a woman.
• In 2022, Maureen Martin, a candidate for mayor of Lewisham, England, said in a campaign leaflet that she thought marriage should be between a man and a woman. The housing association where she had worked for 13 years fired her.
• In 2018, an 18-year-old Australian woman was fired from her job as a contractor for a children’s entertainment business for saying on Facebook that it was “OK to vote no” in a same-sex marriage referendum and changing her Facebook status to show support for the no vote.
• J. K. Rowling — one of the few people in the Western world who is truly too big to cancel — has nonetheless faced a concerted and seemingly never-ending effort to either commercially punish the Harry Potter franchise she created or erase her public involvement with it as punishment for her expressed belief (rooted in her feminism) that women are not men, and men are not women.
• Joe Rogan, one of the world’s most popular podcasters, has likewise faced a persistent effort to get Spotify to drop him over his willingness to host open-ended conversations that air a variety of conspiracy theories and other sketchy ideas, such as anti-vaxx nonsense.
• In 2020, Mimi Groves was kicked off of the cheerleading team at the University of Tennessee, where she was planning to attend, and forced out of the school due to a four-year-old Snapchat of her as a high-school freshman offhandedly using the n-word, apparently after the fashion of its use in a rap song. That Groves apologized was of no consequence.
• Kyle Kashuv, a survivor of the Parkland shooting, had his acceptance revoked by Harvard over the use of various slurs in texts, Skype conversations, and Google documents when he was 16.
• Groves and Kashuv were not isolated incidents. In 2017, Harvard rescinded the admission of at least ten students for sharing sexually explicit memes. In 2020, at least a dozen colleges revoked the acceptance of students over slurs or other racially controversial social-media posts. Law schools have taken similar steps.
• Sue Schafer wore a “Megyn Kelly in blackface” Halloween costume to mock Kelly’s comments dismissing blackface Halloween costumes as no particular big deal. Those comments had gotten Kelly fired by NBC even after she apologized. Schafer wore the costume to a 2018 party thrown by a Washington Post cartoonist, when the controversy was fresh. Two years after the party, the paper wrote a 3,000-word story on the costume, and the story got Schafer — who was not a public figure — fired from her job with a government contractor.
• In 2018, the Atlantic sacked Kevin Williamson for saying that abortion should be treated like homicide, and what he “had in mind was hanging” — as a legal punishment. Never mind that Williamson opposes the death penalty, so this was really more of a provocative take from a writer known for sharp language. Colleagues claimed that this opinion about the law at an opinion magazine made them feel unsafe.
• In 2021, a controversy erupted over Bachelor contestant Rachael Kirkconnell having “liked” a photo with a Confederate flag, as well as a photo of her attending an “Old South” plantation-themed ball. Chris Harrison, the show’s host for 19 years, defended Kirkconnell, asking for “grace.” Instead, Harrison himself ended up out as the host.
• University of Pennsylvania Law tenured professor Amy Wax has been embroiled in a long-running effort to fire her over a variety of her factual assessments of the performance of black students on her campus. Something similar happened to Sandra Sellers, an adjunct professor fired by Georgetown Law simply for discussing the matter.
• Dave Weigel got a month’s suspension from the Washington Post for something he retweeted, for which he immediately apologized. (The retweeted joke read, “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.”) The suspension was almost entirely due to objections lodged by colleague Felicia Sonmez, whose overreactions led the Post itself to fire her just days later.

This is just a sampling of these cases, and they don’t even touch on lesser examples such as efforts to ban speakers from campuses. They illustrate the broad front on which progressive forces have sought both to shut down opposing speech and to punish prejudices other than their own rather than seeking to encounter them with education and persuasion. That is especially clear when dealing with university admissions: Colleges, in particular, are supposed to exist to educate people away from unthinking prejudice, rather than to demand fealty up front.

When to Cancel

So, cancellation is bad — or, rather, it is an extreme remedy that should not lightly be invoked. What could justify such a thing? The answer is that every decent society does, and should, have some taboos that are enforced by formal as well as informal cultural sanction. Even a liberal society has taboos and cannot survive without them. The question is what should be the sort of modestly taboo expression that is met with general disapproval, and what should face more drastic taboos that are enforced by serious sanction that we associate with cancellation.

Consider six questions we should ask before taking the drastic step of punishing someone for a statement, whether it be an idea, an assertion of fact, or something less articulate like a slur:

First, is this the person’s current opinion? People are entitled to change their minds and learn things. There is a large difference between punishing people for things they’ve said recently and will not disavow, and things they said years ago and profess to have rethought. The tendency to cancel people for things they now disavow and apologize for suggests a vindictive hunt for cultural enemies rather than an effort to stamp out ideas too dangerous to be loose in society.

In the case of efforts at canceling truly abhorrent opinions, this also means that we should apply the values of due process and evidence. For example, some law firms terminated offers of employment to law students who were members of groups that issued statements aligned with the October 7 atrocities. In some cases, those terminations were reversed after the firms concluded that the law students had not actually endorsed the statements, had not been consulted in drafting them, and did not stand by their content. In such situations, even the worst opinions need not be held against people who do not profess them.

Second, is this a considered opinion? Offhand remarks, or things thrown out in an argument online, may be things people wouldn’t say if they worked them through. A bad tweet is not the same thing as a signature on an open letter. This is precisely why I was unwilling to cancel Kanye West for one night of bad tweets, but supported doing so once he dug in.

Third, is this an adult opinion? As a rule, we should be extremely hesitant to punish adults for things they said as minors. That goes double if the punishment is meted out by a college, which is supposed to exist to teach them better.

Fourth, is this a public opinion? Everybody says some things in private they would not say in public, including things they may not entirely believe but are kicking around or using as a joke or to get a rise out of someone.

Fifth, is this a democratic opinion? The first four factors really all boil down to whether we are canceling people over deeply held beliefs they are willing to advance in public, rather than things they don’t stand for. A society of adults gives people room to be wrong in youth or in private or in passing and get right over time. But in a liberal-democratic free-speech society, we also need to make room for people to have genuinely held beliefs we find hard to tolerate.

So, when should bad opinions cross the line into taboos we rightly punish? I would submit that the main test is whether this is an opinion that can be resolved in the democratic process.

Consider abortion. Abortion is the taking of an innocent human life. Supporting it is close to as evil as you can get within the spectrum of American politics. Those who support it believe that it is a fundamental liberty. But most Americans agree that the core question is whether the law should prohibit the killing or permit the liberty. That is a question for the democratic and legal process. It is precisely the sort of fundamental collision of life and liberty that governments are organized to resolve peaceably. If you agree to the premise that society must accept government’s verdicts on the question even at the cost of grave injustice, and must respond by seeking to change the law rather than by vigilante action, then you should be within the pale. Groups that may be organized around one or the other pole are free to limit membership and employment to those who share their values, but the broader institutions of society as a whole should tolerate a fuller spectrum of views. Only if you take the stance that John Brown took toward slavery should you face cancellations by private-sector employers and universities.

(On the Kevin Williamson firing, I’d have had no quarrel with the Atlantic refusing to hire Kevin on grounds that it did not share his opinions on abortion. The real problem was the shabbiness of hiring him, knowing those opinions, then abruptly declaring that a manifestation of those convictions was the equivalent of a walking threat of violence.)

The same is true of a great many opinions about the right to marry, the sources of inequalities, the justice of wars, the right to bear arms, the fairness of our systems of policing and the courts, the integrity of our elections, the effectiveness of vaccines, whether men and women exist or are fungible gender constructs, and the like. So long as opinions are submitted to the marketplace of ideas and the liberal-democratic system of peaceable, lawful resolution of social conflicts, we should blanch at treating them as taboo. The more we do so, the more we politicize all of American life.

That is true of some opinions of the perennial conflicts between Israel and its Palestinian antagonists, even opinions we may find distasteful, factually preposterous, or borderline antisemitic. But not all of them.

October 7 was a uniquely clarifying event. Nothing could justify what was done that day. Nothing within the pale of democratic politics could excuse it. In order to take sides with what was done, and to demand that it is the sort of thing Israel must simply tolerate, one must reject the fundamental premise of a liberal democracy that those we disagree with must be met with peaceable disagreement rather than war of extermination.

Nor is it possible to promote the cause of Hamas, or chant its slogans, and exist within a polity in which we tolerate the existence of others. Hamas is not a member of the community of nations, but a dissenter from civilization. It aims at the total destruction of its foe. It is not subject internally or externally to popular sovereignty or law. It bears none of the hallmarks of a group or cause that can be accepted in a society that resolves disputes without recourse to arms. It is, in the ancient Roman term, hostis humani generis — an enemy of all humanity.

Law firms and law schools, above all, exist to promote the mechanisms by which our society resolves private and group disputes without violence. The law is the substitute for riot, duel, and vendetta. To adopt those methods is the negation of law. Of course, a law firm that includes Jewish lawyers or serves Jewish clients or appears before Jewish judges or jurors cannot employ people who believe that Jews, alone amongst the world’s people, are subject to open season for genocidal violence. A law firm with no connection whatsoever to Jews would be within its rights and its best judgment in doubting the commitment of such people to the very idea of the law.

This is the same philosophy by which I have argued that we should cancel only the cancelers, and bar from legal employment only those who are incapable of tolerating open debate. It applies with special force to an instructor targeting Jewish students in his classroom or a mob surrounding or assaulting Jewish students. A liberal society will remain liberal only if it can defend the outer boundaries of liberalism itself.

Sixth, is this a fringe opinion? I have dealt thus far in classical-liberal principles. But allow me to conclude with a more basic concern. An opinion that deserves cancellation may nonetheless warrant forbearance in the interests of social peace, if it is widely shared. This formed much of the basis for tolerating pro-slavery opinion in the America of the 1850s, and for tolerating pro-abortion opinion today. If you attempt to root out an opinion held by a third or half or two-thirds of your own society, you light a fuse to a very large powder keg. Some things must be tolerated, even if they ought not to be.

For now, the view that terrorist attacks are justified in order to extend a Palestinian state from the river to the sea, at the cost of the destruction of the Jewish population, is not one that Americans need to tolerate. So, we should not do so. Taboos can survive only so long as they are enforceable. If we wish to maintain a society that takes seriously the injunction of Never Again, we will hold that line now, while it is still possible to do so. It is encouraging that some of our institutions, even those run by liberals and progressives, are still willing to do so. It bodes ill that many are not. Because that way lies something much worse than people losing jobs.