Cancel Culture’s Condescension Problem

When complaining about “cancel culture,” conservatives tend to lament its most obvious problem: its aim of censuring, ostracizing, or otherwise punishing people or perspectives that progressives deem unacceptable.

Though many on the left insist that cancel culture is purely an invention of angry right-wingers, examples abound. This calendar year alone, we’ve seen a Disney star fired for a social-media post, a New York Times journalist asked to resign after having responded to a question about a racial slur by invoking the slur itself, and a television host who recused himself from his post after suggesting that, just maybe, we should hesitate before excommunicating from polite society anyone who has attended a gathering with a theme now found objectionable.