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| Photo: Harvard University |
Mention the term Cancel Culture and you are likely to elicit as many shrieks and howls as saying any of the things that might get you cancelled. There are topics you cannot broach, words that cannot be said, regardless of context, and opinions that may not be expressed. But even saying that Cancel Culture exists, may in a very Orwellian sense get you cancelled. Now under Trump new life has been breathed into yet another wave of this reactionary phenomenon. This time round, the assault on freedom of speech comes mainly from the Right. So, I was taken by Greg Lukianoff’s latest book with Rikki Schlott The Cancelling of the American Mind, which looked at Cancel Culture before Trump and was published prior to his second term. The comparisons and contrasts are illustrative. I don’t intend to do a review of the book as such, though it is well worth reading, but rather to use the book on the pre-Trump period to talk about the current assault on freedom of speech. It will upset many liberals, who see themselves as holier than thou and draw no parallels between their own attempts to police thought and the Trump offensive.
The petri dish in which Cancel Culture was cultivated and came to the fore acquiring an immediacy unparalleled in the history of censorship and thought control was social media. It is a relatively new medium that the state has sought to control through limiting access to, or restricting what can be said by whom and about what. This is not new, as new media forms arise governments have tried to ban them or control them. It may seem laughable now, but as Lukianoff points out:
In 1538, Henry VIII desperately attempted to put the printing press genie back in the bottle by requiring a crown- approved license to operate a printing press in England. But the proliferation of ideas proved impossible to contain.(1)
But the printing press is slow and cumbersome, even now. It takes a long time for a book to travel the world. However:
There are no peer reviewers on social media, no editorial committees. The decision as to whether a person is as odious and worthy of our opprobrium as Harvey Weinstein is taken in seconds, often by people with little experience in the matter and frequently behind anonymous accounts. It takes seconds, little skill, no thought and no consequences to edit a video clip, a tweet or reply on social media and ruin someone’s life. Lukianoff gives many examples. Who would have thought that a young woman who advocated in favour of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd by the police found herself cancelled over a three second video clip she had posted years before at the mature, ripe old age of fifteen? But that is exactly what happened to Mimi Groves. She wasn’t a right winger, she wasn’t opposed to the BLM, she did something stupid. When she got her learner’s driving licence she sent a private snap chat video clip of herself behind the wheel, to a friend saying “I can drive niggas”.[3] This is a movement of virtue signallers, there is no way back for those who have sinned and the new bishops of the Spanish Inquisition can be anyone with access to a keyboard. It also says a lot about the nature of virtue signallers, they have no intention of changing society. In the Groves case it was more important to embarrass her than it was to build a movement against police brutality.
Many found themselves cancelled for joking or commenting negatively on a variety of issues. Now those who commented or joked about Charlie Kirk’s murder find themselves cancelled, often for very unremarkable statements. He was a vile, thoroughly loathsome individual, and such a description of him could get you cancelled. Killing him solved nothing, but I feel no sorrow at his passing given his own lack of compassion for murder victims. But Trump has now taken the Cancel Culture rule book and decided to enforce it through state actions and not just peer pressure. Suddenly, the liberals find themselves on the backfoot. What can they say? If this was ok before, why not now?
Before Trump there were also institutional measures taken against various people, many of whom lost scholarships, jobs etc. Years of such moves left the Palestinian solidarity movement vulnerable. It was accused of hate speech and the same tactics employed by liberal keyboard warriors and the boards of universities were now rolled out with a vengeance, though a lot of this was done before Trump. In the waning days of Biden’s decrepit rule, he and Holocaust Harris lashed out at anti-Zionists and universities clamped down on protesters.
This is not limited to the US of course. British universities, many of them so woke, they barely get to sleep ever were to the fore in clamping down on free speech. Two years after the genocide in Gaza began it was revealed that British universities had agreed to monitor student chat groups and social media postings on behalf of arms companies, some of them complicit in the genocide. Jo Grady, the Secretary General of the University and College Union condemned the universities[4] but saw no contradiction between that and her support for the hounding of gender critical feminists. One of the wokest universities is Edinburgh University. It had in the past suppressed gender critical views, going as far as to halt the showing of the film Adult Human Female. The film showing eventually went ahead after two attempts. Jo Grady’s union was to the fore in trying to ban the film. They demanded it be banned and both the university and the union have been sued by two academics on this precise point.[5] It was virtue signalling of the highest degree. The students relied on their own muscle but also that of the university, a university which according to Francesca Albanese is one of the most financially entangled in complicity with the genocide in Gaza. So much so, the students walked out of their own graduation ceremonies in protest.[6] Some may well have been involved in the attempts to suppress the film showing also. Cancel Culture is not about struggle or protest, and it is certainly not about debate. It is about virtue signalling and cosying up to the powerful to suppress others. People complicit in genocide are apparently fair allies for enforcing speech codes etc. It never occurs to the virtuous that this will come back to bite them.
DEI
Universities are thought of as hallowed halls of free speech and intellectual inquiry. They are not. Whether they ever were and to what extent is a matter for another day. Lukianoff gives us some surprising statistics on universities in the US. Some of the top US universities are heavily tilted towards the Democrats and at the same time have a low ranking in terms of freedom of speech. In general, the proportion of Democrats to Republicans is 8.5 to one. However, at Harvard the proportion of Democrats to Republicans in a number of faculties (anthropology-sociology, biology, chemistry, economics, English, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology) is a massive eighty to one.[7] FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) which is headed up by Lukianoff, carried out a survey of free speech at universities and ranked Harvard 170 out of 203 with a score of 34.52 describing its record as below average. The worst was Columbia University, which came in at 203, scoring 9.9 and rated as abysmal.[8] The students and liberals who were part of Cancel Culture there, got a rude awakening when it cracked down on the widespread pro-Palestinian protests on campus. Only one of the top US universities, Chicago, had a good speech climate. Not surprisingly, a majority of professors now self-censor in their classes, mindful of what spoilt brats on whom a university education is wasted might say of them. In comparison, only 9% said they did this during the McCarthy period.[9]
Trump attacked the universities with false arguments about antisemitism, being supposedly left-wing and went on the rampage against DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives. Part of this was the Charlie Kirk narrative that ALL blacks and Latinos and other minorities get their jobs despite not being qualified for them. There is no doubt that as part of his assault on DEI, Trump would prefer a world in which non-whites were just janitors. If he could, he would probably have Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio cleaning toilets and waiting upon him, rather than formulating right-wing policy. There are debates amongst black activists about the true value and impact of positive discrimination, but that is not what Trump is about, he is about racism. With positive discrimination, the holder of the job must be and is always qualified for the post. There are no pilots (Kirk’s example) who have not passed all the exams, or can barely ride a bicycle.
However, there is an element of DEI that gets less exposure and it is loyalty tests. Trump has implemented loyalty pledges across the board in new hirings.[10] He has now extended that to universities, who are asked to sign pledges which would see major changes to how the universities function, including their hiring process and caps on foreign student enrolment, amongst other things, in exchange for greater access to federal funds.[11] It is a completely reactionary proposal, though not any more so than what it replaces.
In this he is replicating previous practice at leading universities were academics and potential PhD students had to sign a DEI statement in which they had to explain what they had done to improve diversity in their own area of expertise and this was a key element in the employment process. So, the lecturer in nuclear physics or cardiology had to prove how politically correct they were. What was meant by diversity was deeply troubling. Social class was not considered important, nor was diversity in opinions. The purpose of these statements was political. As Lukianoff points out:
Faculty staff are vetted, just like Trump also does. People’s thoughts and speech are policed and there are real consequences to it. Sixty tenured professors have been fired for speech that “is – or in public settings would be – protected by the First Amendment”[13] with 2/3 of those sackings taking place since 2015. Trump will also sack professors for their speech. People have lost jobs in the US for failing to lick the unlamented deceased Charlie Kirk’s jackboots. Universities across the US have sacked staff and suspended students, one for describing Kirk as a reimagined Klan member. A controversial, though in my opinion a wholly accurate description.[14] Liberals are again on the backfoot, what they argued for over many years is now being used against them.
The cancelling of authors is well documented. There is no real need to go into detail here, though it is dealt with in Lukianoff’s text. We are all overly familiar now with the attempts to cancel JK Rowling over her comments on trans, the one issue you will never be forgiven for, ever. She was however, too big to cancel. Even liberal capitalists smell a dollar, no matter how many metres (or yards) away. Many other authors have not been so lucky. But cancel culture does exist in the publishing world. It is rife. That Rowling and others like Irish author John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas have survived and prospered does not mean they weren’t cancelled. It is as Lukianoff says:
Though there is one example from the publishing world worth looking at and it is that of Kosoko Jackson a misogynist who believed that women shouldn’t profit from gay men’s stories i.e. write about them professionally. He made his living as what is termed a Sensitivity Reader.[16] You have to give it to them, not even Goebbels was that imaginative when it came to spinning censorship. Could you imagine the Nazis having the brass neck to say their sensitivity readers have deemed the text to be un-Aryan? Jackson came a cropper when his own novel failed to meet the ridiculous tests he set for others. A certain sense of schadenfreude came over me whilst reading about him. I know that what happened to him is a as bad as the tripe and rubbish he heaped on others. But he was hoisted by his own petard.
Cancel Culture has always been reactionary; there are no good examples of it. It is not used against people who have actually committed crimes such as incitement to violence, hatred etc. It is used to stifle opinions that are not mainstream. It is also an industry in itself, with huge fortunes being made by the gatekeepers, the modern censors and witchfinder generals. Lukianoff is a liberal, his co-author is right of centre and the term Left is used throughout the book to describe liberals and more radical voices. Only in the US could the Democratic Party be described as left-wing. It is not. It is a right-wing party. It has led the US through many an imperialist war, coup d’etat, bombing and attacks on the living conditions of US workers to benefit Wall Street. Clinton, Obama, Bernie Sanders and AOC are not the Left. The Left are the socialists, those who believe in overthrowing capitalism, not those who think it is fine and some tinkering about the edges and slick PR is what is required.
And yet the Left has been to the fore in backing the liberal Cancel Culture and will now spout out contradictory nonsense about Trump’s version of it. Cancel Culture always had its liberal and its conservative wings. The Left should have said from the word go: a plague on all your houses. I would like to think that Trump’s offensive using similar language and tactics to the liberals might awaken them, but the woke are still profoundly slumbering at the wheel. Although Lukianoff is a liberal, his book should be a wakeup call to them. I couldn’t and didn’t even try to do justice to it here. But to quote Bertold Brecht, a man who would be cancelled were he alive today, “Reach for the book, it is a weapon.” Unfortunately, whole swathes of the Left don’t read anymore. They get their politics from Tik Tok and other social media platforms and whatever the middle-class mob are currently irked about before going back to work at mammy and daddy’s company. Lukianoff puts them all to shame in pointing out the reactionary and self-defeating nature of Cancel Culture.
References
[1] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) The Canceling of the American Mind. New York. Simon & Schuster. para 5.45
[2] IbÃd., para 5.50
[3] IbÃd., para 26.3 to 26.17
[4] The Guardian (08/10/20205) UK universities offered to monitor students’ social media for arms firms, emails show. Daniel Boffey & Aaron Walawalkar.
[5] The Scottish Daily Express (03/04/2025) Protests at Edinburgh Uni gender-critical film screening were designed to ‘create hostile environment’. H. William, PA & B. Borland.
[6] The Student News (06/07/2025) UoE shamed by UN for Gaza complicity as graduates protest. Dom Croot.
[7] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.34
[8] IbÃd., Apendix II
[9] IbÃd., para 12.38. Lukianoff deals with all of this in the book, however, greater detail is freely available from FIRE’s site.
[10] LA Times (25/01/2025) Loyalty tests and MAGA checks: Inside the Trump White House’s intense screening of job-seekers. Matthew Lee et al.
[11] PBS (02/10/2025) Trump asks 9 colleges to commit to his political agenda for better Access to federal money.
[12] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.7
[13] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.43
[14] University Herald (20/09/2025) Universities Fire Staff Over Posts on Charlie Kirk’s Assassination. Chris John.
[15] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 34.11
[16] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 27.58 to 27.64
Social media opens every institution, every individual, and every idea to the scrutiny of hundreds of millions of eyes. That makes them all vulnerable to being torn down. And it’s not always a bad thing. There are some institutions, ideas, and even people who need to be torn down—from Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt to odious sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein.[2]
There are no peer reviewers on social media, no editorial committees. The decision as to whether a person is as odious and worthy of our opprobrium as Harvey Weinstein is taken in seconds, often by people with little experience in the matter and frequently behind anonymous accounts. It takes seconds, little skill, no thought and no consequences to edit a video clip, a tweet or reply on social media and ruin someone’s life. Lukianoff gives many examples. Who would have thought that a young woman who advocated in favour of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd by the police found herself cancelled over a three second video clip she had posted years before at the mature, ripe old age of fifteen? But that is exactly what happened to Mimi Groves. She wasn’t a right winger, she wasn’t opposed to the BLM, she did something stupid. When she got her learner’s driving licence she sent a private snap chat video clip of herself behind the wheel, to a friend saying “I can drive niggas”.[3] This is a movement of virtue signallers, there is no way back for those who have sinned and the new bishops of the Spanish Inquisition can be anyone with access to a keyboard. It also says a lot about the nature of virtue signallers, they have no intention of changing society. In the Groves case it was more important to embarrass her than it was to build a movement against police brutality.
Many found themselves cancelled for joking or commenting negatively on a variety of issues. Now those who commented or joked about Charlie Kirk’s murder find themselves cancelled, often for very unremarkable statements. He was a vile, thoroughly loathsome individual, and such a description of him could get you cancelled. Killing him solved nothing, but I feel no sorrow at his passing given his own lack of compassion for murder victims. But Trump has now taken the Cancel Culture rule book and decided to enforce it through state actions and not just peer pressure. Suddenly, the liberals find themselves on the backfoot. What can they say? If this was ok before, why not now?
Before Trump there were also institutional measures taken against various people, many of whom lost scholarships, jobs etc. Years of such moves left the Palestinian solidarity movement vulnerable. It was accused of hate speech and the same tactics employed by liberal keyboard warriors and the boards of universities were now rolled out with a vengeance, though a lot of this was done before Trump. In the waning days of Biden’s decrepit rule, he and Holocaust Harris lashed out at anti-Zionists and universities clamped down on protesters.
This is not limited to the US of course. British universities, many of them so woke, they barely get to sleep ever were to the fore in clamping down on free speech. Two years after the genocide in Gaza began it was revealed that British universities had agreed to monitor student chat groups and social media postings on behalf of arms companies, some of them complicit in the genocide. Jo Grady, the Secretary General of the University and College Union condemned the universities[4] but saw no contradiction between that and her support for the hounding of gender critical feminists. One of the wokest universities is Edinburgh University. It had in the past suppressed gender critical views, going as far as to halt the showing of the film Adult Human Female. The film showing eventually went ahead after two attempts. Jo Grady’s union was to the fore in trying to ban the film. They demanded it be banned and both the university and the union have been sued by two academics on this precise point.[5] It was virtue signalling of the highest degree. The students relied on their own muscle but also that of the university, a university which according to Francesca Albanese is one of the most financially entangled in complicity with the genocide in Gaza. So much so, the students walked out of their own graduation ceremonies in protest.[6] Some may well have been involved in the attempts to suppress the film showing also. Cancel Culture is not about struggle or protest, and it is certainly not about debate. It is about virtue signalling and cosying up to the powerful to suppress others. People complicit in genocide are apparently fair allies for enforcing speech codes etc. It never occurs to the virtuous that this will come back to bite them.
DEI
Universities are thought of as hallowed halls of free speech and intellectual inquiry. They are not. Whether they ever were and to what extent is a matter for another day. Lukianoff gives us some surprising statistics on universities in the US. Some of the top US universities are heavily tilted towards the Democrats and at the same time have a low ranking in terms of freedom of speech. In general, the proportion of Democrats to Republicans is 8.5 to one. However, at Harvard the proportion of Democrats to Republicans in a number of faculties (anthropology-sociology, biology, chemistry, economics, English, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology) is a massive eighty to one.[7] FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) which is headed up by Lukianoff, carried out a survey of free speech at universities and ranked Harvard 170 out of 203 with a score of 34.52 describing its record as below average. The worst was Columbia University, which came in at 203, scoring 9.9 and rated as abysmal.[8] The students and liberals who were part of Cancel Culture there, got a rude awakening when it cracked down on the widespread pro-Palestinian protests on campus. Only one of the top US universities, Chicago, had a good speech climate. Not surprisingly, a majority of professors now self-censor in their classes, mindful of what spoilt brats on whom a university education is wasted might say of them. In comparison, only 9% said they did this during the McCarthy period.[9]
Trump attacked the universities with false arguments about antisemitism, being supposedly left-wing and went on the rampage against DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives. Part of this was the Charlie Kirk narrative that ALL blacks and Latinos and other minorities get their jobs despite not being qualified for them. There is no doubt that as part of his assault on DEI, Trump would prefer a world in which non-whites were just janitors. If he could, he would probably have Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio cleaning toilets and waiting upon him, rather than formulating right-wing policy. There are debates amongst black activists about the true value and impact of positive discrimination, but that is not what Trump is about, he is about racism. With positive discrimination, the holder of the job must be and is always qualified for the post. There are no pilots (Kirk’s example) who have not passed all the exams, or can barely ride a bicycle.
However, there is an element of DEI that gets less exposure and it is loyalty tests. Trump has implemented loyalty pledges across the board in new hirings.[10] He has now extended that to universities, who are asked to sign pledges which would see major changes to how the universities function, including their hiring process and caps on foreign student enrolment, amongst other things, in exchange for greater access to federal funds.[11] It is a completely reactionary proposal, though not any more so than what it replaces.
In this he is replicating previous practice at leading universities were academics and potential PhD students had to sign a DEI statement in which they had to explain what they had done to improve diversity in their own area of expertise and this was a key element in the employment process. So, the lecturer in nuclear physics or cardiology had to prove how politically correct they were. What was meant by diversity was deeply troubling. Social class was not considered important, nor was diversity in opinions. The purpose of these statements was political. As Lukianoff points out:
Even if you completely agree with the importance of DEI, there really isn’t any reason to ask a potential physics professor to discuss their prior, past, and future “intellectual commitments” to “social justice”… other than to test their political outlook. Its purpose is obvious, and professors themselves know it.[12]
Faculty staff are vetted, just like Trump also does. People’s thoughts and speech are policed and there are real consequences to it. Sixty tenured professors have been fired for speech that “is – or in public settings would be – protected by the First Amendment”[13] with 2/3 of those sackings taking place since 2015. Trump will also sack professors for their speech. People have lost jobs in the US for failing to lick the unlamented deceased Charlie Kirk’s jackboots. Universities across the US have sacked staff and suspended students, one for describing Kirk as a reimagined Klan member. A controversial, though in my opinion a wholly accurate description.[14] Liberals are again on the backfoot, what they argued for over many years is now being used against them.
The cancelling of authors is well documented. There is no real need to go into detail here, though it is dealt with in Lukianoff’s text. We are all overly familiar now with the attempts to cancel JK Rowling over her comments on trans, the one issue you will never be forgiven for, ever. She was however, too big to cancel. Even liberal capitalists smell a dollar, no matter how many metres (or yards) away. Many other authors have not been so lucky. But cancel culture does exist in the publishing world. It is rife. That Rowling and others like Irish author John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas have survived and prospered does not mean they weren’t cancelled. It is as Lukianoff says:
Cancel Culture skeptics seem to think that someone isn’t truly canceled unless they’re completely obliterated forevermore. By this same logic, did the estimated 200 people accused of witchcraft in Salem have nothing to complain about because only about 10 percent of them were executed?[15]
Though there is one example from the publishing world worth looking at and it is that of Kosoko Jackson a misogynist who believed that women shouldn’t profit from gay men’s stories i.e. write about them professionally. He made his living as what is termed a Sensitivity Reader.[16] You have to give it to them, not even Goebbels was that imaginative when it came to spinning censorship. Could you imagine the Nazis having the brass neck to say their sensitivity readers have deemed the text to be un-Aryan? Jackson came a cropper when his own novel failed to meet the ridiculous tests he set for others. A certain sense of schadenfreude came over me whilst reading about him. I know that what happened to him is a as bad as the tripe and rubbish he heaped on others. But he was hoisted by his own petard.
Cancel Culture has always been reactionary; there are no good examples of it. It is not used against people who have actually committed crimes such as incitement to violence, hatred etc. It is used to stifle opinions that are not mainstream. It is also an industry in itself, with huge fortunes being made by the gatekeepers, the modern censors and witchfinder generals. Lukianoff is a liberal, his co-author is right of centre and the term Left is used throughout the book to describe liberals and more radical voices. Only in the US could the Democratic Party be described as left-wing. It is not. It is a right-wing party. It has led the US through many an imperialist war, coup d’etat, bombing and attacks on the living conditions of US workers to benefit Wall Street. Clinton, Obama, Bernie Sanders and AOC are not the Left. The Left are the socialists, those who believe in overthrowing capitalism, not those who think it is fine and some tinkering about the edges and slick PR is what is required.
And yet the Left has been to the fore in backing the liberal Cancel Culture and will now spout out contradictory nonsense about Trump’s version of it. Cancel Culture always had its liberal and its conservative wings. The Left should have said from the word go: a plague on all your houses. I would like to think that Trump’s offensive using similar language and tactics to the liberals might awaken them, but the woke are still profoundly slumbering at the wheel. Although Lukianoff is a liberal, his book should be a wakeup call to them. I couldn’t and didn’t even try to do justice to it here. But to quote Bertold Brecht, a man who would be cancelled were he alive today, “Reach for the book, it is a weapon.” Unfortunately, whole swathes of the Left don’t read anymore. They get their politics from Tik Tok and other social media platforms and whatever the middle-class mob are currently irked about before going back to work at mammy and daddy’s company. Lukianoff puts them all to shame in pointing out the reactionary and self-defeating nature of Cancel Culture.
References
[1] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) The Canceling of the American Mind. New York. Simon & Schuster. para 5.45
[2] IbÃd., para 5.50
[3] IbÃd., para 26.3 to 26.17
[4] The Guardian (08/10/20205) UK universities offered to monitor students’ social media for arms firms, emails show. Daniel Boffey & Aaron Walawalkar.
[5] The Scottish Daily Express (03/04/2025) Protests at Edinburgh Uni gender-critical film screening were designed to ‘create hostile environment’. H. William, PA & B. Borland.
[6] The Student News (06/07/2025) UoE shamed by UN for Gaza complicity as graduates protest. Dom Croot.
[7] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.34
[8] IbÃd., Apendix II
[9] IbÃd., para 12.38. Lukianoff deals with all of this in the book, however, greater detail is freely available from FIRE’s site.
[10] LA Times (25/01/2025) Loyalty tests and MAGA checks: Inside the Trump White House’s intense screening of job-seekers. Matthew Lee et al.
[11] PBS (02/10/2025) Trump asks 9 colleges to commit to his political agenda for better Access to federal money.
[12] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.7
[13] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.43
[14] University Herald (20/09/2025) Universities Fire Staff Over Posts on Charlie Kirk’s Assassination. Chris John.
[15] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 34.11
[16] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 27.58 to 27.64
⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.
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