Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said.
Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.
If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.
Nah, he continued to grift off the right wing while saying more and more unhinged shit until he shuffled off this mortal coil.
> Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.
Could it perhaps have anything to do with the fact that that's a 4chan-originated dogwhistle that was hyper-viral at the time? Why do you think they were asking about it in the first place? It was in the context of the fact that the ADL had identified it as secret hate speech, in the same line of the 14 words.
> If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.
The president of the most powerful country on earth and the richest man in the world say things like that all the time. Why the victim complex?
Notorious bigot Scott Adams claimed that all black people were members of a hate group because of a response to a survey question about the surveyed's sentiments in regards to the statement "It's ok to be white", a question which was asks in the context that a hate crime watch group identified it as being related to white supremacist groups. And your response is that black people, who white supremacists groups actively hate and target should've answered that yes, that statement that I saw on the news that the KKK is using? Just fine. Again, literal insanity, from the literal insane. And sadly I'm stuck in this asylum of a country with you.
"It's why you believe [...]" But you don't know what I believe.
"Scott Adams claimed [...] because of a response to a survey question [...]" But his statement is, if one applies some very basic "media literacy" (as you like to call it), clearly rhetorical, with the underlying message that there seems to be a lot of racial hatred from blacks towards whites in the United States in 2023, and that this racial hatred seems to be institutionally supported, and that as a white person of means he'll use his means to avoid this racial hatred and suggests others do the same. The cited survey is merely one data point he presents to support this belief. Arguing as if he arrived at this conclusion purely off of that alone is total sophistry.
I don't live in the US, so perhaps that will give you some reprieve. Scott Adams might well have been wrong. I don't claim to know here if he was, just that you haven't actually contended with his position at all despite writing a lot of angry words, and that this excess of sophistry justifies a dismissive response.
Sadly, racism along with so many other isms have been so watered down to the point of being completely meaningless.
When i saw the title i knew people would be calling this guy racist as if he said blacks were an inferior race rather than saying the most milquetoast of statements.
We need to start using rpg systems with our hate speech. Am i a level 5 racist because i dont find Scott Adams even remotely offensive? Am i a level 10 communist because i want universal healthcare? Or does that make me a whitemage?
Someone who makes their living from their art adjusts it to the preferences of the remaining customer base. And levying hate at someone makes them like you and those you represent less. This is neither surprising nor is it a valid post-hoc justification for the original outrage at a perfectly moral statement.
> Could it perhaps have anything to do with the fact that that's a 4chan-originated dogwhistle that was hyper-viral at the time?
All that means is that everyone else is either racist against white people or too much of a coward to speak out of the racism of their peers. It doesn't make the statement worse or any less correct. Maybe instead of cancelling people for stating reasonable opinions that other people you hate also say, think hard about why you and your friends are not willing to say those things. Do you care more about your making statements in accordance with your morals or more about not being seen as part of the wrong tribe?
> The president of the most powerful country on earth and the richest man in the world say things like that all the time. Why the victim complex?
Even if that was true, it doesn't change the fact that the woke crowd objects to that while being fine with essentially the same statement levied against whites.
If that means "making racist art", then I think that says a lot of validating things about why most of his original customer base abandoned him.
> the fact that the woke crowd objects to that while being fine with essentially the same statement levied against whites.
This reads like the classic "things right-wingers believe about leftists that have nothing to do with what leftists actually believe".
It was a way of calling out BLM on their open hatred of white people. Which meant that anyone who used it was opposing BLM, and was therefore a white supremacist. Even if they clearly weren't, never had been before, etc.
I think my eyes just rolled out of my head. Firstly because you think “BLM” was a someone you can attribute an opinion to, and secondly, the mind-numbingly idiotic view you did ascribe to “them”.
Turn off cable news and Twitter; it may help.
three people coined the phrase and made a lot of money on it through donations, interviews, grants, books, media, etc.
Yes, BLM the movement and actions may be decentralized -- let's not pretend there weren't profiteering ringleaders at any given point[0], and they most definitely had vocal opinions.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Garza , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrisse_Cullors , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ay%E1%BB%8D_Tometi
And tons of people said it with no affiliation to those three people. What a ridiculous load of nonsense. Also, given the links you provided, I'm curious what, specifically, you think:
"Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized political and social movement"
means? Would you like for me to define "decentralized" to you? Is there some other part of that completely unambiguous sentence that I can help with?
> let's not pretend there weren't profiteering ringleaders at any given point[0], and they most definitely had vocal opinions.
Great, what does that have to do with anything I said?
Y'all are so utterly boring and predictable.
'Someone, somewhere said something mean about white people, and I'm going to brainlessly attribute that to everyone I hate for not advocating for me, personally, enough!' is, paraphrasing your take, the lamest, most childish shit imaginable. Grow up.
This mechanism sounds more dangerous than useful.
Why would you assume the commenter isn't "black" and doesn't already live or have relatives in South Chicago already?
Regardless, see the Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Do you think he was driven to that by cancel culture? Or do you think he just got tired of pretending to care, and started ‘telling it like it is?’
At some point, if Scott Adams behaved like a bigot, we should stop making excuses for him. Becoming "radicalized" through life's hardships is not an excuse, unless we also grant this excuse to BLM et al. Otherwise it's selective slack-cutting.
(they embezzled large parts of it. one of them just got charged with wire fraud and money laundering https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdok/pr/executive-director-blac...)
Cop violence against black suspects because of violent crime by blacks seems a very suspect explanation. It ignores how the US got to that situation. Also, cops aren't in the same category as criminals (well, non-criminal cops anyway) and should be held to higher standards. They should de-escalate, not be another factor in violence.
It seems to me it's a spiral of violence in which the cops sometimes play a role in making it worse, and in any case, it makes the excuses for Scott Adams' views very weak in my opinion. So we should cut Scott Adams' some slack because he was "radicalized" by the "hysterical reaction of the left", but not acknowledge the reasons for BLM's existence or anything even before that?
At some point people have to stop blaming whites from hundreds of years ago and start looking at the consequences current policies and individual choices. This cop violence problem is really only a thing in high-crime areas.
> It ignores how the US got to that situation
Yes, by very lenient with violent criminals.
> Also, cops aren't in the same category as criminals (well, non-criminal cops anyway) and should be held to higher standards. They should de-escalate, not be another factor in violence.
They try that. Suspects refuse to cooperate and results are predictable.
> So we should cut Scott Adams' some slack because he was "radicalized" by the "hysterical reaction of the left", but not acknowledge the reasons for BLM's existence or anything even before that?
There's nothing radical about peacefully disengaging with people who think your mere existance is a bad thing. BLM on the other hand is mostly an attempt to make crime worse by weakening police forces, which again, would mostly hurt black people.
All around the world, and all through recorded history the same thing can be seen.
It's more of an interconnected feedback loop.
Distrusted minority areas are over-policed with excess force, more charges are laid (even if actual crime rates are on par with majority less policed areas), people that are over policed act up and push back, reported crime increases.
In the recent history of the USofA there are even examples of state munfactured crime - the CIA famously raised money for off book weapons to foreign fighters by buying cocaine and selling in bulk in minority parts of the USofA.
That was under Ronald Reagan.
Why? And how is blaming "the hysterical reaction of the left" doing that?
It seems all you're doing is simply stopping at the point of analysis you find palatable, which is dishonest.
> [the US got to the current violent situation] by very lenient with violent criminals.
Bullshit. Your opinion lacks any depth or explanatory power. No serious analysis would stop here.
> [cops try to de-escalate]. Suspects refuse to cooperate and results are predictable.
Reality shows otherwise. There's reason there has been increasing backlash against police violence, and it's not "the hysterical left".
> There's nothing radical about peacefully disengaging with people who think your mere existance is a bad thing. BLM on the other hand is mostly an attempt to make crime worse by weakening police forces, which again, would mostly hurt black people.
This doesn't address what I said, ignores the original comment (that Scott Adams had become radicalized, not even the OP dismissed this) and is generally a dishonest comment.
All this shows is that you have right-wing views about policing, but explains nothing and ignores the reality of how we got there.
Leftists pushing the idea that all good aspects of western culture are white supremacy and must be dismantled would be a factor, yes.
> Bullshit. Your opinion lacks any depth or explanatory power. No serious analysis would stop here.
Crime rates in minority areas prove it.
> Reality shows otherwise. There's reason there has been increasing backlash against police violence, and it's not "the hysterical left".
The increased backlash responds to increased profitability. Just look at how much BLM leaders cash in. Most police shooting victims are white, yet there's not talk about it anywhere.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
> that Scott Adams had become radicalized
He wasn't. That's just leftist hysteria and willfull character assassination.
Which good aspects specifically do you have in mind?
If anything, this display erred on the side of attributing too much to "white culture" which isn't a fair assessment of the contributions of other cultures. E.g. scientific thought, rationality, politeness, self-reliance are all good traits attributed exclusively to white culture, which is questionable.
The display didn't state these were things to dismantle; that's just your right-wing mindset assuming things. You're echoing the talking points of MAGA at this point...
You're a conspiracy theorist accusing others of being hysterical. Good luck with that.
Nah, "leftists" (people, really) are reacting to a pre-existing problem. Plus you built a strawman there, nobody said "all good aspects of western culture are white supremacy", unless you consider cop brutality "a good aspect".
> Crime rates in minority areas prove it.
Nah, crime rates in marginalized eras don't prove what you claim, and neither do they justify cop violence.
> The increased backlash responds to increased profitability. Just look at how much BLM leaders cash in.
No. You are just fixated on your favorite boogie man, while decrying cops and racism being singled out by "the radical left". The "BLM leaders" are irrelevant -- this is a decentralized rallying cry against police brutality, not a hierarchical organization -- what matters is the outcry on people who reacted to police brutality. You are grasping at straws anyway, anyone on HN can see that arguing about funding has nothing to do with whether protesting police brutality is a just cause.
> Most police shooting victims are white
Your stats show police shooting victims are NOT primarily white. I think you meant "blacks aren't the majority", but that's not the winning argument you think it is: nobody said cops are exclusively prejudiced against blacks. Also, shooting is not the only way the police exerts violence and discrimination.
Finally, your link supports the fact police brutality is a problem in the US.
> [Scott Adams] wasn't [radicalized]. That's just leftist hysteria and willfull character assassination.
The comment I was replying to argued Adams was radicalized, but blamed the hysterical left. It pays to read the conversation before jumping in.
No, I was referring to cooperating with law enforcement authorities instead of antagonizing them at every possible chance. How many victims of police shootings could have avoided that fate by simply peacefully cooperating with the officers involved?
> Nah, crime rates in marginalized eras don't prove what you claim, and neither do they justify cop violence.
They do.
> No. You are just fixated on your favorite boogie man, while decrying cops and racism being singled out by "the radical left". The "BLM leaders" are irrelevant -- this is a decentralized rallying cry against police brutality, not a hierarchical organization -- what matters is the outcry on people who reacted to police brutality. You are grasping at straws anyway, anyone on HN can see that arguing about funding has nothing to do with whether protesting police brutality is a just cause.
Not all police shootings are police brutality. In fact, I'd argue most are perfectly justified by suspects refusing to follow orders.
> Your stats show police shooting victims are NOT primarily white. I think you meant "blacks aren't the majority", but that's not the winning argument you think it is: nobody said cops are exclusively prejudiced against blacks. Also, shooting is not the only way the police exerts violence and discrimination.
I prefer to rely on hard data than on paranoid conspiracy theories.
> Finally, your link supports the fact police brutality is a problem in the US.
More palatable to blame the cops than the suspects who needlesly refuse to cooperate.
> The comment I was replying to argued Adams was radicalized, but blamed the hysterical left. It pays to read the conversation before jumping in.
I read the comment. I disagree with the characterization.
That's not "a good aspect of Western culture". Non-Western culture also has law enforcement.
"Antagonizing" is the crux of the problem: with racial profiling and excessive policing of minorities, it's the police who's antagonizing. If you put people with guns and a predisposition against minorities in constant contact and friction will them, things will happen.
In any case, "antagonizing" law enforcement doesn't warrant execution or use of deadly force, at least not in a democracy.
> They do.
No, they don't.
> Not all police shootings are police brutality. In fact, I'd argue most are perfectly justified by suspects refusing to follow orders.
The link you provided specifically mentions police brutality, I guess you should have paid closer attention.
"Refusing to follow orders" seldom warrants shooting. Maybe in a dictatorship.
> I prefer to rely on hard data than on paranoid conspiracy theories.
You actually don't. The "hard data" you provided shows white people are NOT the primary victims of police shooting.
Also you're fixated on a conspiracy theory about BLM's leaders yadda yadda, when the reality is that this was a public outcry about police brutality. That's the hard data you ignore because your ideology is fixated on the "radical left" boogiemen.
> More palatable to blame the cops than the suspects who needlesly refuse to cooperate.
Non sequitur. Also, it's what your link states, I guess you should have paid closer attention.
> I read the comment. I disagree with the characterization.
Nah. I don't see your answer to that comment. I think you misread it, much like you misread the stats link you referenced.
Those aren't the same thing. The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.
> I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.
GP wasn't referring to people of the time but rather people of the present day. There have been some surprising contradictions in what has and hasn't been "cancelled".
> w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.
Indeed it would be exceedingly difficult to legislate against it. But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it. I'm not required to be accepting of all behavior that's legal.
For example, presumably you wouldn't agree with an HN policy change that permitted neo nazi propaganda despite the fact that it generally qualifies as protected speech in the US?
Take a look at the current state of this post. Most of the comments around Adams' bigotry are downvoted, and plenty of pretty wildly right-wing comments are upvoted.
The purpose of HN is to gratify intellectual curiosity. Plenty of users are doing a good job of discussing this difficult topic curiously. We want this to be a site where difficult topics can be discussed, and that can only happen if people are committed to curious conversation rather than ideological battle.
If you want to participate on HN, we need you, like everyone, to respect the guidelines, no matter how difficult and activating the topic is.
These lines from the guidelines are particularly relevant here:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> But something doesn't need to be illegal for us to push back against it.
This is exactly what cancel culture is. It's pushing back on something (usually legal, but behavior we don't strongly don't agree with).
And its absurd to me how the right acts like cancel culture is a left movement. The right has used it too. Look at all the post Charlie Kirk canceling that happened, huge scale -- even the government got involved in the canceling there. Colin Kaepernick is probably one of the most high profile examples of canceling. The big difference is that the right has more problematic behaviors. Although more of it is being normalized. Jan 6 being normalized is crazy to me, but here we are.
You conveniently left out the part about mob mentality there. I don't think anyone was ever objecting to people expressing their disapproval of something in and of itself. Certainly I wasn't.
I'm not sure what partisan complaints are supposed to add to the discussion. I don't think it matters if one, both, or neither "team" are engaging in the behavior. The behavior is bad regardless.
> I'd stop using HN and I'd tell others to also not use it. I'd implement cancel culture on it.
That's a boycott but I don't believe it qualifies as "cancelling". Identifying YC associated businesses and telling people not to patronize them due to the association might qualify. Trying to get people who continued to use HN after the policy change fired would qualify.
What if HN was a group about celebrating the abusing of kids, and the people who used HN were daycare workers? Would you just say that since it happens outside of work no one has the right to report it?
The example seems off base. Wouldn't that be conspiracy to commit a crime?
Taking you at (what I assume to be) your intended meaning. Obviously you can contrive various situations that would be sufficiently alarming to the typical person to cause them to justifiably abandon their principles and attempt community organization. Someone posting things that don't fit your worldview and make you mad doesn't rise to that bar.
Celebrating a crime isn't conspiracy to commit one.
> Obviously you can contrive various situations that would be sufficiently alarming to the typical person to cause them to justifiably abandon their principles and attempt community organization. Someone posting things that don't fit your worldview and make you mad doesn't rise to that bar.
Why wouldn't it? You've just constructed your bar, and that's great. I'm glad you'd never want to react on scale based on someone or some organizations postings. If Google's CEO posted that he "personally" thought that selling information to governments was fine if you didn't get caught, you wouldn't suggest to your friends to not use Google because it was just his viewpoint?
At the end of the day the community will decide if an argument to boycott at scale makes sense. If I go around saying to boycott Google because a guy there doesn't like anime probably will make me look more a fool than anyone else.
I didn't construct some arbitrary personal bar. I simply acknowledged that edge cases exist that reasonable people might feel necessitate community action as a matter of self preservation. That doesn't undermine the general principle.
At the end of the day we're discussing social standards so there aren't going to be any airtight logical arguments and the edges will inevitably be blurry. If you adopt an extremist mindset you'll be able to rationalize just about anything. That doesn't mean you're actually in the right though.
Now, it's our job, when we see the arc not bending the right way (or fast enough) to do something, but I think to avoid allowing the arc to have levers is not doing ourselves any favors.
And with all the talk of cancel culture (not government action, but just all private citizen action), I've actually seen very few examples of it resulting in something that I consider unacceptable. Note, I'd consider physical threats outside the bounds of cancel culture -- those are just physical threats.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2026/01/15/culture-warrio...
First, speak out about it and shame those engaging in it. If its not socially acceptable to ruin someone's live over their opinions then less people will go along with the mob and it becomes less of a problem.
Second, make sure that people's livelihoods are not ruined by people being mad at them. That's essentially what anti-discrimination laws do we just need to make sure they cover more kinds of discrimination. Essentially large platforms should not be allowed to ban you and employers should not be able to fire you just because a group of people is upset with something you expressed outside the platform/company.
Ah, fight cancel culture with cancel culture.
So you're going to legislate that employers can't fire people because of something they've done outside of work (presumably as long as its legal)? Many professions have morality clauses -- we'd ban those presumably? And if you had a surgeon who said on Facebook that he hated Jews and hated when he operated on them (but he would comply with the laws) -- as a hospital you'd think that people who raised this to you had no ground to stand on. That they should just sue if they feel they got substandard treatment?
If I say something racist at home, my friends and family will shame me - that is social consequence. If I say something racist at home and the person I invited over publicly posts that on Twitter and tags my employer to try to get me fired, that's cancel culture, and there's clearly a difference.
There are virtually no social groups where it's socially acceptable to get offended by what an individual said and then seek out their friends, family, and co-workers to specifically tell them about that thing to try to inflict harm on that individual. That would be extremely unacceptable and rude behavior in every single culture that I'm aware of, to the point where it would almost always be worse and more ostracizing than whatever was originally said.
what would your alternative be?
Capitalism operates on consumers right to vote with our feet and dollars. This takes the form of "a bad review" that signifies a bad investment. It's our only market-based defense against abuse.
I want to reinforce this fact. Consider the origins of the term "ostracism", where a sufficiently objectionable individual could be literally voted out of the village. If that doesn't count as being "cancelled" I don't know what does.
cancel culture isn't a synonym for shaming.
cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier.
shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.
You shame a child who stole a cookie by telling them that now they need to go brush their teeth, and that they won't get one after dinner , and that you're disappointed that you found them to be sneaking around behind your back.
You don't kick them out of the house and tell the neighborhood not to hire them under threat of company wide boycott from other moms.
If I come across a Dilbert comic, I might still read it and laugh.
Just make sure the comic isn't "Dilbert Reborn", which Adams started after he lost his national syndication. Those are either unfunny, vile, or both. https://x.com/i/status/2011102679934910726
The first one is about Dilbert going to an anti-white-man protest, which might be how people on the right perceive something like a BLM event, but it's not what these events actually are. This is the kind of zero-sum thinking that conflates "my life should matter" with "your life should not matter." It's not what leftists actually believe.
The originals' core premise was universal workplace satire that criticized the office as a system: bureaucracy, incentives, incompetence, managerial nonsense... stuff that felt broadly true no matter one's politics. Even when it got cynical, it was still observational, in the sense of "here's how corporate life warps people." This depiction of what is essentially everyone's shared day-to-day struggles is the thing that gave it a place in mainstream culture.
In direct contrast, Dilbert Reborn is about Adams's personal grievances: his divorce and subsequent inability to find another partner, his fall from grace and full embrace of the alt-right movement, and his long-held beliefs about race, sex and other social issues that he quadrupled down on. Its core premise is "I was wronged; subscribe to the uncensored version; also here's the political/culture commentary bundle." It uses the recognizable characters and brand equity of the original comics to sell a fundamentally different product: paywalled, grievance-tinged, "spicier", creator-centric franchise built in the wake of his 2023 meltdown and institutional rejection.
There's actually quite a few conservative comedians and cartoonists I find funny. Adams was not one of them. The fundamental truth about successful humor is that you cannot make it about you and your own grievances. Adams totally failed at that.
> shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.
Eiji Yoshikawa's 1939 novel depicts a woman who follows Musashi around Japan waging a campaign to smear him over something he didn't do, ultimately preventing him from being hired into a lord's retinue.
It was also synonymous with ostracism, to be excluded from society, to have little to no chance of regular financing or loans, to have debts called, to be fired and have little hope of being employed.
It was socially networked suppression, operating at the speed of club dinners and afternoon teas.
Such things go back in time in many societies, wherever there was a hierarchy, whispers, and others to advance or to tread down.
They have all slightly different meaning, used in slightly different contexts, with a slight different effect on the individual and community. They can't be used interchangeable without loosing that distinction and creating slight misunderstandings (as well as originating from different cultures and religions). We might say that someone should be banished from polite society, but we can't say they should be interdicted from polite society.
Note I didn't say race quotas (i.e. hire minimum 50% non-white) were bad. I just said, there are people who oppose this idea, they should at least be permitted to air their views, a discussion is important.
I was drummed out for that. To me that's cancel culture in a nutshell. Suppression, censorship, purge anyone who opposes your idea but also anyone who even wants to discuss it critically (which is the only way to build genuine consensus).
Now 20 years on what I see when I interact with younger people is there are two camps. One of those camps has gone along with this and their rules for what constitutes acceptable speech are incredibly narrow. They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech. Mind you what the First Amendment protects as legal speech is vastly, vastly vastly broader than what these people can handle. I worry for them because the inability to even hear certain things without freaking out is an impediment to living a happy life.
Meanwhile there is a second camp which has arisen, and they're basically straight up Nazis. There is a hard edge to some members of Gen Z that is like, straight up white supremacy, "the Austrian painter had a point," "repeal the 19th" and so on, non-ironically, to a degree that I have never before seen in my life.
If you don't see the link here and how this bifurcation of the public consciousness emerged then I think you're blind. It was created by cancel culture. Some of the canceled realized there was no way for them to participate in public discourse with any level of authenticity, and said fuck it, might as well go full Nazi. I mean I presume they didn't decide that consciously, but they formed their own filter bubble, and they radicalized.
We are likely to soon face a historically large problem with extreme right wing nationalism, racism and all these very troubling things, because moderate views were silenced over and over again, and more and more people were driven out of the common public discourse, into the welcoming arms of some really nasty people. It's coming. To anyone who thinks "cancel culture" is not a serious concern I really encourage them to rethink their views and contemplate how this phenomenon actually CREATED the radicalization (on both sides) that we are seeing today.
I say this with sincerity: I have met precisely zero young people who I think come anywhere close to this description over the last decade.
I’ve seen it in the online world, yes, but this tends to amplify the very very small minority who (on the surface) appear to fit your description. And I see it across all age ranges and political persuasions.
Sure - but I'd argue that's due to the overall unhealthy aspects of internet use and not specifically 'cancel culture'.
The internet has become a constant stream of something that is simultaneously designed to maintain your attention and engagement ( control you ), and sell you stuff ( control you ).
I think that's a far too strong. I can see how grievances can be exploited to promulgate these views, and unfair cancelling might be one of those, but I don't see that as the main driving grievance that has been exploited - what I see is the timeless 'times are hard and it's some other groups fault' grievance as the main engine.
I'd also argue that extreme right wing views are on the rise in many places in the world, and I'd argue most of them never got anywhere near the US level of cancel culture - and indeed things like positive discrimination are still just seen as discrimination.
I think it's unlikely to be one factor - but if I had to choose one, I'd say there is a better correlation between the relatively recent rise in day to day internet use and the rise in prominence of such views.
> The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.
No they weren't. "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist, but despite your assertion that he was terrible "even for his day", I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.
John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. Now you can get "cancelled" for supporting it. The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. It's actually one of the best times to be a horrible person. Hell, you can be president.