It’s not about ‘cancel culture.’ It’s about who gets to do the canceling

On Oct. 3, 1992, Sinead O’Connor was cancelled for tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II during a performance on “Saturday Night Live.”

Nobody called it “cancelling” back then. It was just way outside the carefully set bounds of society and thus, bad and wrong and punished. Joe Pesci was the next SNL host, and showed up with a taped picture of Il Papa and said he’d have punched her for her act as the crowd cheered him on. Madonna, no stranger to religious controversy, later mocked O’Connor by tearing up a picture of Joey Buttafuoco.

There were a few people taking O’Connor’s side back then, but that moment ended her chance at stardom and her promising music career ended up on a one-hit wonder trajectory (which is too bad, because “Nothing Compares 2 U” absolutely slaps.)

I always think of O’Connor when I hear people make grave prophecies about the dangers of “cancel culture” or, say, you see a bunch of extremely wealthy people with vast platforms signing mealy-mouthed statements about how “free speech” is under attack. 

The easy thought is: These are people feel so immune to criticism that they think the entire artifice of free speech must be toppling over because Gary6969420 said something mean about them to his 11 followers. And no doubt, that’s true. These are people used to having their egos flattered, their whims met, their ideas celebrated.

But a much bigger issue is that these people feel like they should have the same power over the culture that the people who cancelled O’Connor back in the ‘90s had — and they don’t.

Social media is a toxic hellscape, and yet, it has proven to have remarkable power when it comes to setting the tone of our culture. Billionaire author J.K. Rowling signed that statement lamenting the end of free speech as we know it simply because she holds bigoted views on transgender individuals, and then was called out for it. That’s it. No government has locked her up. No one is deleting her work from the world or burning copies of “The Half-Blood Prince.” Her money isn’t disappearing from her account via means other than her charitable giving strategies. The Queen isn’t even coming for her knighthood (yet).

If you’re a J.K. Rowling in the ‘90s, you’re lucky in a way that there’s no social media for you to expose your bigotry to the world.

But let’s say she wanted to go out of her way to discuss how 0.5% of people who transition choose to de-transition in 1999 as some sort of “trans threat.” She definitely could have gotten a magazine piece as the world’s top-selling author. And once it was out, what recourse would the other side have against it? Basically none; the media and cultural gatekeepers of that time — nearly all white, male and cisgender — would never provide a similar platform for an LGBTQ response. The best you could probably hope for was a letter to the editor against her piece, running side by side with other letters praising her. The publisher would look at that page, nod approvingly, and say it was balanced.

Why Rowling is so obsessed with trans rights, I’ll never know. She could have noted that transgendered people are murdered at unheard of rates compared to the rest of the population. She could have seen their struggle for survival and acceptance through the lens of the world she created. Instead she believes the free speech rights of the world’s richest and best-selling author is being limited, because what she really wants is something she can’t have: She believes that her bigotry should be the culture. 

Unfortunately for her, the world has changed. Fewer gates and gatekeepers mean a cultural experience that increasingly has more room for diversity and less room for bigotry. Indeed, that cultural shift is one reason why the right has been driven further and further into the fever swamps over the past 40 years. They can see it too, and they don’t like it annnnny more than Rowling does.

And in the end, Rowling doesn’t disapprove of cancel culture at all. Most of the signatories don’t. Rowling’s entire weird crusade is that trans rights should be canceled, just like Bari Weiss thinks it’s fine for pro-Palestinian voices to be silenced, just like Wynton Marsalis wants jazz to be a dusty museum piece, just like Olivia Nuzzi wants to take Richard Spencer seriously, just like Yascha Mounk thinks James Bennet shouldn’t have been fired for lying about doing his job because somehow that’s what he thinks centrism is.

The “controversy” these people endlessly warn about is not necessarily big thinkers with dangerous ideas that have no platform; it’s that all their bad ideas are losing the cultural debate they think they want to have. 

What they see as cancellation is actually just a common sense remedy: The only way to stop losing is to stop talking.

When they complain about the “Twitter mob” coming for them, they’re actually making the Elite Karen argument: who are these people, what are their credentials, how dare they? But it’s too late. The twitter mob, the latter-day Visigoths, are already at the gates … and you can’t cancel them now.

Oh, and Sinead O’Connor? She was dead on about the church’s sex abuse, and a quiescent media that took decades to catch up to where she was in her understanding of the horrors back in the early ’90s.

But even though her career didn’t turn out the way it might have, cancellation didn’t end her life or her career. She still made albums, made money, went on talk shows, lived the life of a generally semi-famous person, even as she struggled with her own past abuse.

If O’Connor can survive being canceled, I’ve got high hopes that a bigoted billionaire author can do the same.