The "cancel culture" debate is dumb

We ought to argue about substance not process

Hey folks: It’s Thursday and “cancel culture” has been back in the discourse this week.

I think it’s a stupid term and I agree with everyone who thinks conservatives have been simultaneously incoherent and hypocritical in their take on this topic. I don’t use the term and don’t think that I ever will.

But I will say that I think the general dialogue on this issue has gotten too focused on the particulars of Twitter dynamics and the possibility of people getting fired for bad tweets. There are a bunch of interesting questions about social norms around social media use, and a bunch of other interesting questions about at-will employment and workplace norms. But what I actually think is roiling left of center circles is not these process questions, but questions of substance.

When I was a kid in the 1990s, it was common for people to call things “gay” as a kind of generic insult. But kids who went to Grace Church School in Greenwich Village didn’t do that — it was a super pro-LGBT communi…