Everyone gets canceled sooner or later

You may as well just stir the pot.

Don’t let bullies and morons keep you from speaking your mind. (Photo via Getty)

I don’t necessarily suggest that anyone spend a lot of time keeping up with Bluesky drama.

But there was an incident last month where Jamelle Bouie was dragged as a “Nazi collaborator” over what seemed like a pretty routine disagreement. Not long before that, Will Stancil experienced a cancellation effort for trying to create positive media attention for anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota. And a bit before that, the Sarah Lawrence chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine decided to label Ezra Klein a “fascist normalizer.” Somewhere in the middle came a baffling wave of outrage directed at Lakshya Jain for reporting that the public has traditionalist views on several widely debated trans-rights issues related to sports and youth transition.

I’ve seen some people doing schadenfreude bits about one or several of these first three, since in practice Bouie and Stancil are pretty aggressive social-media progressives themselves, while Klein has angered a lot of American Jewish institutions by using his platform to elevate strong critics of Israel.

But the real lesson here isn’t that anyone is getting what they do or do not deserve. It’s mostly a reminder of something that I think is really important: If you write about issues in the news, you’re going to end up on the wrong side of a cancellation pile-on sooner or later, and you just shouldn’t worry about it too much.