When I was the target of a cancellation attack as chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission in 2022, losing my livelihood as a result, cancel culture had already been going strong for a decade.
My cancellation followed what has now become a familiar pattern. A coterie of politically motivated activists (in my case the Alberta NDP and their minions in the blogosphere) scour the internet for the slightest infraction by a public figure. Then the cancellers, virtue signal to their “in-group,” call out the target for an alleged offence against woke morality (I had written an academic book review 13 years ago on historic Islamic imperialism where a single line was plucked, in which I said it was an overly and inherently militaristic religion).
This is followed by more in-group lackeys engaging in a pile-on while practising social vigilantism (I faced the wrath of a small cabal of NDP-affiliated academics and the National Council of Canadian Muslims).
Finally, the third-party witnesses bring the cancellation event to its culmination using their power to terminate or de-platform the target (the Jason Kenney government capitulated and booted me from office only two months after taking up the post. I was fired the same day a complaint was received and learned I had lost my job on the news. I was never told by my employer fully why I was terminated).
From the perspective of the target, this pattern is personally devastating. In my case, I lost my income and the reputation I had worked so long to build. I had wound up my law practice before taking on the job with the commission, so I had no clients to return to. In order to salvage something from the experience, my only option was expensive and prolonged litigation. I am still working my way through a lawsuit with the Alberta government, flush with money and as much time as they need to drag it out.
Debt, depression, and physical illness are common. Shortly after I was terminated, my partner and I lost our home, and each developed health issues. That my partner had worked for former NDP Premier Rachel Notley for four years and that I personally knew many of the Alberta NDP MLAs who were now calling me racist and a purveyor of hate speech, made the betrayal all the more bitter.
Added to this was the sheer injustice of the experience.
Despite having studied medieval Islamic philosophy at Harvard with professor Muhsin Mahdi, the top scholar in the field, I was now being accused of Islamophobia by individuals who had never thought or cared about Islam or its political history. Though I refused to apologize for having written a legitimate academic review, I was pressured into writing a statement confirming my willingness to learn more about Islam and suggesting that my views on the topic had changed.
Given that ongoing intellectual pursuits should result in revised opinions, it is not surprising that I have modified my past ideas. But this is not what the cancellers are seeking. Instead, cancelation events regularly involve the extortion of an apology or statement from the target that is then used against the cancelled as apparent proof of their guilt. In an article I will publish later this year, I compare the cancellation target’s apology or statement to a false criminal confession—the motivation and psychology involved are virtually identical.
In this Jan. 20, 2017 photo, a protester holds a sign during a demonstration in front of Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Ted S. Warren/AP Photo.
Tracing the history of cancellation
That we can now identify common patterns, motivations, and underlying ideological commitments across cancellations suggests we have arrived at a tipping point for cancel culture. We now have enough examples and evidence to confirm cancellation exists and that it follows specific outlines. For much of the decade from 2012 to 2022, it was regularly argued that cancel culture did not exist, that it was instead the marginalized using social media to hold the powerful to account for their discriminatory words and behaviour.
That dismissive attitude, necessary to perpetuate the toxicity of the cancellations, is on the wane. Precisely because we have seen so many examples of cancellation, because they follow a recurring trajectory, and because the cancellers’ motivations have been readily exposed as far more self-serving than they would have us believe, we might be inclined to believe that cancel culture’s reign of terror is approaching its end.
But, while I believe we have seen enough cancellations to identify and call out the cancellers for what they truly are, we are not out of the woods yet. Instead, I believe the first phase of untrammelled cancel culture has come to an end and a second phase of retrenchment is beginning.
Cancellation’s second wind
During cancel culture’s first decade, the cancellers went largely unchallenged, attacking targets at will to satisfy their hidden but insidious ideological agenda. In the United States and the the U.K. (the cancellation plague never gained the same status in continental Europe) the first phase came to a close over the last few years as the cancelled and their defenders began to fight back.
The anti-cancellers, consisting of select media outlets, podcasters, and social commentators (from Douglas Murray to Stephen Fry) spearheaded the pushback. But it was writers, including academics, who began the hard work of dismantling the beast through scholarly treatments that used hard data and theoretical analysis to expose cancel culture’s ideology and its impact.
While Alice Dreger was one of the first out of the gate in 2016 with her book, Galileo’s Middle Finger, asking whether science had been infected by the concerns of activists, it has only been since 2020 that we have seen an abundance of books and articles analyzing cancellation as a subject of scholarly interest.
It really began with Alan Dershowitz’s Cancel Culture in 2020, in which he calls for due process and clear criteria when it comes to cancellations, and has continued in the last few years with works such as Evan Nierman and Mark Sachs’ 2023 contribution, The Cancel Culture Curse, providing practical advice on combatting cancellations. Duquesne University Professor Luke Sheahan, drawing on the work of social theorists Robert Nisbett and Harold Garfinkel, made his contribution to cancellation studies with his important exposition of the social psychology of cancellation as a form of “degradation ceremony” enacted by a “revolutionary community.” 2023 saw the publication of Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind, rife with case studies and definitions of cancellation. And in just the last month, an ex-pat Canadian professor at the U.K.’s University of Buckingham, Eric Kaufmann, released his The Third Awokening.
Protesters demonstrate outside a Toronto Munk debate featuring Steve Bannon and conservative commentator David Frum in Toronto, November 2, 2018. Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press.
In many respects, Kaufmann’s comprehensive assessment of cancel culture’s history, the data behind who cancels who and why, and most importantly, a thorough philosophic analysis of the “woke” ideology that justifies cancellation, serves as one of the inaugural texts of cancel culture’s second phase.
In his wide-ranging work, Kaufmann argues that cancel culture is part of a larger ideological movement that was activated with the decay of Western Marxism in the 1960s. Marxism was replaced by a therapeutic anti-racism reminiscent of Tocqueville’s analysis of democratic soft despotism. In place of the popular “woke” appellation, Kaufmann uses the more scholarly terms “cultural socialism” and “progressive illiberalism” to label this ideology of cancellation.
Specifically, he convincingly contends that what we are witnessing is not a version of cultural Marxism but a faction within left-liberal thought that has come to dominate our institutions, especially our universities. According to Kaufmann, it must be understood as the impetus behind a now-decades-old ideology that also spawned the less virulent political correctness of the 1980s and ‘90s. And if it appears that cancel culture is losing some of its bite, Kaufmann argues that it is only part of the ebb and flow of the cultural socialist ideology that continues to return in evermore aggressive forms.
Fighting back
With each of these new works, and with a growing number of rigorous statistical studies, this second phase of cancel culture has emerged as an effort by scholars and public intellectuals to understand and combat a phenomenon that has gestated over the past decade and consumed our discourse.
The ability and willingness to comprehend, deter, and challenge cancel culture marks this second phase as one in which the cancellers will face more thoughtful resistance. But this resistance will also harden the cancellers’ resolve, as they attempt to entrench their ideology deeper in Western institutions.
Going forward, the second phase will likely require several efforts across a range of disciplines and institutions. At the scholarly level, we will need to build on the academic works already written, expanding their scope and audience. This will include peer-reviewed studies and theoretical treatments of cancel culture’s individual and social psychology, its history, philosophic roots, and its strategies and tactics. I would go so far as to call for a sub-field of “cancellation studies” that engages in transdisciplinary research to address cancel culture’s many facets. Though this will likely be met with resistance from many in higher education, it could begin with those schools such as the University of Austin or Arizona State University that have shown themselves open to reviving the university curriculum.
We will also need to confront cancel culture’s impact on our cultural and business institutions, especially among those institutions that cancellers pressure to extort terminations and de-platform targets. Corporate governance risk management strategies should include plans to counter cancellation attacks, beginning with third-party institutions calling out cancellers while unequivocally supporting employees, speakers, and public officials. Meanwhile, governments must be ready to push back against the political pressure to cancel targeted employees, and communications teams will need the tools to understand and unmask cancellation efforts.
Though this second phase has begun in the United States and is picking up steam in the U.K., Canada, typically slow to get on board with cultural trends, remains behind the curve on addressing cancel culture. My cancellation occurred in 2022 and I am still litigating the matter. That B.C. NDP cabinet minister, Selina Robinson, was cancelled just this year for an innocuous comment following the October 7 Hamas attacks, and with the imprimatur of the same National Council of Canadian Muslims that sought my removal from Alberta’s Human Rights Commission, suggests Canada still has some catching up to do.
But given the important work of several emerging scholars and public intellectuals, while phase two of the cancel culture wars seems well underway, those of us who have been its victims feel a lot less lonely.
