Cancel Culture Comes for Anti-Semites

Surging hate, bipartisan hypocrisy, and the philosophy of cancel culture

Protestors in New York City on October 8, 2023. Source.

A note on sourcing: this article is one of the most heavily sourced pieces I’ve written, with over 100 links embedded throughout the text. In some instances, consecutive words are individually hyperlinked with separate sources. While it does not make for the most pleasing aesthetic, I felt it was important to offer a thorough documentation.

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In the wake of the October 7th, 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians carried out by Hamas, swaths of the Western left and Muslim communities have shown the world, through justifying or celebrating a pogrom, that they are not the moral paragons they purport to be. Condemnations of their astounding inability to scrounge up even the most rudimentary wisps of humanity have been gratifyingly vocal, but the pushback has gone well beyond criticism or reasoned refutation. Cancel culture has come for the haters of Israel. Or is it “accountability culture”? In a reversal of the usual dynamic of recent years, conservatives are cheerleading cancellation campaigns and the left is crying foul, but it’s small-l liberals who should be the loudest and most concerned right now. When emotions run high, the first casualty are liberal principles, but it’s precisely during these moments of passion that they are most crucial.

The Floodgates Open

At first, the stories began showing up on my radar in a trickle. Playboy dropped Mia Khalifa over comments that approved of Hamas’s attacks. Air Canada fired a pilot for posting a photo of himself holding a sign that read “Keep the world clean” beneath an image of an Israeli flag in a trash can. A prestigious Chicago law firm rescinded a job offer to an NYU law student who blamed Israel for the Hamas slaughter of civilians. Then France banned all pro-Palestine protests. Germany soon followed with prohibitions on public support for Hamas. Both countries used police to break up unlawful rallies. High-profile commentators and politicians in the West began calling for those who voice support for Hamas to be stripped of their citizenship and/or deported. People I have worked with began echoing these sentiments publicly.

Then the floodgates opened. A truck with a digital billboard screen began driving around Harvard’s campus displaying the names and photos of students who signed anti-Israel open letters and calling them anti-Semites. CEOs began demanding lists of such students to be produced so they could know who not to hire. Websites popped using automated programs to scrape social media and compile lists of thousands of anti-Israel or pro-Palestine users, along with their names and employer information. Pro-Israel watchdog groups began aggregating instances of anti-Semitic statements or behavior and launching pressure campaigns to get offending individuals fired from their jobs or expelled from their universities — often successfully. A Citibank employee was fired for saying “No wonder Hitler wanted to get rid of them all [the Jews]” on Instagram. A man was suspended from his financial firm after being filmed ripping down posters of Israeli civilians kidnapped by Hamas.

Of the many people who have either been fired or are facing ongoing campaigns to get them fired, several patterns have emerged. Most appear to be Muslim. A bizarrely high percentage work in healthcare, including physicians, dentists, administrators, medical directors, respiratory therapists, surgeons, proctologists, and pediatricians. An Atlanta cancer specialist was fired for celebrating Hamas’s attacks on Instagram. An NYC emergency room doctor was axed for rejoicing in the wake of the October 7th pogrom, also on Instagram. A Boston-area dentist was terminated after being caught on video tearing down Israeli kidnap posters. A Beverly Hills radiologist was sacked for referring to “Zionists” as “genocidal, demonic, greedy, pedophilic retards” on Twitter. Jew-haters who identify as non-binary — Theydolf Hitlers or Heinrich Them/Themmlers? — also appear to be overrepresented among the targets of cancellation campaigns.

Then there came the obvious overreaches. The CEO of an influential tech conference was forced to resign over decidedly tame anti-Israel comments. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered state universities to disband a pro-Palestine student group over extremist views. A scientific journal editor was even terminated simply for retweeting an article from The Onion, a satirical news website that lampooned elements of the discourse surrounding Israel/Palestine.

Most disturbing of all are the growing number of cases where people have been fired on the basis of private communications that were leaked without their consent. An attorney in the Illinois state comptroller’s office was fired over a private message in which she called Jews “vermin”, expressed the desire to put them in gas chambers, and said “Hitler should have eradicated all of you.” A finance company is facing organized pressure to sack a senior marketing designer who likewise said, in a private DM, “I wish that Hitler would have finished all of you.” A healthcare company in Greater Chicago faces a similar concerted push to fire a nurse who said, again privately, that she hopes Israeli hostages are burned alive and fed to dogs. And a Los Angeles realtor was fired after private messages were published in which she said “History proves Jews are never wanted anywhere” and “No wonder Germans killed and kicked them out too.”

Pervasive though this phenomenon seems, for every person fired or doxxed there are many times more who have flown under the radar, or whose employer has stood by them. The New York Times, for example, recently hired a freelance contributor with a history of praising Hitler to cover the Israel/Palestine conflict, no less. Their response to the ensuing controversy was unwavering support for their contributor: “he understood our concerns and could adhere to our standards.” The Times, who once ousted their opinion editor for running an op-ed by a US senator advocating for troops to restore order in the George Floyd riots (a view backed by a majority of Americans), evidently believes in redemption when it comes to pro-Hitler views.

None of this has happened in a vacuum. Around the world, there has been a shocking eruption of disgusting and sometimes violent incidents of anti-Semitism that would require many thousands of words to fully document. The aforementioned posters of kidnapped Israelis, in particular, have functioned as a recurring fulcrum of insanity on this front. Given that these flyers are essentially symbolic — there is virtually nothing random US or UK pedestrians can do to rescue kidnapped Israeli children — it’s almost as if they’ve been plastered everywhere simply to goad anti-Semites or Hamas supporters into outing themselves by tearing them down, and boy have they.

A lynch mob of gathers in a Russian airport on October 29, 2023 to block a flight to Israel and find any Jews on the premises. Source.

The Philosophy of Cancel Culture

My initial reaction to this wave of backlash was schadenfreude and a sense of justice. Imagine being a Jewish patient of one of those doctors? Imagine taking your Jewish kid to them for treatment? I still can’t wrap my mind around the sheer volume of people who have been caught supporting pogroms or expressing Hitlerian views. As the days stretched on, however, and the blitz of firings, doxxings, and public shaming campaigns became too numerous to track, my righteous outrage soon gave way to deep unease. Aren’t these incidents part and parcel of the same “cancel culture” I have so often criticized? 

Certainly, they have the same structure as cancel culture: vindictive cultural vigilantes rooting out wrong-speak and whipping up mobs to get offending individuals fired in order to enforce a certain worldview — and to terrify onlookers into staying in line. And yet at the same time, are there to be no consequences for the incredible spike in anti-Semetic bile and incidents across the globe? This gets to a fundamental question. If cancel culture is wrong, is it inherently and unconditionally wrong in a deontological sense, or is it generally wrong because it’s usually carried out in a way that punishes the innocent and doles out disproportionate penalties to those guilty of relatively minor offenses? When Democratic pollster David Shor was fired during the George Floyd mayhem for citing research showing that non-violent protests are more politically effective than rioting, is that analogous to the lawyer who was fired for saying she wanted to gas the Jews? One seems like an extraordinary overreaction to a simple difference of opinion, while the other feels like a total no-brainer. Is one cancel culture while the other is “accountability culture”? Or is a cancellation a cancellation?

There is something intuitively unsatisfying with the view that all cancellations are created equal, regardless of the specifics involved. Making no distinction between a person fired for a now-insensitive Halloween costume from 15 years ago versus someone wishing death to the Jews seems an overly simplistic broad brush. However, the moment we begin making these distinctions, we open a can of worms. Who gets to decide when an offense is minor or cancellable? Who gets to decide when a cancellation is overkill or justified? Who decides where we draw the line? If it’s fine to cancel an avowed Nazi, what about someone who is discovered to privately hold Hitlerian views but has never done so publicly? What about your run-of-the-mill Archie Bunker armchair racist? What about someone who is simply very socially and culturally conservative; someone whose views, while never overtly bigoted, place them in close proximity to actual bigots? What happens when the racists are themselves racial minorities? Nobody can agree on how to define terms, much less set boundaries.

The only way around this morass of subjectivity is to take one of the extreme stances that either issues a blanket endorsement of cancel culture across the board, or condemns it in all cases. Hardly anyone would countenance the former, since even the censorious still want freedom for themselves. The flip side, however, entails the stance that nothing anyone could ever do or say — nothing at all — so long as it has no direct connection with their job and isn’t a crime, could ever constitute a fireable offense and should never be publicly called out. This, too, is unsatisfying.

None of this, of course, is about the First Amendment or legality. This isn’t an issue of the government taking anyone’s rights away, and no serious person believes that employers should be forced to retain the services of employees after they’ve been outed as fans of pogroms. The quandary that this recent turn of events has brought to the fore is considerable. If we agree that cancel culture is a bad thing, and we also agree that uncompromising and absolutist stances about cancel culture are too inflexible and unrealistic to map onto the complexities of real life, where does that leave us? When does basic accountability become cancel culture? It’s easy to say you’re against cancel culture, or that you don’t have a problem with it. What’s hard is answering these questions, because when you get right down to it, none of us are pro- or anti-cancel culture absolutists. 

Perhaps one clear line most people can agree on are expressions of genocidal bigotry (actual genocide, not the far-left redefinition which translates to “the deaths of more than 17 people, provided they were killed by folks we dislike”). But even here we run into problems, because some of the people who have been fired over truly odious comments nevertheless expressed them in a private setting. No one can blame any company for terminating these employees, of course — once such facts come to light and become a public spectacle, it presents a potentially existential threat to the business that cannot be ignored. But people should be allowed to be assholes in private. When I ask myself, “Is this cancel culture?”; when I look past the fact that the people on its receiving end are utterly contemptible cretins, I have to conclude that yes, it is. These are the least sympathetic victims of cancel culture I could possibly imagine — but victims they are.

Principled liberals oppose cancel culture in general because it leads to a less free, less open, more repressive, authoritarian culture. Normalizing cancel culture creates a powerful weapon that anyone can wield. While some may use it judiciously and responsibly for true justice, it inevitably devolves into an all-purpose cudgel to enforce ideological conformity, advance political zealotry, cynically eliminate rivals or competition, exact petty vengeance, or simply indulge in low-risk sadism. As with any other form of vigilantism, cancel culture might be beneficial in any given instance, and yet any society in which it became a ubiquitous and uncontested fact of life would result in a society in which none of us would want to live. Does this mean it is never justified?

The philosopher Karl Popper once briefly described a dilemma that open societies face: if, in the name of tolerance, they tolerate intolerance without limit, then tolerance itself will eventually be destroyed by the intolerant. This has come to be known as the paradox of tolerance. The concept has been widely misused by authoritarians on both the left and right, again stemming from the fact that we no longer have shared definitions of what it means to be intolerant. Popper’s logic, however, remains sound. Freedom in a society is like money in a business — just as one needs to spend money to make money, one needs to spend a tiny amount of freedom to maximize the greatest possible freedom.

A society crushed under the weight of an all-encompassing cancel culture is an unfree society. At the same time, a society that is the real-life version of 4chan is no improvement. The abolition of all standards of decency leaves us with no acceptable mechanism, under any circumstances, to censure members whose behavior, if tolerated, would eventually lead to a different, and far more dangerous form of unfreedom.

No one should be fired for being pro-Palestine. No one should be fired for justifying Hamas acts of terror, or blaming the victims as “settler colonialists” who had it coming, or chanting “glory to our martyrs”, or tearing down a poster from a telephone pole — however reprehensible I find these things. No one should be doxxed who has committed no crimes. No one should be blacklisted for signing a foolish open letter. No one should be the target of cancellation campaigns over private messages, however depraved. But if someone publicly and unrepentantly professes genocidal hatred or textbook anti-Semitism, well, they bought the ticket, now they have to take the ride. That’s where I draw the line, and I see no contradiction with liberal principles.

Scoundrels on All Sides

The discourse surrounding all of this has been, true to form, a circus of bipartisan hypocrisy. On the right, Ron Desantis, Douglas Murray, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and other arch opponents of cancel culture have pulled about-faces on free expression by calling for wholesale deportations and even arrests of anyone supporting Hamas — which they define very broadly. On the other side of the aisle, many leftists are pointing fingers not only at the right-wing hypocrisy on display, but at any free speech advocate who is not as vocally outraged about this new spate of cancellations as they are.

The political right, it’s true, has revealed themselves to be, for about the millionth time, frauds and charlatans whose torches of liberty only cast light onto themselves. They have no principled opposition to cancel culture. They embraced it during the Cold War. They embraced it during the Christian-inspired moral panics of the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s. They embraced it during the War on Terror and the George W. Bush years. Then they opposed it in the 2010s and 2020s only because it was they who found themselves on the receiving end for once. As I wrote two years ago, “The American right doesn’t give a rat’s ass about freedom, liberty, or the marketplace of ideas, and never did. They cherish their freedom and liberty to do and say whatever they want with no consequences.”

For the left to unselfconsciously call anyone else free speech hypocrites, however, is more than a little rich. They have missed the most central point free speech advocates have been warning about for years: if you allow, foster, or contribute to the erosion of free expression for those you dislike, you will end up eroding your own rights to free speech. For years we small-l liberals have cautioned that normalizing the tools of authoritarianism might seem tempting when they’re sitting comfortably in your own hands, but they will eventually be picked up by others. How myopic and delusional must one be to imagine that they will somehow always come out on the winning side of every cancellation campaign?

The writer Oliver Traldi summed it up perfectly when he said, “I think the bigger hypocrites are the people who have attacked us [free speech advocates] for years and now expect us to expend a ton of energy and concern hiding them under our wings.” It’s galling, but we must do it nevertheless. The modern left, just like the modern right, are scoundrels devoid of any principles who cry about civil liberties when they are in a position of weakness and act like authoritarian bullies when they hold power. That fact cannot change our principles. The very left-wing Westerners and right-wing Muslims who spent 15 years pushing for “hate speech” laws and cheering on (while simultaneously denying) cancel culture are now the victims of their own creation. The impulse to revel in their suffering and make hypocrites of ourselves is strong, but it’s also precisely what they would do in our position. The greatest possible refutation of their bankrupt worldviews is to guard even their right to be complete and total jackoffs.

See also: “Hamas’s Useful Idiots”

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