In a Shocking Turn of Events, the Right is Using the Left's Cancel Culture Tactics

Who could have foreseen this?

The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT testify before Congress. (Photo credit: Kevin Dietsch via Getty)

The three university presidents who testified before Congress last week — and who are now being pelted with e-dung in our virtual town square — were screwed long before they set foot on Capitol Hill. There probably was a path through the minefield of career-destroying statements laid before them by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, but navigating that path would require having previously shown a commitment to free speech. And, since all three presidents represented schools that have been doing to free speech what Sbarro’s has been doing to Italian cuisine (Harvard and Penn are last and second-to-last in FIRE’s free speech rankings) all they could do was fumble, stammer, and then issue statements clarifying that they do not support genocide. And the first rule of PR is: When you find yourself clarifying your position on genocide, you’ve lost.

The university presidents weren’t wrong, though. I agree with those who have pointed out that statements about genocide are not always threats, and therefore those statements are sometimes protected by university free speech codes. Of course, it’s hard to make that point if you, say, recently allowed a biology professor to be run off campus for committing the unforgivable sin of saying that there are two sexes, as Harvard did. The fact that these schools spent years savaging the concept of free speech put them in a position where they could lose a battle of wits to Elise Stefanik, which truly takes some doing.

What strikes me about this episode is how comprehensively the left’s cancellation playbook has been embraced by the right. Every phase of this episode echoes events from the post-George Floyd racial reckoning; the only change is that the political orientation of the cancelled and cancellers has reversed. In 2022, I wrote about how Ron DeSantis borrowed the left’s tactics to chill speech in Florida; now, we’re seeing a more expansive embrace of cancel culture by the right at the national level. Elise Stefanik is, in a way, extremely woke. Which is a label that the Trump-loving election truther probably wouldn’t love, but she has absolutely embraced the woke left’s tactics.

Tactic 1: Force someone to comment

Bear attacks are uncommon in this country, because most Americans know not to fuck with bears. Bears stay in the woods; we mostly stay in the towns and cities. If a bear mauls you at I-HOP, then that’s cheating and the bears know it.

In much the same way, most of us avoid commenting when passions are inflamed and the odds of our words being misconstrued are high. It’s not the greatest feeling in the world, but as Lincoln said: “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and have a million Twitter morons flood your inbox and try to get you fired.” Freedom of speech includes the freedom to shut the fuck up to avoid being mauled by the internet.

In 2020, activists tried to make saying nothing unviable. “Silence is violence” was the phrase of the moment; anyone not visibly supporting The Revolution — and, in fact, every facet of The Revolution, no matter how idiotic — was assumed to be an opponent. Many universities and companies caved to pressure and issued statements, lest anyone think that Cornell or Miracle Whip might be racist. That set a precedent that led to this week’s petard-hoisting. After all: “Institutional statements stifle individual speech and therefore we will not be commenting on recent events” is a reasonable thing to say if you haven’t spent years shooting your mouth off about every goddamned thing like a drunk guy at Hooters. But universities had done that, so when an issue arose that split the opinions of their students and donors, they were fucked.

Members of Congress can force someone to come to Washington, sit at a table, and publicly answer questions until Congress decides that they’re done. Testimony is a turbocharged version of compelled speech; I have worked in government and cannot emphasize enough how much Congressional testimony is a stacked deck. It’s long. It’s boring. It’s televised. If you push back — if you say “if the Gentlewoman from New York would stop trying to go viral for a goddamned minute and let me answer…” — they will circle the wagons in a bipartisan fashion and chide you for giving sass to Congress. The Members speak one-at-a-time and often don’t even attend the whole hearing, so they’re fresh and ready when you’re in hour five of lawyered-up word-parsing hell. It’s the political equivalent of being jumped by 50 ninjas in a stairwell. Republicans could force these university presidents to talk, and since those presidents happened to be midwit bureaucrats who sewed the seeds of their own downfall long ago, the outcome was never in doubt.

Tactic 2: Round all awfulness up to “genocide”

I’ve written before about how the word “genocide” has been so cheapened by ubiquity that it makes Star Wars movies seem like Stradivarius violins. It’s become de rigueur among lefty morons to call Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide”, even though — no matter what you think of Israel’s actions — they are not genocide.

The chant “from the river to the sea” can reasonably be interpreted as a call for the end of the state of Israel. After all: If Palestine occupies the land from the river to the sea, you can’t exactly put Israel on pontoons and float it in the Mediterranean. But as awful as the statement is, it’s not explicitly genocidal. That’s because it’s vague; it doesn’t say what should happen to people currently living in Israel. And the stupidity of many protesters gives them a plausible defense: Some who use the chant extol the deeply stupid belief that Jews and Palestinians would live peacefully in a single state in which all citizens’ rights are protected. In that usage, the chant isn’t a call for genocide: It’s a call for kindergarten-level solution to the conflict that has been resoundingly rejected by everyone in the region. The defense is basically: “Some people who use the chant aren’t anti-Semites — they’re complete fucking idiots.” And I, for one, find that argument pretty convincing.

Calls for “intifada” are also vague. Intifada is usually — though not always — interpreted as a call for violent resistance. But violent resistance is not the same as genocide. I truly am bothered by our society-wide determination to call everything “genocide” — I think the Oxford University Press should take the word “genocide” away from us and put it in a drawer until we show that we can use it responsibly.

Stefanik rounded both the “river to the sea” chant and chants related to intifada up to “calls for genocide”. In doing so, she collapsed the difference between those ambiguous chants and less-ambiguous phrases that would more clearly constitute a threat. She also brought the word “genocide” into the conversation, which is a tactic people use because the word is a live grenade that will blow you to bits if you don’t handle it with care. The fact that the presidents handled the g-word with the grace of an Italian waiter in a ‘60s screwball comedy just ensured that Stafanik’s stunt would have maximum impact.

Tactic 3: Blur the line between speech and violence

Leftists know that speech is protected, so they frequently argue that the censorship they want isn’t about reducing speech: It’s about reducing real world harm. They deploy Olympic-level mental gymnastics to draw a line connecting, say, someone saying “Oriental” and rivers of blood flowing through our streets. There are stoners listening to Pink Floyd albums whose ability to draw a connection between unrelated things pales in comparison to a leftist trying to explain how speech they disagree with will lead to violence.

I fail to see how a protester chanting “from the river to the sea” at a rally constitutes violence. But Stefanik — having already declared that chant and others to be “calls for genocide” — simply assumed the connection. She declared the chants to be ipso facto bullying and harassment; she was incredulous that the presidents said that there might be cases in which it’s not. Determining when speech crosses the line to harassment can be difficult; having just said that I don’t consider “from the river to the sea” to be violence, I’ll also say that the same words could be violence if scrawled in blood on a Jewish student’s door. Context matters. Opponents of speech seek to eliminate context — they argue that speech they don’t like is violence, no ifs, ands, or buts. It’s why any time a dictator jails a journalist anywhere in the world, they say “He was, uh…inciting violence. Yeah, that’s the ticket.”

Tactic 4: Remove context through a tightly edited viral video

Viral videos are probably the single worst way to learn about the world; the only news sources that rival them for inaccuracy are drunk relatives and guys who give speeches on the subway. Editing videos in misleading ways has become an artform — the videos frequently remove context that might change how we think about what we saw. David After Dentist would be a very different video if it turned out that David had been freebasing heroin just before he got in the car.

The Elise Stefanik viral video exists in a three and 1/2 minute version and what you might call a five and 1/2 minute “director’s cut”. The full hearing was more than five hours long. The viral video left many people with the impression that the presidents were squishy on anti-Semitism and genocide; in the full hearing, they condemned those things in clear language.¹ Most of the hearing was about what, exactly, the universities’ rules are and how those rules are applied. The only truthful answer to those questions is “it’s complicated”, but things seem uncomplicated in Stefanik’s video: We just see three hoity-toity academics failing to condemn genocide. Of course, it’s unlikely that any of the three are actually anti-Semitic or soft on genocide, and their personal views aren’t even the problem: The problem is that their schools have been gung-ho about shutting down right-wing speech and are acting very differently now that controversial speech is coming from the left. But it’s possible to cut together a video in which the presidents seem like Diet Nazis, which once again demonstrates social media’s uncanny ability to show people in the worst possible light.

Tactic 5: Ramp up social and financial pressure

It’s impossible to keep track of all the times when a shitstorm of social and financial pressure rained down on someone for a perceived sin. Luckily, someone is keeping track: FIRE keeps databases of campus speakers who have been disinvited and academics who have gotten into trouble. I wish they also kept a database of companies who publicly shit their pants trying to put out a PR fire, because those cases are the funniest and most transparently meaningless. History has made it clear that companies will denounce Nazis, become Nazis, bomb Nazis, or arm Nazis depending on which course of action will allow them to sell the most stuff, and it’s utterly ridiculous that we expect them to express moral beliefs.

The standard left-wing crusader position on the phenomenon of extreme social and (sometimes) financial pressure is: 1) It’s not happening, and 2) It’s good that it’s happening. This notion can be found in things like the famous cartoon that floods social media whenever someone gets raked over the coals for a minor infraction — all denunciations are excused as “just showing some asshole the door”. The question of whether the pressure being exerted is fair or good isn’t really grappled with.

The university presidents have become conservative media superstars, a status you can only achieve by being a liberal doofus, a right-wing blowhard, or a pretty blonde lady with B+ teleprompter reading skills. One president has already resigned, and the other two are under intense pressure to do the same. Big-time donors are withdrawing their money, which has reduced Harvard’s endowment from “more money than God” to a mere “twice the GDP of the Milky Way”. Representative Stefanik cheered Elizabeth Magill’s resignation by tweeting “One down. Two to go.” Cancellation campaigns of this sort are sometimes so effective that the infraction barely matters; even people who think you did nothing wrong will push you out just to placate the mob. Claudine Gay might yet get booted from Harvard, in which case she’ll probably trace the steps of everyone who gets rejected by Harvard and end up at Tufts.

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Cancel culture is a set of a tactics that can be used to bludgeon your political opponents. It’s enabled by modern media and is especially effective during emotionally charged moments. We’re in a cycle in which the left and the right embrace these tactics at different times in an attempt to get the upper hand. Our politics have become the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode where the gang springs interventions on each other just so they can call each other assholes.

The only way out of this cycle is to have principles that apply in all cases. Regardless of where one stands on the political spectrum, it should be possible to affirm things like:

• Not all bad things are genocide;

• Not all odious speech is violence;

• We should know that viral videos often omit context; and

• Social and financial pressure should be proportionate to the offense.

Anyone who wants to be protected by these principles should espouse them regardless of the political valence of any particular instance. In fact, it’s especially important to cite principles to restrain “your side”, because calls for the “other side” to follow principles just come across as partisan whinging. You can’t piss all over a principle today and then expect it to protect you tomorrow, as three university presidents recently found out.

I can’t believe that some on the left didn’t see this coming. Of course the shoe would eventually be on the other foot — the shoe is always eventually on the other foot. Last week, Elise Stefanik laced up that proverbial shoe and lodged it about a foot deep in Elizabeth Magill’s ass. University presidents who don’t want to suffer the same fate should probably re-commit to principles that have eroded in recent years.

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1. Harvard President Claudine Gay spoke of “eradicating” anti-Semitism at Harvard and called calls for genocide “abhorrent”. Penn President (now former President) Elizabeth Magill called anti-Semitism “shameful” and spoke of a “responsibility” to fight it. MIT President Sally Kornbluth denounced anti-Semitism and called it “disturbing”.