That’s really the meat of the matter, isn’t it? What consequences do they actually face? Alex Jones is still a millionaire with a huge audience, even after a massive and sustained deplatforming initiative. As @thomdunn mentions:
In other words, people who already faced oppression, both in real, actual life and in the made-up glamour of social and professional online media. This is what being “cancelled” actually looks like:
Point taken. But what real power does somebody like Greil Marcus, or for that matter Noam Chomsky, have? They’re academics. Most people ignore them, and we are all free to.
Wynton Marsalis – what power is he protecting? He has been a frequent champion of the voices of marginalized and ignored African Americans. You can’t lump him in with JKR.
I respect a lot of the signatories, too. I’ve worked with a few of them briefly. And to be clear, I’m not one who’s necessarily against elites or experts in the populist sense. But I also understand that this letter is almost a knee-jerk reaction from those who’ve been so steeped in privilege for decades (not a lot of people under age 55 on that list) that they’re blind to it – to the extent that some of them signed the letter without really reading it or considering the motives of other signatories.
The Internet (not just social media) has democratised public discourse for good and for ill, and in the process reduced these signatories’ privilege. The letter comes out of this place:
They both have a lot of cultural capital amongst American intellectuals, either series as allies or enemies. Marcus is still an influential music critic and tastemaker who’s listened to by the industry.
He lumped himself in with her, not as a TERF but as a member of a clubby little group whose primary concern is protecting their privilege (including Rowling’s to be a bigot).
Influence of thought. That’s pretty much what it means to be a famous academic.
Chomsky has Numerous NYT bestsellers and over 200k followers. Marcus has access to one of the largest print and online publications on the planet. Compared to say, some actually disenfranchised person expressing concern on twitter to their 200 followers, I’d say he has quite a lot of power. Sure, it’s not the nuclear football, but most power isn’t that concrete.
But that’s exactly the point; he lumped himself in with JKR. And at a moment when her toxic views were on megablast culturally. To think that walking through dogshit won’t make you track it all over the house is ignorant, at best.
ETA: @gracchus and @Brainspore beat me to it. Agreed!
That story only tells the start of the problems too. You survived an murder attempt or violent assault? Prepare for a lifetime of PTSD, people doubting your story, telling you that it wouldn’t have happened if you had “stayed” cis or going for the trans panic defence on the attackers behalf.
Absolutely. Plus all of the LGBTQAI+ victims of domestic assault who never report, the assaults that are intentionally or ignorantly misclassified, the psychological and emotional abuse that has no category or mechanism for reporting and on and on and on.
This is a “let them eat cake” letter. It is the cultural aristocracy telling the peasants and unwashed masses that don’t have a privileged platform themselves and are expressing discontent, to back off and stop bugging them.
Appreciate all the informed perspectives on this thread, especially from @gracchus, @cannibalpeas, and @Brainspore. You’ve definitely broadened my thinking about the issue.
I definitely was not dismissing the issue of every signee’s accountability for knowing the context of the letter they signed, and the awful views of fellow signees. I just felt like, in general, people have assigned more power to this group of people than some of them actually possess. Rethinking that assumption now.
I think it is worth clarifying how this letter came about.
Multiple signatories made it clear they weren’t told who else was signing the letter. They were asked by someone they trusted to add their name, and then found out when it was released who was on it.
Was this naive? Absolutely. I once worked in the office of a vaguely well known guy and every six months or so a request came in for an authgraphed photo. He had a strict rule that he only personalized photos for people he knew. He said it was because when some famous shooter (Mark David Chapman? Squeaky Fromme? John Hinkley? I forget now) was arrested, in their stuff the police found a warmly personalized autographed photo from Betty Ford. Not that she probably ever autographed it herself, but it was embarassing.
Anyway, it seems very clear that Williams and his confidants like Bari Weiss set out to write a letter that seemed inoffensive on its face, and then keep a lot of signatories in the dark about who was behind it and who else was signing. It was a pretty cynical set up, and Williams’s evasiveness about how it happened makes this clear. His ongoing nastiness and bad faith – the weird South of France episode – make it clear he had some cheesy plan that isn’t rolling out exactly the way he wanted.
They added the vague Trump reference when they realized they needed cover to get more liberal signers. They probably kept Greenwald off because they didn’t think he’d keep his mouth shut. The timing with Bari Weiss’s nutty resignation letter and her suggestion that she has big new plan certainly sounds like it’s a pretty cynical move to launch a new project. We’ll see.
I know a certain number of signatories were unhappy they signed it because they didn’t know who else was signing it at the time, and that context changes the meaning. (And if they had asked who else had signed it, I don’t know they would have gotten an answer.)
Whether you realize it or not, I think you actually hit the nail on the head here. Some signatories, like Chomsky, had no context other than “Do you agree that abhorrent speech must also be protected to ensure Free Speech Rights for everyone?” It’s a deliberate vague platitude that gestures towards some moral prominence without actually offering anything of substance. People have always kept their opinions to themselves for fear of ostracizing themselves; the only problem now is who is that the ostracization is publicized on social media and threatening people who had protected clout under the status quo. And that’s the power structure they all have in common: the status quo.
Not in the context of this story about Greenwald (who isn’t one of my favourite people, either). @keithe’s scenario described above seems increasingly more plausible, especially combined with @thomdunn’s analysis. In addition to privilege-blindness amongst the letter’s signatories it now looks like there’s a lot of bad faith on the part of Williams and his coterie in its composition.
Public intellectualism. It’s soft power.
Anyone who signed THE LETTER should be sharply quizzed about why they felt it was so important to stick up for TERFs and racists.
Also too: Glenn Greenwald is straight trash. Got his start defending Nazis, and his magazine is only notable for getting a Trump critic thrown in jail for giving Glenn a sad.
Although public discourse has always been toxic, it has also always been civil. I gain as much researching and formulating my responses as you do with yours.
It’s where we choose to put our energy that determines the outcome. If we invest in toxic cesspools like Twitter, we shouldn’t be the least bit surprised that we come away with chemical burns. If we engage in well-moderated forums with genuine discussion like BBS, we get civility, find common ground and help shift each others’ perspective. I won’t even begin to pretend I come to my perspective alone. It is heavily influenced by the good writers, moderators and community members. The links they post, the writers and thinkers they highlight and the way they illuminate with context and perspective is extremely rare, but also extremely valuable.
At some point, I’d love for the “anti-cancel” crowd to specify just how much attention I’m required to give to ideas I already don’t agree with, and how much money I need to give to people I don’t want to financially support.
And, importantly, are the two things exchangeable? Can I just write a check to Glenn Greenwald (Bari Weiss, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Cotton, J.K. Rowling, Ted Nugent, Diamond and Silk, Louis C.K., Bill O’Reilly, Orson Scott Card, Ted Rall, Bill Cosby, etc.) or must I actually consume their stuff directly into my brain in order to avoid the shame of being a nasty little close-minded illiberal fascist?
And if I must diligently read their stuff, am I required to hold a formal Oxford Debate in my head each time to re-evaluate my (sheltered, bubbled, immature) belief system? Let’s say I carefully, judiciously peruse Tom Cotton’s argument that United States military needs to invade the United States, and find it wanting. How long does that last for until I must—in order not to be an evil canceller—revisit the idea when the next person proposes it? A month, a week, five minutes?
Finally, is there a quota of ideas I don’t agree with that I must nevertheless agree with? This has been heavily implied by all the anti-cancel stuff so let’s have it out in the open. I mean, if I read every word Bari Weiss writes and thank her and ask her for another, but somehow I’m not convinced, then was I really giving her a fair shake? Or was I just going through the motions but remaining a secret canceller all along, like the smug ignorant soy-boy Oberlin alum I presumably am?
We really need some benchmarks here.
Its the forced evolution of, non-ironically, the ideological strategy used by christians & right wingers in their fight against the teaching evolution in schools and/or discussions of climate change. The strategy, made infamous by the wingnut Discovery Institute, aims to undermine productive discourse by demanding that educators (specifically) and public figures (generally) “teach the controversy”. The Discovery Institute even named this approach, calling it “The Wedge Strategy”.
Of course, there is no “controversy”. Evolution is settled science. Climate change is settled science. The Earth is round is settled science. The objective is to use such unsubstantiated claims to force - or “Wedge” open - opportunities to pretext and thereby give footing to ideological rhetoric in circumstances where established fact reigns.
In this instance, the letters’ complainants are inventing - from whole cloth - a counter-narrative of “controversy” as a wedge to divert critical focus away from their own insensitive, disingenuous and/or hostile speech acts. Weiss et al. have learned - and subsequently practiced - that intentionally harrassing or provocative speech can be masked by recursively referring to “controvery” the using that rhetorical move to claim injury where none exists.
The injury these well-compensated petulant children suffer from is the Brandeis remedy where false speech is countered vy more speech. Its the abundace of speech they fear. Abundance is a twin threat to those holding priviliged pisitions in the “speech” market. Abundance necessarily means more, a whole lot more which, in market terms, is the antithesis of scarcity and therefore high “prices” (read: income). In democratic terms, abundance denotes greater participation - more voices being an inherent good and the structural goal of liberal societies. Those claiming to be “injured” by a turn to an abundance of speech are laboring to shift the discourse from topics of societal well-being to individuated grievances centered on the complaintants’ sense of loss of market validation and reward in an attempt to defend not their views or ability to express them but their standing in a marketplace where speech or access to the platforms facilitating free speech were scarce.
Do not be fooled. They are terrified by the fact of abundant free speech as that fact alone impeaches them as elites, as arbiters of the public discourse and - as a natural market function - diminishes their earning power in the market for free soeech. It is the latter outcome that frightens them the most!
are you trying to be sarcastic?
signing an anodyne letter, with or without knowledge of the other signatories contains almost as much discourse as the blandest of tweets, so perhaps that’s enough for cancel culture to work its magic.
This is what really burns me. Some of these signatories are people I deeply admire and often because of their thoughtful, well-researched ideas and their ability to convey them in a broadened perspective. To think that they just threw their names at something willy-nilly is hard to stomach. Believable, but kind of unbelievable.
I do understand that there was deceit involved, but would any one of these approve a manuscript before seeing the final publication draft?
