Cancel Culture Quotes

“People who are actually" cancelled "don't get their thoughts published and amplified in major outlets.... The term" cancel culture "comes from entitlement—as though the person complaining has the right to a large, captive audience, & one is a victim if people choose to tune them out. Odds are you're not actually cancelled, you're just being challenged, held accountable, or unliked.
― Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”
― Emily J.M. Knox, Foundations of Intellectual Freedom

“Humans are antifragile; exposure to discomfort and uncertainty -physical, emotional and intellectual- is necessary.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“I can't say anything though. Even if it’s true I’d sound like a prick. Believe that. How can we even— Christ! That’s the problem with people living however they want. When anything goes, reason is no longer credible. You can’t point out trouble. If the truth is offered, and they don’t want it, they get to say the truth is a lie. Autonomy is now prioritized over understanding.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“Canceling a differing opinion evidences the ability of that opinion to defend what you cannot.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“In politics, the near future is likely to be closer to George Orwell’s 1984 than to Brave New World.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience

“I’m always talking about the internet and what’s happening now, so cancel culture is something I’m interested in as a phenomenon, but I don’t want it to come across like I’m butt-hurt about it because, honestly, I don’t really care. Because what is cancelling? People start a social media account and once they get more than 300 followers they can’t see their audience as anything but an audience, something to be performed to — which is why you get the weird thing of your mate who works in a brewery talking on Facebook like he’s talking to a packed convention centre. When you’re performing to an audience, the only human inclination is to be the benevolent protagonist. You’d never assume the role of the antagonist — that’s why trolls exist with anonymity. People who actually put themselves out there, online, their role is to be the good guy. We’re not aware of the solipsism of this behaviour because we’re all doing it. So once a week, culture generates a baddie so all the good guys can go: ‘Look how good I am in opposition to how bad he is.’ And the reason we forget about whatever morally [dubious] thing that person has done a week later is because we don’t care. It’s all literally a performance. There’s a purposeful removal of context in order to seem virtuous that happens so constantly that people can’t even be arsed.”
― Matty Healy

“Most of us who champion free speech also believe in the idea of etiquette and the social contract. We simply do not believe that such parameters should be legally enforced by censorship or compelled speech diktats.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Collective guilt, the damaging impact of cultural appropriation, our servility to amorphous power structures, the primacy of identity politics; all of these concepts and more are now uncritically accepted by many of those in positions of authority. When politicians use phrases such as 'white privilege' and 'systemic racism', for instance, they are deploying the language of Critical Race Theory without necessarily understanding the full implications of the ideas behind the buzzwords. They are the unsuspecting agents of applied postmodernism.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“That racism still exists is taken as evidence of the failure of the liberal project, but of course nobody has made the case that it has been eradicated. If a disease is cured but a few symptoms linger, one does not claim that the treatment was ineffective. Social liberalism is an ongoing process because it recognizes the imperfectability of human nature.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Simply to make the accusation is to prove it. To hear the allegation is to believe it. No motive for the perpetrator is necessary, no logic or rationale is required. Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic. Why did Coleman Silk do this? Because he is an x, because he is a y, because he is both. First a racist and now a misogynist. It is too late in the century to call him a Communist, though that is the way it used to be done. A misogynistic act committed by a man who already proved himself capable of a vicious racist comment at the expense of a vulnerable student. That explains everything. That and the craziness.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“This is not a debate about just anything', he said 'but about sanity itself'.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Manufacturing a case of victimhood allows the aggrieved to elicit sympathy or even to mobilize third parties such as legal authorities against their enemies. Since a victimhood culture is one where this status is most valuable, we should expect it to be especially prone to false claims of victimization.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“There are different kinds of false accusations. In some cases, the accusers might genuinely believe what they say. People accused of witchcraft are innocent, but those who condemn them might genuinely believe that they are witches. In other cases, the accuser kwnos the accusation is false. Such cases can happen because the accuser and accused were embroiled in a conflict over something that third parties would not treat as a matter for intervention.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“There are different kinds of false accusations. In some cases, the accusers might genuinely believe what they say. People accused of witchcraft are innocent, but those who condemn them might genuinely believe that they are witches. In other cases, the accuser knows the accusation is false. Such cases can happen because the accuser and accused were embroiled in a conflict over something that third parties would not treat as a matter for intervention.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“It is those who cannot defend their argument who seek to silence those who can.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The cancel culture is born of the inability of an opinion to withstand the scrutiny of thoughtful debate. And as such, this statement is likely to be canceled.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“You can’t ‘cancel’ courage.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“A rant is the attempt to overcome an opposing position through anger because the individual hasn’t been able to defeat it through fact. Therefore, to engage in a rant is to admit defeat.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I am saddened by those who ride the merry-go-round of circular arguments, repeatedly passing me by again and again not because they have a superior argument, but because I didn’t get on.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Nel mondo-palcoscenico di oggi spesso sapere quali termini ed espressioni linguistiche preferire, e renderlo la consuetudine fine a sé stessa di una clava da tirare in testa al primo reo che passa, equivale in tutto e per tutto al saper stare a tavola durante un inaccessibile banchetto dell’altissima borghesia, in cui al posto dell’argenteria di cui dimostrarsi avvezzi all’uso ci sono lessici impiegati da nicchie privilegiate che vanno dalle università della Ivy League agli uffici marketing delle grandi corporation.”
― Davide Piacenza, La correzione del mondo. Cancel culture, politicamente corretto e i nuovi fantasmi della società frammentata

“We need to be looking after young men a bit better before we start demonising them.”
― Matty Healy

“We must remember that attacks from without will always pale in comparison to those from within. And as we reflect on 911, we would be wise to consider the fact that the largest threat to our nation today is less the former and more the latter.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Whereas democracy is founded on the negotiation of diverging viewpoints, ideology is sustained through intolerance of dissent. You are, as the saying has it, either with us or against us. This is the essence of bigotry.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“The ongoing culture war, whose existence if often denied by its chief antagonists, is no longer something that any of us can afford to ignore. Culture warriors have always been small in number, but lately, they have inveigled their way into positions of power and influence. As a result, the sphere of combat has extended into our homes, our schools, our places of work. Families, friendships and other relationships have been ruined. Many of us would prefer not to participate, but weapons have been forced into our hands. Culture warriors threaten to divide us even as they claim to be healing division. They couch their regressive ideas in progressive terminology, and those who attempt to slow their momentum are quickly subdued.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Where the New Left promoted the politics of unity, today’s intersectional reactionaries promote the politics of division.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“For the new puritans, nothing need be explained or rationalized, because objective truth has become subordinated to -lived experience-. Where Marx saw society as an ongoing competition for resources and power between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (a development from Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic), the high priests of Critical Social Justice see society as stratified according to identity politics.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“The belief of the apparatchiks of Critical Social Justice - that all our problems will magically disappear once we outlaw certain points of view or words that cause 'harm' - is a utopian delusion.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“To demand of your opponent what you are not willing to demand of yourself evidences the cowardice of both your character and your cause.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Infantilising yourself can often seem like a plea for diminished responsibility. Most of us will have encountered someone who, when criticised for behaving badly, appeals to their own vulnerability as a way of letting themselves off the hook. No matter what they do or the harm they cause, it’s never fair to criticise them, because there’s always some reason – often framed through therapy jargon or the language of social justice – why it isn’t their fault. Childishness grants them a perpetual innocence; they are constitutionally incapable of being in the wrong.

But we will never make the world better if we act like this. Thinking of yourself as a smol bean baby is a way of tapping out and expecting other people to fight on your behalf. It also makes you a more pliant consumer. Social media is awash with the idea that ‘it’s valid not to be productive’, as though productivity were the only manifestation of capitalism and streaming Disney+ all day is a form of resistance. It’s much rarer to encounter the idea that we have a responsibility about what we consume, or that satisfying our own desires whenever we want is not always a good thing: “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” has morphed into “there is no unethical consumption under capitalism”.”
― James Greig

“Mistakes abound when groupthink goes unchallenged.”
― Greg Lukianoff, The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There Is a Solution