Noam Chomsky has embarrassed himself here by signing his name along with nazi apologists and bigots like Bari Weiss and Rowling. https://twitter.com/Mediaite/status/1280544057538818048

Chomsky has joined the ranks of far-right cranks like Boghossian and his academic fraud gang, Claire Lehmann, and the Evo-psych pseudoscientists. Sad to see.

Hopefully Chomsky was ignorant about the social context here, and will reconsider.

TFW you really, really don't understand the argument.

https://twitter.com/O03180394/status/1280652229284749312?s=19

It's really funny when these nazi supporting types (This one follows a bunch of nazi accounts made to lie about protestors and the left) are really invested in insisting that other people using their free speech to criticize people is censorship. https://twitter.com/topkek08482798/status/1280685885202325509?s=19

Why are these people trying to cancel me if they're against cancel culture anyway? If strongly criticizing someone online is canceling, they're literally doing it to me right now. It's censorious, apparently.

The funniest part is that the online right has been telling lies to try to get me "canceled" for years now, on top of just outright yelling at me and misrepresenting my positions.

And yet I don't think "cancel culture" is a real thing. It's just people criticizing others.

Are there some lefties who behave badly and weaponize callouts over little to nothing? Yes, there are. But I don't think they're uniquely a left problem. It's a people problem.

Not only that, the vast majority of the left doesn't do that, and those that do, don't have power.

For the record, i dont generally want to "cancel" most people, especially not over bad takes.

I would generally always rather they listen to criticism and clarify, elaborate, or walk back the thing that drew the criticism. That's kind of the goal of criticism.

The only time I at all see the argument for "canceling" is for cases in which someone is actively using their position of authority to victimize others, or has committed a literal crime. This doesn't describe Chomsky in any way.

The kind of person this DOES describe, for instance is Harvey Weinstein.

The other thing that makes this letter from Harper's absolute bullshit is that many of the people who signed it have a history trying to get people they disagree with fired, either by using threats of litigation, or emails to other people's bosses.

Cancel culture for me, but not for thee!

Bari Weiss, Jesse Singal, and JK Rowling all fall into this category, that I know off the top of my head.

There's likely others.

Jordan Peterson was famously a critic of "cancel culture," and he was trying to make a "registry" of lefty professors that was intended to discredit them and be used to spam their universities with to fire them for being dangerous "cultural Marxists"

"Cancel culture" had nothing to do with free speech. The censorious group is the people who want to STOP "cancel culture", because their entire goal is to silence anyone who might dare try to criticize a powerful person.