Conservatives are attacking so called "cancel culture" because they want to normalize racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. by drawing attention to isolated instances where the efforts to undo such bigotries were perhaps not perfect. Don't fall for the bait.

You'll note that no one has been fired or censured for calling for lower marginal tax rates, fewer environmental regulations, or opposing the Iran nuclear deal, etc. It's not about "cancelling" conservatives, it's about how much open and proud bigotry we'll accept.

This is all that needed to be said about the Dr. Seuss story from yesterday. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/02/972970871/looking-again-at-a-doctors-old-rhymes-seuss-works-havent-kept-up-with-the-times

"Geisel, who was tormented as a child for being German during World War I, didn't want any kid to feel bullied. As he grew to reflect on the racism in his books, it would have been consistent for Dr. Seuss to ask Are there some things that just need to be retired?"

"Canceling" old movies or books wasn't so much of an issue before the interwebs because IT WAS VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO ACCESS OLD MOVIES and you had to trudge to the library to find old books. We've always been in the business of retiring old and obsolete books.

The "Spread the Word to end the Word" campaign against "the R-word" was in 2009. It was very successful in shifting the way (at least some) people thought and talked about people with disabilities. What was the cost of cancelling the R-word? Seriously, what did it cost anyone?

Pay attention to what precise sorts of expressions the opponents of so-called "cancel culture" seek to protect and thereby normalize, and what ideas they (in other moments) decry as "unpatriotic" or "un-American." https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1366988147897159681?s=20

"Cancel culture" is what politics looks like when your party has few policy proposals that voters like, but has discovered that reactionary identity politics works well to mobilize a large coalition of voters who are white, male, and/or straight.

Movements of marginalized people have ALWAYS been reframed by conservatives as totalitarian efforts to deprive YOU of YOUR FREEDOM! That's how slaveholders talked about abolitionists, how segregationists talked about the civil rights movement.

This is where the whole "gay agenda" talking point came from. "It's not just gay people demanding to be treated as equals, 'they' want to turn the whole world gay!!!"

This same dynamic is at work with bathroom policies for gender non-conforming students. Those kids are just asking for equal access to educational opportunities, but it gets turned into a sinister plot about boys wanting to sexually assault girls.

The "cancel culture" script is the same old reactionary, "standing athwart history yelling stop" script that the American right has been using for decades (if not longer) to convince ordinary voters that the sky is falling, we're going down the slippery slope to the gulag, etc.

Anyway, have there been some hiring/firing decisions that were maybe misguided? Sure. Like a couple dozen over the past few years maybe. In the meantime, can we talk for a second about the hundreds of thousands of workers have been harassed by their racist or sexist bosses?

Conservatives want you to believe that working to undo racism is more dangerous than racism. They want you to believe that working to undo sexism is worse than sexism. They want you to believe that working to undo homophobia is worse than homophobia. They're wrong.

They want you to believe that a handful of anecdotes about firings add up to a systemic and sinister "cancel culture" that threatens our society, meanwhile they want you to ignore 400 years of evidence attesting to the very real systemic dynamics of racism and sexism.

Even worse, they want you to believe that any coordinated efforts to undo centuries of structural and systemic inequality pose THE REAL threats to freedom that we need to fight against.

As I was saying. (h/t @nlsegall) https://twitter.com/justinhorowitz_/status/1367132702089052160