> The right, has for the past decade or so taken a moral high ground with regards to cancelation.

Have you been in a coma for that decade?

▲ PaulHoule 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I first saw a moral panic over ‘cancel culture’ circa 2013 from The Atlantic and the opinion page of the New York Times. (The first because it’s demo is the naive liberal and pearl clutching parents of college students and the second because folks like Brooks and Blow don’t want to be canceled themselves). It was until 2017 or so that conservatives noticed the phenomenon and started to talk about it in The National Review and such.

Ezra Klein, who I generally respect, said he got more crap over

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assa...

than anything else he’s written but I think it was unfortunate that he chose the words because Kirk, among other things, promoted Trump’s lies about the 2000 election, bussed people to the Jan 6 riot, and had a hit list of professors he wanted to punish just like David Horowitz, dad of the Andressen-Horowitz Horowitz. That bit about “prove me wrong” was always disingenuous, it would fool the pearl clutching parents who read The Atlantic and the likes of Ezra Klein. Probably the most harmful thing about illiberal campus leftists is that they allowed illiberal rightists to appear to take the high ground.

▲ kelnos 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Cancel culture has been a thing a lot longer than since 2013. McCarthyism, anyone? Funny how cancellation has historically been wielded by the right, but once the left gets a few (comparatively minor) cancel-jabs in, it's a Real Problem.

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asdff 7 hours ago | parent [-]

The important distinction is that the left cancels by utilizing consumer choice vs the government.

	▲	gsf_emergency_2 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Government the Father, consumer choice the Mother. To push a domestic metaphor (Or are the gender roles switched)

▲ gsf_emergency_2 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Cancel culture" gets piled on by conservatives sometimes because it's such an obvious own goal that used to be a prerogative of the right

I might be off my rocker on this, but!

>prove me wrong

Is such a right-wing to say.

Because it signals that a conservative believes that

  *self-improvement is possible*.

(Their actions tend to suggest otherwise-- Thiel and Wolfram are my go-to not even mala (fide) examples. Lack of faith in learning happens in liberals or self-styled moderates, but we'd call that pessimism ("depression" in the empathetic or clinical). With thinking right wingers it's normally narcissism..Ezra is a pessimist but he carelessly assists the own goals)

Calling out cancel culture today: the youngest kid signals that they give up on self-improvement in favor of acting out, so the elder sibling, who used to be punished for a very similar thing, jumps (gleefully) on it . "Mama look at what she just did!" knowing the parents gonna wring their hands

▲ kulahan 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Man, can you at least elaborate? This kind of comment isn’t what I wanna see HN devolve into.

He’s definitely right with that sentence. Do you not think it’s generally true that the right has been on the defensive with regards to cancel culture, and thus is constantly preaching about how cancelling is wrong?

The few times they’ve gotten to go on the offensive, they play the same game, cancelling whoever it is they’re upset about. It’s horseshoe theory all over again.

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ceejayoz 13 hours ago | parent [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._national_anthem_kneeling_...

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kulahan 13 hours ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

	▲	ceejayoz 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		“Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written.“