This article ignores the core issue with cancel culture: the difference between opinion and incitement. Boycotts are not free speech. They may be legitimate actions, but they are actions. So calls for boycotts or firings or other consequences are logically akin to “Lock her up” and “kill the ni****s.” They are performatives, in the pre-SJW (pre-pejorative) sense of the word. Incitement is not speech. Incitement is action. Of course, so is persuasion, so the line between opinion and incitement is not bright. But the line is real enough to allow us to say that “Reject his views” and “Get him fired” are on opposite sides of it.

Because the article is not about speech as action, it wanders down roads that have nothing to do with cancel culture. Squelching free speech is a sign of insecurity, and there is plenty of insecurity to go around on ends of the political spectrum. Yes, the right does it and the left does it, but comparing the two is a diversion. I mean seriously, do we care whether the left is “entirely” to blame for cancel culture? And what do “empty gestures and statements about the trampling of free speech” look like, i.e., what makes them “empty”? IMHO, these are facile nonsense memes — things that sound like they are saying something but aren’t — seemingly relevant because the only question worth answering hasn’t been asked.

Cancel culture is about punishment for speech, justified by the very fact that said speech is itself not “false,” but “hurtful.” Cancel-worthy utterances are “microaggressions” — acts of aggression — deserving acts of retribution, viz., calls for cancellation. This particular trope — insensitivity as aggression — is unique to the left, which is why “cancel culture” is a feature of the left’s political brand, no matter what the right has done regarding “free speech” in the past. One can see the subtle game afoot here, cancel culture’s immunization to its greatest flaw. To treat calls for cancellation as actions is to admit that speech is action, and to admit that speech is action is to admit that certain speech deserves cancellation.

Reasonable people can disagree as to where the line between opinion and action lies. But so can unreasonable people, which is really what this fuss is about. The professionally aggrieved left has become totalitarian and unreasonable in its efforts to thwart the law of diminishing returns. The time has come to focus on creating hope in the Black community, but the SJW army is equipped only to crush the privilege of the White Community. Thereby hangs another essay for another time.