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Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to point out that McCarthy was a fierce right-winger, and the "punish people for wrongthink" mentality has been almost exclusively a right-wing thing until very recently. "Cancel culture" is what right-wingers complain about when they've realized left-wingers have rifled through their rhetorical toolbox. Personally, I don't think "only we're allowed to cancel people" is a good enough reason to denounce this article.

A better argument would be that Scott isn't the right-winger the article writer thinks they are, and that the article is poorly researched. At worst, I'd say he's probably a little too dismissive of privilege narratives, but that doesn't make him a white supremacist or a neo-fascist. Of course, that doesn't make an article, and we gotta keep the content grill sizzling, so here's some tenuous connections to make an interesting story to meet quotas.

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I'm going to point out that McCarthy was a fierce right-winger, and the "punish people for wrongthink" mentality has been almost exclusively a right-wing thing until very recently

Saying that both sides have engaged in it does not make it the correct thing to do. It's a disgusting thing for people to engage in, regardless of the political affiliation of the people doing it. That said, I have seen countless examples of cancel culture in action coming from the left, and comparatively few from the right. Even Obama has decried the left's zealousness to cancel people [1]. When Obama calls you too woke, you're probably too woke.

As to the rest of your response, I was using the general idea of mccarthyism. The dictionary defines it as "a campaign or practice that endorses the use of unfair allegations and investigations". I think that definition squarely fits what happened here.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-ca...

McCarthy was fiercely anti-communist, but so were most other people at that time. He became famous for alleging large scale infiltration of the US government by communist agents. He couldn't prove it, there are some historians who believe McCarthy was largely correct about the scale of the Soviet activity in the US government. They argue he was effectively 'cancelled' as a consequence of being dangerously correct, and that declassified decrypts released by the NSA decades later prove it. An example of this argument is:

https://www.amazon.com/Blacklisted-History-Senator-McCarthy-...

Another is:

https://archive.org/details/josephmccarthyre00herm/page/5/mo...

A perhaps more accessible writeup in the Washington Post from 1996:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1996/04/14/w...

"Cancel culture" is what right-wingers complain about when they've realized left-wingers have rifled through their rhetorical toolbox

Can you give some examples. At least from the perspective of a British person, I cannot recall right wing people ever engaging in "cancel culture" during my life time. Are you thinking of religious people in the USA?

I'm old enough to remember American Republicans cancelling French Fries and country singers because of the Iraq war.

Then you're definitely old enough to remember them burning nikes and keurigs. How about their hatred of Starbucks for being inclusive with holiday greetings?

French fries are not people or ideas, are they?

The "fries" were not what were being canceled; the French were.

Nobody tried to "cancel" the French population of America, did they? That's really reaching.

This had absolutely nothing to do with the French population of North America. I'd ask if you were trying to have a good faith discussion, but the fact that you pretended the original comment was actually talking about cancelling potatoes answers that.

McCarthy was exactly the example of right-wing cancel culture I was going to use. It's extremely prominent; his explicit goal was to ruin the careers of people too left-wing for him, and it was successful for at least a time. Him being correct about there being lots of left-wingers around doesn't mean he isn't engaging in cancel culture. Most of the things left-wingers bring up to cancel people are entirely factual.

For the record, the rest of my examples here are going to be extremely Amerocentric, too. I'm sure if I spent an hour I could find an example of Tories doing something cancel-y, but I'm more familiar with American politics. So you could argue that Tories specifically haven't cancelled anyone, but I'm not so sure that's the case. Cancelling is not "left wingers taking down people who aren't as left wing as them", it's what happens when the whole of society decides to disapprove of someone due to their actions. Everybody has some kind of button to press, some ideology they will find distasteful enough as to refuse to associate with people who believe in it.

A good example today of right-wing cancel culture would be the far-right primarying moderate Republicans. If you are a Republican politician and you don't think Donald Trump should forcibly lead a military coup to retake America, your days in politics are limited. The party was lost to right-wing radicals decades ago, and they don't tolerate anyone outside their little black hole on the political compass. Hell, state GOP branches are already censuring the seven or so Republicans that voted to convict Trump. The only difference is that the cancelling here is limited to inter-party struggles rather than breaking out into the wider culture.

There's also that time right-wingers tricked Disney into firing James Gunn over vile things he tweeted decades ago. Cancel culture doesn't need to be ideologically consistent. We usually think of it as left-wingers getting angry about right-wingers and purging them; but it can also be right-wingers getting angry about left-wingers, and then making up a story to sick their lefty friends on them. All you need for cancel culture is someone who wants someone else socially gone, and another group of people willing to disassociate with certain ideologies.

Furthermore, to actually fight cancel culture, you either need to compromise on free speech and prohibit people from revealing someone's political ideology; or you need to compromise on freedom of association and make it illegal to disassociate from someone over their political ideology. I'm not sure either of those changes are actually beneficial.

There's also that time right-wingers tricked Disney into firing James Gunn over vile things he tweeted decades ago.

Super curious what the “trick” is that you’re referring to. My understanding is that he did indeed write these things and publish them on his Twitter feed. Simply pointing that out isn’t a “trick,” unless I have missed something about the story.

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