> but today it is all about getting scalps,
You say "today" as if it's ever been any different. Has it?
You say "today" as if it's ever been any different. Has it?
Do you think you'd keep your job after saying something anti-Christian in the 1950s? Look at what happened to Sinead O'Connor in the early 90s after she spoke out against child abuse in the Catholic church.
Maybe the biggest difference is that now we write when we communicate with peers, so there's evidence of our speech. I'm not convinced the mechanism behind cancel culture itself is new at all.
I don't think this is an apt comparison at all.
1. Sinead O'Connor is a celebrity, celebrities have always had more scrutiny. It doesn't seem comparable to the random employees getting fired / random HS students losing their college offers that are happening today.
2. She did not just speak out against child abuse, she held up a photo of the pope on national TV while singing "evil", and then tore it up. This was obviously an act intended to be very public and very controversial.
3. What actually happened to her other than some angry editorials? Were her performances canceled by venues?
I'm not familiar with the case of celebrities or Sinead O'Connor specifically, but no celebrity in my lifetime before the advent of this new wave of cancel culture has been completely cancelled the way they are today (even Michael Jackson, who had serious allegations of child molestation, had an O2 concert scheduled shortly before his death).
Even for the average person, if you lost your job due to anti-mob comments in the 50s that didn't bar you from ever finding a job again (which is the case for some today), and this is without even touching on the way some people have had their entire twitter history crawled and pulled apart from a time when they were generally very different people.
As I said, this is probably a function of social media in the modern era more than anything else.
But they have, this is the very nature of the infamous Hollywood blacklist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
Have you ever read "Time of the Toad" by Trumbo?
I think people would be blacklisted in exactly the same way in the 50s; this is all fairly well documented in relevant writings from the period.
I think we're in agreement that social media and specifically giving people access to publishing has changed the duration and discoverability of the speech.
I'd definitely be interested to see comparisons that are more like-for-like though, if they exist. I'm not familiar with "Time of the Toad", although from a brief look it seems to also deal with Cold War era issues? Again, this isn't a like-for-like comparison.
I realize that you didn't mean this statement the way I am reading it, but I'm having a hard time not reading this as a reference to the time when the minority was less vocal and knew its place.