Here is the deal about cancel culture, you only get canceled by two types of people:
1. The people who already hate you
2. The people who only liked you because of the power thing (media platform, institution, social position, prestigious job, lucrative employment, etc.) with which you are/were affiliated.
The people who love you will ignore the thing you are getting cancelled for and continue to love you.
So most of the “celebrities” and “thinkers” coming out against “cancel culture” have some stake in a corporate position where the profit margin depends not only on their true fans, the ones who love them who will never cancel them, but on that second group above, the people who follow them based on their affiliation with that big corporate media platform.
So to be from that world, to have that high position and to come out against cancel culture is for these “celeb thinkers™” to be basically admitting they actually are not free of corporate standards (and every corporation has standards; they may be bloodthirsty capitalists but that corporate reputation must be untarnished and heads roll when that may be happening) and are therefore asking that corporate standards that apply to the CEO all the way down to the janitor just NOT apply to them, the “talent”.
You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be controversial and expect your employer to tow the line when the controversy outweighs your contributions to the corporation’s bottom line. Sorry but you really do sell your soul to a corporation when you go to work for them. You get their platform and audience size but you when the audience rises up you are on your own. Of course, if your success is so big that even when the cancelers come for you the corporation has your back, then the would-be cancelers are revealed for what they truly are: imposers of “morality”. Sometimes the imposition works and sometimes they just whine until they find someone else to pick on.
I’m all for free speech, I’ve won legal battles caused by my writing – one was in the Supreme Court of New York* – and I have written for corporate media to, I was actually the 12th employee at the company that became Vox Media, so I’ve had the blade of cancellation to my throat OFTEN… in fact it is an ordinary feeling for me. And guess what? That is the fucking point of putting my opinion and creativity out into the public sphere, people fall in love with me, people hate me, people ignore me until I’m are writing for something big with a big reach and the minute I am not they go back to ignoring me.
What the people speaking out against cancel culture are admitting is that their grand thought essays and such aren’t so amazing and great that they would garner the attention they do without a third party publisher, aka, a corporate backer. So for all the haranguing of “cancel culture”, their arbitrary morality and their disingenuous baiting, there are very few public opinion writers who come to the defense of someone they loathe and disagree with being cancelled, so there may be no integrity on the canceler side but there is little of it on the “First Amendment means don’t bash my writing” side.
When you speak out in America, you find out there is a war going on and it isn’t a two sided war where everyone you could possibly agree with is your buddy. They are mostly corporate shills who don’t want to share their platform and its power with you. The fear has never been greater not because the first amendment is under any great pressure but because there are no visible platforms in America that are not attached to some great power – be it an institutional power or a corporate power. There is nowhere to be autonomous and creative, there is no way to be a ture maverick without being a mannerist sketch of independence for someone’s platform that requires extremely limited behavioral freedom.
Cancel culture can’t come for the autonomous and those are the only creatives and thinkers that are truly free.
*Supreme Court of New York is what NY calls their “State Court” and they call their actual “Supreme Court” State Court. But still, it was the rare free speech case that went to trial and I won it.