What they truly fear is the symbolic effect of a heretic speaking freely in a space seen as traditionally controlled by dogmatists
In the many op-ed denunciations of cancel culture that get churned out , a common theme is that we’ve all become too quick to take “offence.” But having spent the last few years interviewing cancel-culture victims, from Steven Galloway to Meghan Murphy to James Damore, I can attest that the real driver of mob-run silencing campaigns isn’t “offence.” It’s a desire to demonstrate power.
Even so, we free-speech types often exaggerate the censorial powers of modern outrage mobs. As Meghan McArdle wrote in the Washington Post this week, J.K. Rowling’s recent decision to go public with common-sense views on gender and biology show that we’ve reached a tipping point on cancel culture. South Park and Ricky Gervais have both survived their own heresies. And even Louis C.K.
“Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children,” Jacques Mallet du Pan wrote in 1793, amidst La Terreur. Thus has come to pass that even giants of progressive leftism come under mob suspicion. This now includes George Elliott Clarke, an impeccably progressive Africadian giant of Canadian arts and letters, whose work as poet, playwright, editor and critic have earned him the Order of Canada and a dozen other prestigious awards besides.
Yet the ranks of well-known poets are full of truly horrible and wicked people. Lord Byron was a predatory lothario and occasional pedophile. Swinburne went in for child sex and bestiality. Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite. Gabriele D’Annunzio was a fascist crackpot. Shelley’s pregnant teenage paramour killed herself when the poet abandoned her. Of course, none of these men can be compared directly to Kummerfield, because his crimes occurred within recent, living memory.
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