Cancel Culture on Substack
It is a left-leaning tendency
I have been testing a theory that left-leaning people are more, much more, likely to exploit their power to cancel opposing views than are non-left-leaning people.
Substack, because it is a platform developed specifically to attract writer talent with the promise of free speech, provided a great platform for carrying out this test.
To conduct the test I would subscribe to newsletters owning a center-left to hard liberal bias, and post honest and factual comments in opposition to the left-wing views expressed by the author and/or other commenters. Then I would attempt to match the tone and temperament of reactions to my post. For example, a commenter responding to me post with respectful civility, I would respond in kind with thanks and attempted civility. However, if the commenter responded with vitriol, I would respond matching their tone.
My goal was to see if this tendency for left-leaning journalists to want to cancel opposing viewpoints was a corporate media dictate or something innate.
While my efforts are in no way based on any scientific protocol, they did seem to confirm my theory as I was canceled from commenting by three, out of five, left-leaning Substack newsletters.
The three cancelation newsletters are :
Jonathan V Last - The Dispatch - The Triad
Charlie Sykes - The Bulwark
Matthew Yglesias - Slowboring
The two left-leaning newsletters that have not yet canceled me are:
Heather Cox Richardson - Letters from an American
Robert Reich - Robert Reich
I also subscribe to five center—right or right-leaning newsletters. None of those have demonstrated any signs of cancelation. More importantly they have not demonstrated any propensity to cancel any commenter… even those with strong left-leaning views and those that deliver their opinions with a level of vitriol.
The results of my informal test have confirmed what I have observed over the years… that left-leaning people are more apt to use their authority and power to “sanitize” viewpoint opposition comments by implementing bans, cancelations and other means. Not only do left-leaning leaning journalists demonstrate intolerance of opposing viewpoints, but they demonstrate a desire to maintain a more ideologically-pure forum where all participants tend to agree.
The implications of this conclusion, if accurate, are profound in that most of the people that end up working in the profession of journalism identify as politically left. So we end up with a sort of fox guarding the henhouse situation where only left-leaning viewpoints can exist.
Are left-leaning journalists more fragile? Or are they not really journalists as much as trumpets of their ideological tribe?
Regardless of the reasons, it is not a good thing for journalists, especially those posting their content on Substack.com, to subscribe to the cancel culture ethos. And one can consider that cancel culture is not so much an extreme position adopted by radical campus extremists, but a common tendency of left-leaning journalists. Meanwhile right-leaning journalists not only refrain from canceling people with oppositions comments, they seem to embrace this idea that people should be free to express their views no matter how wrong they might be.
I thought I already unsubscribed once from this lousy Substack. This time I am making sure of it.
Interesting experiment. Alas, not surprising.
It has a lot to do with why I have moved towards the independent center. When I was young, independent thinking was not widely banned on the political left, and I felt fairly welcome. Now, the progressive left is mostly dogmatically attached to their strategies and no dissent is allowed.
The strutting martinets of my youth were from the right. The neo-progressive left now seems to have even more of them (in my non-random environment at least).
My experience is that this is not inherent to liberalism (and has not always been true), but largely a more recent phenomenon as a toxic mind virus (ideology) has infected most progressives and many liberals.
They think they are still liberal. In fact, they think they are still non-political (the new ideology is just about doing the moral thing, which all reasonable people should agree with; that that moral thing happens to be entirely aligned with neo-progressive politics is coincidental).
I would say that one of the key steps in being absorbed into this ideology is "supporting the oppressed is the prime directive, displacing truth and traditional concepts like reciprocality, merit, and the golden rule". Because it's selflessly supporting the weakest and most vulnerable, one has the unquestionable moral high ground, and when you have that, you need not treat others as you wish to be treated (like listening to them if they will listen to you). That's just for people with the same moral standing, which doesn't apply.
And I posit that this is part of why the new ideology became so much censorious. They are convinced they have righteousness on their side because they are caring people who accept their white cis heteronormative guilt, and so it's OK if they shut down dissent. If doing so would protect a marginalized person from the psychological harm of being disagreed with, all the more moral and praiseworthy. But eventually the power corrupts and they may reflexively shut down disagreement even without that justification.
I don't think this ideology has as much traction with more traditional conservative values (which is not to say there are no mind viruses more crafted to appeal to conservatives). But I see elements of the victimhood narrative crop up on the Right as well, just not as centrally yet.
From the perspective of a very long time liberal, it's like a horror film about the invasion of mind controlling aliens (ok, an exaggeration). People start changing personalities.
And that is NOT traditional liberalism. It's an infected version.