{"id":117654,"date":"2021-02-04T11:45:14","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T16:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=117654"},"modified":"2021-02-04T11:58:13","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T16:58:13","slug":"knowles-the-bad-faith-debate-over-cancel-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/knowles-the-bad-faith-debate-over-cancel-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"KNOWLES: The Bad Faith Debate Over \u2018Cancel Culture\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fknowles-the-bad-faith-debate-over-cancel-culture%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=117654&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/GettyImages-1213312949-1200x800-1.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" \/><\/div>\n<p>It is high time we cancel \u201ccancel culture\u201d \u2014 if not the phenomenon then at least the slogan, which has engendered tedious and dishonest debates that fail even to address the issue that those two words describe.<\/p>\n<p>Such debates begin when someone makes a comment that offends leftist sensibilities. The offender may be a public figure or a private citizen; he may be a rock-ribbed conservative or a heterodox liberal. Whatever the circumstances of the offender, leftist activists mobilize to attack his reputation and destroy his career. Conservatives then decry \u201ccancel culture,\u201d attack leftist \u201ccensorship,\u201d and extol the virtues of \u201cfree speech,\u201d at which point the leftist censors observe that the First Amendment does not prevent \u201cprivate companies\u201d from censoring whomever they please.<\/p>\n<p>The cancelers next observe that the American free speech tradition does not protect citizens from any and all consequences that might result from their speech. Finally, they point to the many examples throughout American history of conservatives\u2019 suppressing radical speech, from the Alien and Sedition Acts all the way up through McCarthyism and beyond, and they accuse the Right of hypocrisy.<\/p>\n<p>But opponents of \u201ccancel culture\u201d are not hypocritical; they\u2019re just imprecise. Political activists of all stripes rely on slogans to represent and popularize complex ideas. A debate in good faith may make use of slogans, but it will address the ideas that the slogans represent. Bad-faith debates, on the contrary, often deal primarily with slogans, misconstruing them to score political points by refuting opinions that one\u2019s opponents do not actually hold.<\/p>\n<p>The slogan \u201ccancel culture,\u201d much like the slogan \u201cpro-life,\u201d refers to a specific phenomenon. \u201cCancel culture\u201d describes the present inclination to censor and ostracize people who contradict leftist orthodoxy. \u201cCancel culture\u201d does not refer to the general belief that people ought never to incur consequences for the things they say or write, nor does it suggest that society ought to have no standards whatsoever. No one believes that an employee who shows up do work in a brown shirt and yells, \u201c<em>Seig Heil<\/em>!\u201d from the water cooler has some sacred right to keep his job. Defenders of \u201ccancel culture\u201d evade the issue by straw-manning their opponents\u2019 views.<\/p>\n<p>The American legal system has prohibited large swaths of speech from our nation\u2019s earliest days, including fraud, sedition, threats, and obscenity, among other categories. Laws such as the Smith Act have empowered the government \u2014 rightly, in the opinion of this author \u2014 to prosecute communists and other subversives who sought to overthrow the government by force of violence in the middle of the twentieth century. One may both support laws that suppress communism and oppose \u201ccancel culture\u201d without hypocrisy because cancel culture refers to a specific phenomenon. Constitutionalism and communism are both forms of government, but they differ in substance. There is nothing hypocritical about embracing one set of standards and opposing its opposite.<\/p>\n<p>Bad-faith debates over the ethics and legality of abortion follow a similar pattern. Opponents of abortion use the term \u201cpro-life\u201d as shorthand for their belief that babies ought not to be butchered in the womb. The slogan does not refer to a general opposition to the use of deadly force \u2014 say, by the police, military, or civil authority \u2014 nor does it represent some utopian wish to avoid or abolish death. Debates over capital punishment, pacifism, or the extension of human life have their place. But it is not hypocritical to support capital punishment and oppose abortion because the two issues involve different moral questions, no matter what a slogan might suggest.<\/p>\n<p>Supporters of \u201ccancel culture,\u201d like defenders of abortion, act in bad faith when they interpret their opponents\u2019 slogans to mean something they do not and never have meant. The tactic precludes the possibility of substantive debate. But then perhaps that is point.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/news\/knowles-keep-tubman-off-the-20\">More from Michael Knowles: Keep Tubman Off The $20<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><em>The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><em>The Daily Wire is one of America\u2019s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/subscribe\"><span class=\"s1\"><em>member<\/em><\/span><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is high time we cancel \u201ccancel culture\u201d \u2014 if not the phenomenon then at least the slogan, which has engendered tedious and dishonest debates that fail even to address &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1892627,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[4421,3896,5250,4679,3972],"class_list":["post-117654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-culture","tag-debate","tag-faith","tag-knowles","tag-over"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1892627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}