Cancel Culture Is Real, Ruining People For Thought And Speech Crimes
We're all poorer for this, as my mother would say.
Colin Wright ended up getting a job at Quillette, where he's published this piece: "Think Cancel Culture Doesn't Exist? My Own 'Lived Experience' Says Otherwise."
Supposedly, as AOC's story goes, cancel culture is an invention of "poor me" wealthy and famous writers, people who "get their thoughts published and amplified in major outlets,"
In fact, Wright explains:
The vast majority of cancel culture's victims are people you've never heard of, who don't have the means to fight back, or who have learned to keep quiet so they don't lose whatever reputation or job security they still have.I know, because I was once one of them.
...I graduated with a PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara in 2018, and took a postdoctoral position at Penn State. I'd just joined Twitter, and observed that the pseudoscience I'd seen on campus had by now metastasized to the wider world and become the stuff of everyday hashtags. Even scientists whom I knew personally and respected were parroting this nonsense as scientific fact. But I dared not say a word. I would soon be applying to tenure-track assistant-professor jobs; I could not be seen publicly arguing down the claim that internally felt gender feelings trumped biology.
In October 2018, the Grievance Studies scandal dropped, bringing renewed focus on the intellectual degradation within academic fields focused on gender and sex. A few weeks later, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, Nature, published an editorial claiming that classifying an individual's sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics "has no basis in science." These events, happening in such close succession, pushed me beyond my threshold for restraint. Despite my academic mentors' warnings that speaking up could ruin my career, I let my bottled-up frustrations out in an essay I sent to Quillette. It was published under the headline, The New Evolution Deniers.
The essay went viral. And while I received my fair share of praise for it, I also knew I'd provided critics with a bona fide gotcha moment. ("I did not train to be a scientist for over a decade just to sit quietly while science in general, and my field in particular, comes under attack from activists who subvert truth to ideology and narrative," I wrote.) Blank-Slate feminists and trans activists alike publicly accused me of wrongthink.
What's worse, my heresies were multiplying, as I had taken to Twitter to defend my views and confront my critics. I also eventually co-authored another Quillette essay, with endocrinologist Dr. William Malone and author Julia Robertson, titled No One Is Born in 'The Wrong Body', arguing that children are put at risk of long-term harm if they are indoctrinated with ideologically torqued misinformation about their bodies and behavior.
In October 2019, following the publication of that second article, I received word that someone had posted a new listing in EcoEvoJobs, the largest job board in my field, that read, "Colin Wright is a Transphobe who supports Race Science." This was during the height of the academic-recruitment season. The post was eventually removed by the board operator. But there was no telling how long it was up or how many of my colleagues had seen it.
Flash forward to January of 2020:
It was around this time that I was contacted by a biology-department chair at a private liberal arts college in the Midwest. He commended me for my writings, and told me that he'd even used my New Evolution Deniers essay as a basis for discussion in his own classes. But while he and his fellow biology-department faculty would likely support my hiring, he said, the school's own human-resources department would almost certainly block me as "too risky."...In the closing lines of The New Evolution Deniers, I wrote that academia was "no longer a refuge for outspoken, free-thinking intellectuals," and that "one must now choose between living a zipper-lipped life as an academic scientist, or living a life as a fulfilled intellectual." My own experience, reinforced by the steady flow of emails I receive from concerned academics, would suggest that the situation has only gotten worse.
What you have read here is the story of just one ex-academic. But it should concern everyone that the entire academy is now being held hostage to a vocal minority that insists we should inhabit a fantasy intellectual milieu that is little more than an ideologically deflected play on Christian myths. Make no mistake: Cancel culture is very real. And its manifestations are not confined to the rich and powerful. As with many cultural processes, the fight to roll it back will be a long, hard struggle. I don't pretend to know how it will end. But I do know that it begins by opening our eyes to the problem. To do otherwise would represent--if I may borrow a phrase from the social-justice lexicon--the literal erasure of my own lived experience.
What? Quillette has published another tedious screed by a former and would-be academic bemoaning 'cancel culture'?
It must be a day ending in Y ...
Kevin at August 3, 2020 10:41 PM
How about we cancel the culture that makes it impossible to walk safely down the streets of dozens of American cities?
Radwaste at August 4, 2020 8:41 AM
So, question for our elders...
Is this what McCarthyism was like? Only obviously it was the right wing and now it is the left?
NicoleK at August 4, 2020 9:04 AM
I have experienced cancel culture in the climate change wars over the past 20 years. People I have known like several state climatologists have lost their jobs. Editors of major journals have been fired. People I know have had profiles created on Wikipedia that are nothing but hatchet jobs. People giving a talk at a university on climate change have had profs stand up after the talk and yell at the speaker. One example of this was the speaker said the glaciers of Greenland are mostly locked within a bowl of mountains and cannot "slide" into the ocean. A prof yelled at the speaker. Profs have been attacked ad hominim repeatedly for the "wrong" views. Conservative views will prevent you from getting a job in a college even for a position with no political content.
On the case documented above, it is not "tedious"--it is scary that the practice of giving hormone treatment to pre-teens is not up for debate when we don't let the same kids buy cigs or alcohol or drive or marry etc. These treatments are permanent.
McCarthyism: there were in fact communists in the state department and elsewhere just as today. Some huge spy scandals uncovered massive transfer of secrets to the soviets, who were in fact dangerous. Going after actors was of course absurd and McCarthy overplayed his hand but acting like the "right" was just being paranoid is a typical ploy to cover for serious sedition.
cc at August 4, 2020 9:19 AM
Nicole do you mean the red scare more generally? - McCarthy's activities were focused on government offices.
Also who thinks AOC is dishonest vs delusional. I honestly can't make up my mind. Maybe it's both.
orangina at August 4, 2020 9:21 AM
Having been in academic research and walked away from it 20 years ago, these people were happy to have an ideology filter then. I remember the self-righteous opinions of people who described themselves as "liberals" who viewed certain ideologies as simply "wrong", and they were happy to exclude them from tenure tracks in engineering departments, because "only stupid people believe that". They failed to say that your views on income tax (i.e., the flat tax) or your being pro- balanced budget amendment or against government single payer health insurance did not have a real impact on whether you could do research in chip fabs - so why do they expect that it wasn't going to get eventually eat them all? Of course it would get to your point that if you didn't kiss the latest ring, you won't be allowed to do research, since they stopped caring about advancing knowledge some time back.
El Verde Loco at August 4, 2020 11:07 AM
The problem with McCarthy: to a large extent, he was right. But he stepped on enough toes to get himself canceled.
I'm pretty sure that if you have an XX gene, you're female, if you have an XY you are a male. Why do they deny Science?
I have experienced cancel culture in the climate change wars over the past 20 years.
That would have been me, a climate heretic but I bailed out of meteorology to be a sysadmin. As a joke I stole goes, if a lawyer can be disbarred, can a meteorologist be disgusted?
I R A Darth Aggie at August 4, 2020 2:03 PM
Cancel Culture cancels Kindergarten Cop in Portland's Northwest Film Festival. At first, I thought this was a joke, but apparently KC is as bad as Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind.
https://reason.com/2020/08/04/kindergarten-cop-is-canceled-likened-to-birth-of-a-nation/
Conan the Grammarian at August 4, 2020 4:36 PM
Supposedly, as AOC's story goes, cancel culture is an invention of "poor me" wealthy and famous writers, people who "get their thoughts published and amplified in major outlets,"
Justine Sacco would like a word.
Jeff Guinn at August 4, 2020 5:00 PM
Keeping in mind that the essence of clear reasoning is the ability to state, in a way they would find both accurate and fair, the arguments of those with whom you disagree. this is worth a read.
Jeff Guinn at August 4, 2020 5:00 PM
That woke one was very accurate Jeff. And is why people are resorting to the simple 'Get fucked!' when confronted by the woke. Or with a gun depending on how violent the woke are feeling like today.
Ben at August 4, 2020 7:42 PM
Very interesting read.
Conan the Grammarian at August 5, 2020 6:36 AM
Quite applicable to the other thread, isn't it.
Ben at August 5, 2020 3:57 PM
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