Cancellation fail

Looks like I was right again. Richard Hanania survived his attempted cancellation with flying colors, as I predicted. Not only was his book not cancelled, but pre-order sales have surged.

‘Cancel culture’ arguably peaked in 2010-2017 or so. The left’ ability to cancel has been significantly diminished since the mid 2010s due to a combination of:

1. Loss of credibility on the part of the liberal media due to hoaxes, fake news, ‘mission creep’ (everyone and everything being called racist instead of actual racists, which means the label loses all meaning/potency). Bystanders were initially on board with the left’s anti-racism message, but then the left went too far by including too many non-racists under that categorization.

Major publishing houses realized that acceding to the left is bad for business, as the left are only a small minority, and have lost credibility and are generally unpopular even among middle-class educated liberals (the very people who tend to buy those politics books to begin with). This confers with my earlier post about how conservatives overestimate the power of liberals and leftists to coordinate. Even if liberals and leftists agree on many social issues, they still will not cooperate to censor or cancel targets.

2. Fragmentation due to the rise of social media. Pundits and academics no longer need mainstream media such as The Washington Post, The Atlantic, or The NYTs for attention.

3. Rise of Substack and post-Elon Twitter. These two are a major blow to cancel culture. Pre-2021 Twitter was not as big of a deal as it is today, and much more left-wing biased. Much of discourse has now moved to Twitter, and Twitter acts as a traffic funnel to highly popular and profitable Substack blogs, in addition to Elon paying popular Twitter users. This means, more than ever, pundits and commentators are freed from being financially dependent on legacy media.