"Cancel Culture" is the result of powerful people with large platforms finally hearing more criticism, and hating it. "Cancel Culture" has become the Republican party's biggest bogeyman, and the only part of their platform anyone seems to care about. The specter of cancel culture, as most people frame it, is a political tool for politicians and a money tool for entertainers. It is their greatest grift. The politicians and media figures on both sides weaponize your anger and use that negative energy for their own personal gain.

Why does "Cancel Culture" exist in the first place? The hysteria around Communist infiltration of American society was one of the earliest most blatant attempts by the Right to take people's rights away for their beliefs. The Communist Control Act of 1954, signed by Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, criminalized any participation in Communist organizations. This unambiguously sought to take away the rights of American citizens purely for what they believed.

The Right likes to shout "Cancel Culture" because they can't actually explicitly address the purported transgressions of values, usually the value of anti-bigotry. Take Dr. Seuss for example. Dr. Seuss's estate decided to discontinue some of his books due to some insensitive racial stereotypes. This wasn't at the request or demand of the "woke mob" or the Democrats, it was just a decision that his estate made. No Republican actually ever referenced the images from the Seuss books. Rafael Cruz fundraised off it, by selling signed copies of Green Eggs and Ham, a book that is still available for purchase and was not one of the pulled books in question. He, and they, had to keep referencing Green Eggs and Ham because they couldn't look at the racist stereotypes and say "that's good, I like it." They had to obfuscate it by saying, "the Left wants to cancel Dr. Seuss."

There are real problems with the vague non-term "Cancel Culture" and how it can affect real working people, but for the most part it is a marketing gimmick, a brand, a cudgel and a shield. It's the same thing as when Congressman Jim Jordan goes on Fox News to complain that he can't speak, or somebody going on a national tour called Censored. If your career is built around saying things only to upset people, you can and will say anything with no thought to what it means or why you are saying it. There can be no real cancellation as long as outlets exist for all of these poor souls to blather on about their persecution complexes while collecting checks from rubes. Corporations make decisions not because of "wokeness" or that they're "doing a Marxism", it's because of money. They make decisions they think are profitable.

"Cancel Culture", the celebrity / politician / pundit version, is complete bullshit. No consistent meaning. Pointless. So what is the actual problem? The firings, not of some actor or politician being asked to resign, but just people, on both sides. Teachers, random workers, all kinds of people, for being racist, for being anti-racist, for being misunderstood - it's being framed as a problem "of the Left" because the Left doesn't have the infrastructure to complain about it every day, or the interest in doing that. The Right has had infrastructure focused on that for decades.

There's a whole website of canceled people who've lost their jobs. Many of the examples aren't people who were "dog-piled" or that the "woke mob" demanded to be fired, it's people fired for transgressions of values by their bosses internally. Maybe it is a good opportunity to talk about at-will employment, and how maybe it should be harder to fire people for whatever reason. Maybe a good opportunity to talk about how we tie healthcare to employment, so losing your job is actually a health concern. We could talk about the negative mental health effects of online bullying.

Cancel Culture isn't real, it's not a thing, it's a meaningless term... but it's also technically real in other ways that the people who complain about Cancel Culture don't care about. If we could retire the term and the vague bullshit concept, that would be great, while also furthering the conversation about what our values are, how we as a society enforce those values or reject those values, or interact with people in that same society who don't share those values. How we achieve accountability, how we determine consequences. How maybe if the solution is to fire the person, we should also be a society which effectively houses and feeds people and provides healthcare regardless of employment.