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President Joe Biden's call to expand public support of child care in his joint address to Congress puts a spotlight on an issue that has been a subject of growing bipartisan cooperation. In recent decades, Republicans have increasingly embraced the idea that government can play a greater role in providing quality child care for working families, responding to the reality that nearly two-thirds of U.S. households have no stay-at-home parent. As Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Parson put it in his January State of the State address, "Our children are the workforce of tomorrow if we are to truly make a difference in their lives, it starts with early childhood development." Two of the first states to adopt broad public preschool for 4-year-olds were Georgia and Oklahoma, in the 1990s, and the state with the highest-rated system, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research, is Alabama.

But the country now faces a realignment of the politics of child care. Two paths await: On one, the economic and educational imperative of child care integrates itself into the American psyche, expanding gender equity and ensuring that public funding of the early years becomes just as expected as public funding of the schooling years. On the other, child care becomes another front in the culture wars, as one camp bucks against perceived government intrusion into the private realm and onetime allies retreat into their respective corners.

The threat of a breakdown became clear soon after Biden's address, when author and rumored Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance tweeted that "'universal day care' is class war against normal people" the "normal people" being those who prefer a care arrangement involving a parent. Vance was then on Tucker Carlson's show repeating these claims to a wide audience.

This is not fringe posturing. In the GOP response to Biden's address, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina warned that the president's plan would "put Washington even more in the middle of your life from the cradle to college." Scott's Senate colleague Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., was less coy when she tweeted an old article about the Soviet Union's child care system with the comment "You know who else liked universal day care." In March, Idaho rejected a $6 million federal child care grant over the objections of business groups partially because state lawmakers expressed concern over children being indoctrinated by the government.

This view is a throwback to the so-called "traditional values" loudly espoused by conservatives decades ago. In 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created a national day care system, saying that it "would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing [and] against the family-centered approach."

Since the turn of the millennium, however, two threads pulled the parties closer together on the issue. The first was acceptance of the fact that, like it or not, mothers of young children had entered the workforce in large numbers and were not going anywhere. While certain populations of American women have always worked, less than 40% of mothers with children under age 5 were in the labor force around the time of Nixon's veto; since the late 1990s, that figure has hovered around two-thirds.

The second thread was emerging brain science showing that early childhood experiences, including child care, are foundational to later academic and life outcomes. Republicans were therefore able to back increased child care funding on economic grounds: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been a vocal supporter, and the Trump White House held a high-profile child care summit in December 2019.

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While Republicans face a question of whether to abandon these positions now that a Democratic president has embraced the issue, Democrats must reckon with the question of choice when it comes to stay-at-home parents.

Americans do, in fact, want a dizzying variety of care setups: secular child care centers, faith-based options, home-based day cares, public prekindergarten, minding by relatives, care from a parent. These preferences can shift with children's ages and family circumstances, and vary among demographics. While Biden's child care proposals are optional and inclusive of all types of external care, they are silent on stay-at-home parents.

The significant share of families that want a degree of parental care and the fact that many families struggle financially because they have traded child care costs for reduced income has led some on both sides of the aisle to call for a home-care allowance (on top of the recently expanded child tax credit, which is untethered to care). Paying stay-at-home parents is a concept with left-wing roots, although it has been a source of controversy in feminist circles because so much of the pressure to stay home is likely to fall on women. Nordic nations such as Finland and Sweden have used home-care payments for parents who opt out of publicly supported child care. If Democrats incorporated such an option into their plans, it would probably deflect some of their opponents' criticism.

The reality for the Republican Party, however, is that it is already badly underwater with women. The coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated the pain borne particularly by mothers of the lack of affordable child care. Expanded public support of child care is massively popular: An April Yahoo News/YouGov survey found 58% of Americans in favor of providing universal pre-K for all children. And 60% including 64% of women and 41% of Republicans supported increasing subsidies to reduce the cost of child care. While those numbers would surely drop under a sustained messaging assault, the support for child care appears both broad and deep.

Some conservatives, like Vance and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., have endorsed direct financial support for parents as an alternative to child care spending. While such payments could help with general child-rearing costs, Hawley's proposal of $12,000 annually for married couples (and $6,000 for single parents) is not enough to address many parents' struggles. Group care is necessarily expensive because the child-to-adult ratios must be low; experts calculate that the cost of quality care averages $15,000 to $30,000 annually per child, depending on age and location. The lack of money flowing into the child care sector explains parents' difficulty in finding slots, even before the pandemic, as well as the workforce's persistently low wages and high turnover. These schemes could carry political risk for conservative Republicans who oppose expanding social services by nudging parents to stay home.

For the past two decades, the child care debate has largely lingered below the surface as American politics became more polarized. While presidents mentioned the issue, it was not a centerpiece of any agenda, and the plans on offer were limited. The ground has now shifted, and how policymakers react will determine the politics of child care for the 2020s and beyond.

Elliot Haspel is the program officer for education policy and research at the Robins Foundation in Richmond. He is the author of "Crawling Behind: America's Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It." This piece was written for The Washington Post.

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Child care has bipartisan support. But the culture war could wreck that. - Newsday

There is a quote from Ralph Reed that I often return to when trying to understand how the right builds political power. I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members, the former leader of the Christian Coalition said in 1996. School board elections are a great training ground for national activism. They can pull parents, particularly mothers, into politics around intensely emotional issues, building a thriving grass roots and keeping it mobilized.

You could easily write a history of the modern right thats about nothing but schools. The battles were initially about race, particularly segregation and busing. Out of those fights came the Christian right, born in reaction to the revocation of tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools. As the Christian right grew, political struggles over control of schools became more explicitly religious. There were campaigns against allowing gay people to work in schools and against teaching sex education and evolution.

Now the Christian right has more or less collapsed as anything but an identity category. There are still lots of religious fundamentalists, but not, post-Donald Trump, a movement confidently asserting itself as the repository of wholesome family values. Instead, with the drive to eradicate the teaching of critical race theory, race has moved back to the center of the public-school culture wars.

I put critical race theory in quotes because the right has transformed a term that originally referred to an academic school of thought into a catchall for resentments over diversity initiatives and changing history curriculums. Since I first wrote about anti-critical race theory activism in February, its become hard to keep up with the flurry of state bills aimed at banning the teaching of what are often called divisive concepts, including the idea, as a Rhode Island bill puts it, that the United States of America is fundamentally racist or sexist. We will reject Critical Race Theory in our schools and public institutions, and we will CANCEL Cancel Culture wherever it arises! the irony-challenged Mike Pence tweeted last week.

As The Washington Posts Dave Weigel pointed out, Glenn Youngkin, a candidate in Virginias Republican primary, recently released four anti-critical race theory videos in 24 hours.

Part of the reason the right is putting so much energy into this crusade is because it cant whip up much opposition to the bulk of Joe Bidens agenda. Bidens spending plans are much more ambitious than Barack Obamas were, but theres been no new version of the Tea Party. Voters view this president as more moderate than Obama, a misconception that critical race theory scholars would have no trouble explaining. Republicans have groused about how hard Biden is to demonize. They need a more frightening, enraging villain to keep their people engaged.

Critical race theory presented as an attack on history, a program to indoctrinate children and a stealth form of Marxism fits the bill. The recent elections in Southlake, Texas, show how politically potent the backlash to critical race theory can be.

In 2018, the affluent Texas suburb was in the news for a viral video of a group of laughing white students shouting the N-word. Black residents told reporters about instances of unambiguous racism, like a sixth grader joking to a Black student, How do you get a Black out of a tree? You cut the rope. The video, reported NBC, seemed to trigger genuine soul-searching by school leaders, and they created a diversity council of parents, teachers and students to come up with a plan to make their school more inclusive. The council, in turn, created a document called the Cultural Competence Action Plan.

The reaction from conservative parents was furious. A PAC formed to fight the plan. At a contentious school board meeting, The Dallas Morning News reported, a Black student on the diversity council was booed after testifying: My life matters. Two school board members who supported the plan were indicted on charges they violated Texas Open Meetings Act, merely because they texted about the plan before a board meeting. The conservative radio host Dana Loesch, who lives in Southlake, appeared on Tucker Carlson to denounce very far-left Marxist activists trying to implement critical race theory education.

This weekend, in a Southlake election that drew three times the ordinary number of voters, opponents of the Cultural Competence Action Plan dominated, winning two school board seats, two City Council seats and the mayors office by about 40 points in each race. Their victories will likely serve as an example to conservative organizers nationwide. The Federalist, a right-wing website, heralded the election as the early stage of a new cultural Tea Party marshaled against critical race theory instead of government spending.

The Christian Coalition took off during Bill Clintons presidency, when the religious right engaged locally because it felt shut out of national power. Clearly some conservatives think that opposition to critical race theory could be the seed of something similar. Telling parents that liberals want to make their kids hate their country and feel guilty for being white might be absurd and cynical. It also looks like it might be effective.

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Opinion | Why the Right Loves Public School Culture Wars - The New York Times

Recently, Gallup released polling data indicating that fewer than half of Americans are members of churches, mosques or synagogues. In 1937, 73 percent of Americans claimed some form of religious membership. Today that figure is 47 percent. This decline plays into what sociologists call the "secularization thesis," the presumption that as modernity barrels onward, religiosity slowly gives way to rationalism and technocratic ways of devising meaning.

But before secularism claims complete victory over religiosity, note that the Gallup poll reveals an almost even split between the two. Religiosity and secularism are not going anywhere, even as they interact in troubling ways via the "culture war." As the chasm that separates these worldviews seems only to widen, there is all the more reason to find ways to coexist peaceablyand a return to religious freedom will be a necessary ingredient for a more tranquil future.

Everyone, religious and non-religious alike, has an interest in defending religious liberty if we hope to have a public square that accurately reflects American demography. Even if you are not religious, consider that the First Amendment protections that all Americans enjoy emanate from a religious milieu. The Framers recognized that, before individuals are citizens of the state, they are persons attempting to make meaning and bring order to their lives. Everyone desires to live in accordance with what they believe to be true about the world.

The architect of our Constitution, James Madison, expressed this sentiment in his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. "Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society," he wrote, "he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe." Madison argues that religion recognizes realities that impress truths upon individuals prior to the authority of the state. Whether someone is expressly religious or not, every conscience must reckon with what is true or false, and then seek to live accordingly. The presumption of liberty means that we grant such freedoms insofar as they pose no unmistakable threat to society.

As a conservative evangelical Christian, I have a stake in protecting the right of expression of views I disagree withas much as I would hope to persuade you to protect mine, too. I use my religious liberty to proclaim the gospel and its implications for all of lifejust as a non-Christian possesses the right to proclaim his or her worldview, persuade others of its conclusions and live according to its implications. Our rights are reciprocally bound with one another's. The political philosopher Leo Strauss captured the political tension we must all balance if we hope to maintain a habitable system in which people disagree: "the political question par excellence is how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom that is not license." That, in summary, is the delicate balancing act of liberal democracy.

If religious freedom is going to work, it will require virtues that are in short supply, such as empathy and goodwill. Religious freedom requires me to believe that, despite what I may assume, others' moral and religious arguments are being made in good faith. It forces me to reckon with our common humanity and shared desires. Religious liberty channels our better angels in that it appeals to magnanimity as a form of cultural currency and moral grammar.

To be sure, as a conservative evangelical, I hold to convictions about the exclusivity of Jesus Christ and the nature of gender and sexuality that would cause many readers to recoil. I'm not contending for religious liberty just to be left alone, but to advocate for truths that benefit the common good and human flourishing. A robust understanding of religious liberty requires a humble understanding that cultural orthodoxies will ebb and flow, because today's victors can easily fall out of fashion. The back-and-forth of cultural exchange allows freedom to prosper, better ideas to gain traction and dictatorships that rely on stifling orthodoxies to be rejected.

The decline of religious liberty is a major reason our culture wars are so brutal. By looking to the government to adjudicate our divisions, we've outsourced debate on what is true or false. We ask a central authority to declare one side the victor and the other side the loser. Government cannot be agnostic about everything, but the great thing about religious liberty is that, rather than looking to the government to decide every important question, it allows each person freedom of conscience to decide how to act. Perhaps our political culture would be healthier if questions of ultimate meaning were not on the ballot every four years or divined by Supreme Court justices, and instead, were worked out in institutions, local communities and ultimately, in individual consciences.

Secularization is ascendent today. But the branch of religious conservatism I represent is not going anywhere, and we have to find ways to live together. Deliberation and persuasion must rise to the surface of our public discourse to settle conflicts. I'm going to continue to exercise my religious liberty to point to the truths that I believe are necessary for human beings and societies to flourish. If you think I'm wrong, convince medon't banish me.

Andrew T. Walker is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a Fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is author of Liberty for All: Defending Everyone's Religious Freedom in a Pluralistic Age.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

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Could Religious Liberty Help End the Culture War? | Opinion - Newsweek

Cancel culture, as a concept, feels inescapable. The phrase is all over the news, tossed around in casual social media conversation; its been linked to everything from free speech debates to Mr. Potato Head.

It sometimes seems all-encompassing, as if all forms of contemporary discourse must now lead, exhaustingly and endlessly, either to an attempt to cancel anyone whose opinions cause controversy or to accusations of cancel culture in action, however unwarranted.

In the rhetorical furor, a new phenomenon has emerged: the weaponization of cancel culture by the right.

Across the US, conservative politicians have launched legislation seeking to do the very thing they seem to be afraid of: Cancel supposedly left-wing businesses, organizations, and institutions; see, for example, national GOP figures threatening to punish Major League Baseball for standing against a Georgia voting restrictions law by removing MLBs federal antitrust exemption.

Meanwhile, Fox News has stoked outrage and alarmism over cancel culture, including trying to incite Gen X to take action against the nebulous problem. Tucker Carlson, one of the networks most prominent personalities, has emphatically embraced the anti-cancel culture discourse, claiming liberals are trying to cancel everything from Space Jam to the Fourth of July.

The idea of canceling began as a tool for marginalized communities to assert their values against public figures who retained power and authority even after committing wrongdoing but in its current form, we see how warped and imbalanced the power dynamics of the conversation really are.

All along, debate about cancel culture has obscured its roots in a quest to attain some form of meaningful accountability for public figures who are typically answerable to no one. But after centuries of ideological debate turning over questions of free speech, censorship, and, in recent decades, political correctness, it was perhaps inevitable that the mainstreaming of cancel culture would obscure the original concerns that canceling was meant to address. Now its yet another hyperbolic phase of the larger culture war.

The core concern of cancel culture accountability remains as crucial a topic as ever. But increasingly, the cancel culture debate has become about how we communicate within a binary, right versus wrong framework. And a central question is not whether we can hold one another accountable, but how we can ever forgive.

Its only been about six years since the concept of cancel culture began trickling into the mainstream. The phrase has long circulated within Black culture, perhaps paying homage to Nile Rodgerss 1981 single Your Love Is Cancelled. As I wrote in my earlier explainer on the origins of cancel culture, the concept of canceling a whole person originated in the 1991 film New Jack City and percolated for years before finally emerging online among Black Twitter in 2014 thanks to an episode of Love and Hip-Hop: New York. Since then, the term has undergone massive shifts in meaning and function.

Early on, it most frequently popped up on social media, as people attempted to collectively cancel, or boycott, celebrities they found problematic. As a term with roots in Black culture, it has some resonance with Black empowerment movements, as far back as the civil rights boycotts of the 1950s and 60s. This original usage also promotes the idea that Black people should be empowered to reject cultural figures or works that spread harmful ideas. As Anne Charity Hudley, the chair of linguistics of African America at the University of California Santa Barbara, told me in 2019, When you see people canceling Kanye, canceling other people, its a collective way of saying, We elevated your social status, your economic prowess, [and] were not going to pay attention to you in the way that we once did. ... I may have no power, but the power I have is to [ignore] you.

As the logic behind wanting to cancel specific messages and behaviors caught on, many members of the public, as well as the media, conflated it with adjacent trends involving public shaming, callouts, and other forms of public backlash. (The media sometimes refers to all of these ideas collectively as outrage culture.) But while cancel culture overlaps and aligns with many related ideas, its also always been inextricably linked to calls for accountability.

As a concept, cancel culture entered the mainstream alongside hashtag-oriented social justice movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo giant social waves that were effective in shifting longstanding narratives about victims and criminals, and in bringing about actual prosecutions in cases like those of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein. It is also frequently used interchangeably with woke political rhetoric, an idea that is itself tied to the 2014 rise of the Black Lives Matter protests. In similar ways, both wokeness and canceling are tied to collectivized demands for more accountability from social systems that have long failed marginalized people and communities.

But over the past few years, many right-wing conservatives, as well as liberals who object to more strident progressive rhetoric, have developed the view that cancel culture is a form of harassment intended to silence anyone who sets a foot out of line under the nebulous tenets of woke politics. So the idea now represents a vast assortment of objectives and can hold wildly different connotations, depending on whom youre talking to.

Taken in good faith, the concept of canceling a person is really about questions of accountability about how to navigate a social and public sphere in which celebrities, politicians, and other public figures who say or do bad things continue to have significant platforms and influence. In fact, actor LeVar Burton recently suggested the entire idea should be recast as consequence culture.

I think its misnamed, Burton told the hosts of The View. I think we have a consequence culture. And that consequences are finally encompassing everybody in the society, whereas they havent been ever in this country.

Within the realm of good faith, the larger conversation around these questions can then expand to contain nuanced considerations of what the consequences of public misbehavior should be, how and when to rehabilitate the reputation of someone whos been canceled, and who gets to decide those things.

Taken in bad faith, however, cancel culture becomes an omniscient and dangerous specter: a woke, online social justice mob thats ready to rise up and attack anyone, even other progressives, at the merest sign of dissent. And its this the fear of a nebulous mob of cancel-happy rabble-rousers that conservatives have used to their political advantage.

Critics of cancel culture typically portray whoever is doing the canceling as wielding power against innocent victims of their wrath. From 2015 on, a variety of news outlets, whether through opinion articles or general reporting, have often framed cancel culture as mob rule.

In 2019, the New Republics Osita Nwanevu observed just how frequently some media outlets have compared cancel culture to violent political uprisings, ranging from ethnocide to torture under dictatorial regimes. Such an exaggerated framework has allowed conservative media to depict cancel culture as an urgent societal issue. Fox News pundits, for example, have made cancel culture a focal part of their coverage. In one recent survey, people who voted Republican were more than twice as likely to know what cancel culture was, compared with Democrats and other voters, even though in the current dominant understanding of cancel culture, Democrats are usually the ones doing the canceling.

The conceit that the conservative right has gotten so many people to adopt, beyond divorcing the phrase from its origins in Black queer communities, is an obfuscation of the power relations of the stakeholders involved, journalist Shamira Ibrahim told Vox in an email. It got transformed into a moral panic akin to being able to irrevocably ruin the powerful with just the press of a keystroke, when it in actuality doesnt wield nearly as much power as implied by the most elite.

You wouldnt know that to listen to right-wing lawmakers and media figures who have latched onto an apocalyptic scenario in which the person or subject whos being criticized is in danger of being censored, left jobless, or somehow erased from history usually because of a perceived left-wing mob.

This is a fear that the right has weaponized. At the 2020 Republican National Convention, at least 11 GOP speakers about a third of those who took the stage during the high-profile event addressed cancel culture as a concerning political phenomenon. President Donald Trump himself declared that The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it. One delegate resolution at the RNC specifically targeted cancel culture, describing a trend toward erasing history, encouraging lawlessness, muting citizens, and violating free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and speech.

Ibrahim pointed out that in addition to re-waging the war on political correctness that dominated the 1990s by repackaging it as a war on cancel culture, right-wing conservatives have also attempted to launch the same rhetorical battles across numerous fronts, attempting to rebrand the same calls for accountability and consequences as woke brigade, digital lynch mobs, outrage culture and call-out culture. Indeed, its because of the collective organizational power that online spaces provide to marginalized communities, she argued, that anti-cancel culture rhetoric focuses on demonizing them.

Social media is one of the few spaces that exists for collective feedback and where organizing movements that threaten [conservatives] social standing have begun, Ibrahim said, thus compelling them to invert it into a philosophical argument that doesnt affect just them, but potentially has destructive effects on censorship for even the working-class individual.

This potential has nearly become reality through recent forms of Republican-driven legislation around the country. The first wave involved overt censorship, with lawmakers pushing to ban texts like the New York Timess 1619 Project from educational usage at publicly funded schools and universities. Such censorship could seriously curtail free speech at these institutions an ironic example of the broader kind of censorship that is seemingly a core fear about cancel culture.

A recent wave of legislation has been directed at corporations as a form of punishment for crossing Republicans. After both Delta Air Lines and Major League Baseball spoke out against Georgia lawmakers passage of a restrictive voting rights bill, Republican lawmakers tried to target the companies, tying their public statements to cancel culture. State lawmakers tried and failed to pass a bill stripping Delta of a tax exemption. And some national GOP figures have threatened to punish MLB by removing its exemption from federal antitrust laws. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.

But for all the hysteria and the actual crackdown attempts lawmakers have enacted, even conservatives know that most of the hand-wringing over cancellation is performative. CNNs AJ Willingham pointed out how easily anti-cancel culture zeal can break down, noting that although the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was called America Uncanceled, the organization wound up removing a scheduled speaker who had expressed anti-Semitic viewpoints. And Fox News fired a writer last year after he was found to have a history of making racist, homophobic, and sexist comments online.

These moves suggest that though they may decry woke hysteria, conservatives also sometimes want consequences for extremism and other harmful behavior at least when the shaming might fall on them as well.

This dissonance reveals cancel culture for what it is, Willingham wrote. Accountability for ones actions.

CPACs swift levying of consequences in the case of a potentially anti-Semitic speaker is revealing on a number of levels, not only because it gives away the lie beneath concerns that cancel culture is something profoundly new and dangerous, but also because the conference actually had the power to take action and hold the speaker accountable. Typically, the apocryphal social justice mob has no such ability. Actually canceling a whole person is much harder to do than opponents of cancel culture might make it sound nearly impossible, in fact.

Its true that some celebrities have effectively been canceled, in the sense that their actions have resulted in major consequences, including job losses and major reputational declines, if not a complete end to their careers.

Consider Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, and Kevin Spacey, who faced allegations of rape and sexual assault that became impossible to ignore, and who were charged with crimes for their offenses. They have all effectively been canceled Weinstein and Cosby because theyre now convicted criminals, Kelly because hes in prison awaiting trial, and Spacey because while all charges against him to date have been dropped, hes too tainted to hire.

Along with Roseanne Barr, who lost her hit TV show after a racist tweet, and Louis C.K., who saw major professional setbacks after he admitted to years of sexual misconduct against female colleagues, their offenses were serious enough to irreparably damage their careers, alongside a push to lessen their cultural influence.

But usually, to effectively cancel a public figure is much more difficult. In typical cases where cancel culture is applied to a famous person who does something that incurs criticism, that person rarely faces serious long-term consequences. During the past year alone, a number of individuals and institutions have faced public backlash for troubling behavior or statements and a number of them thus far have either weathered the storm or else departed their jobs or restructured their operations of their own volition.

For example, beloved talk show host Ellen DeGeneres has come under fire in recent years for a number of reasons, from palling around with George W. Bush to accusing the actress Dakota Johnson of not inviting her to a party to, most seriously, allegedly fostering an abusive and toxic workplace. The toxic workplace allegations had an undeniable impact on DeGeneress ratings, with The Ellen DeGeneres Show losing over 40 percent of its viewership in the 202021 TV season. But DeGeneres has not literally been canceled; her daytime talk show has been confirmed for a 19th season, and she continues to host other TV series like HBO Maxs Ellens Next Great Designer.

Another TV host recently felt similar heat but has so far retained his job: In February, The Bachelor franchise underwent a reckoning due to a long history of racial insensitivity and lack of diversity, culminating in the announcement that longtime host Chris Harrison would be stepping aside for a period of time. But while Harrison wont be hosting the upcoming season of The Bachelorette, ABC still lists him as the franchise host, and some franchise alums have come forward to defend him. (It is unclear whether Harrison will return as a host in the future, though he has said he plans to do so and has been working with race educators and engaging in a personal accountability program of counsel, not cancel.)

In many cases, instead of costing someone their career, the allegation of having been canceled instead bolsters sympathy for the offender, summoning a host of support from both right-wing media and the public. In March 2021, concerns that Dr. Seuss was being canceled over a decision by the late authors publisher to stop printing a small selection of works containing racist imagery led to a run on Seusss books that landed him on bestseller lists. And although J.K. Rowling sparked massive outrage and calls to boycott all things Harry Potter after she aired transphobic views in a 2020 manifesto, sales of the Harry Potter books increased tremendously in her home country of Great Britain.

A few months later, 58 British public figures including playwright Tom Stoppard signed an open letter supporting Rowlings views and calling her the target of an insidious, authoritarian and misogynistic trend in social media. And in December, the New York Times not only reviewed the authors latest title a new childrens book called The Ickabog but praised the storys moral rectitude, with critic Sarah Lyall summing up, It made me weep with joy. It was an instant bestseller.

In light of these contradictions, its tempting to declare that the idea of canceling someone has already lost whatever meaning it once had. But for many detractors, the real impact of cancel culture isnt about famous people anyway.

Rather, they worry, cancel culture and the polarizing rhetoric it enables really impacts the non-famous members of society who suffer its ostensible effects and that, even more broadly, it may be threatening our ability to relate to each other at all.

Its not only right-wing conservatives who are wary of cancel culture. In 2019, former President Barack Obama decried cancel culture and woke politics, framing the phenomenon as people be[ing] as judgmental as possible about other people and adding, Thats not activism.

At a recent panel devoted to making a nonpartisan Case Against Cancel Culture, former ACLU president Nadine Strossen expressed great concern over cancel cultures chilling effect on the non-famous. I constantly encounter students who are so fearful of being subjected to the Twitter mob that they are engaging in self-censorship, she said. Strossen cited as one such chilling effect the isolated instances of students whose college admissions had been rescinded on the basis of racist social media posts.

In his recent book Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, human rights lawyer and free speech advocate Dan Kovalik argues that cancel culture is basically a giant self-own, a product of progressive semantics that causes the left to cannibalize itself.

Unfortunately, too many on the left, wielding the cudgel of cancel culture, have decided that certain forms of censorship and speech and idea suppression are positive things that will advance social justice, Kovalik writes. I fear that those who take this view are in for a rude awakening.

Kovaliks worries are partly grounded in a desire to preserve free speech and condemn censorship. But theyre also grounded in empathy. As Americas ideological divide widens, our patience with opposing viewpoints seems to be waning in favor of a type of society-wide cancel and move on approach, even though studies suggest that approach does nothing to change hearts and minds. Kovalik points to a survey published in 2020 that found that in 700 interactions, deep listening including respectful, non-judgmental conversations was 102 times more effective than brief interactions in a canvassing campaign for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Across the political spectrum, wariness toward the idea of cancel culture has increased but outside of right-wing political spheres, that wariness isnt so centered on the hyper-specific threat of losing ones job or career due to public backlash. Rather, the term cancel culture functions as shorthand for an entire mode of polarized, aggressive social engagement.

Journalist (and Vox contributor) Zeeshan Aleem has argued that contemporary social media engenders a mode of communication he calls disinterpretation, in which many participants are motivated to join the conversation not because they want to promote communication, or even to engage with the original opinion, but because they seek to intentionally distort the discourse.

In this type of interaction, as Aleem observed in a recent Substack post, Commentators are constantly being characterized as believing things they dont believe, and entire intellectual positions are stigmatized based on vague associations with ideas that they dont have any substantive affiliation with. The goal of such willful misinterpretation, he argued, is conformity to be seen as aligned with the correct ideological standpoint in a world where stepping out of alignment results in swift backlash, ridicule, and cancellation.

Such an antagonistic approach effectively treats public debate as a battlefield, he wrote. He continued:

Its illustrative of a climate in which nothing is untouched by polarization, in which everything is a proxy for some broader orientation which must be sorted into the bin of good/bad, socially aware/problematic, savvy/out of touch, my team/the enemy. ... Were tilting toward a universe in which all discourse is subordinate to activism; everything is a narrative, and if you dont stay on message then youre contributing to the other team on any given issue. What this does is eliminate the possibility of public ambiguity, ambivalence, idiosyncrasy, self-interrogation.

The problem with this style of communication is that in a world where every argument gets flattened into a binary under which every opinion and every person who publicly shares their thoughts must be either praised or canceled, few people are morally righteous enough to challenge that binary without their own motives and biases then being called into question. The question becomes, as Aleem reframed it for me: How does someone avoid the reality that their claims of being disinterpreted will be disinterpreted?

When people demand good-faith engagement, it can often be dismissed as a distraction tactic or whining about being called out, he explained, noting that some responses to his original Twitter thread on the subject assumed he must be complaining about just such a callout.

Other complications can arise, such as when the people who are protesting against this type of bad-faith discourse are also criticized for problematic statements or behavior, or perceived as having too much privilege to wholly understand the situation. Remember, the origins of cancel culture are rooted in giving marginalized members of society the ability to seek accountability and change, especially from people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, power, and privilege.

[W]hat people do when they invoke dog whistles like cancel culture and culture wars, Danielle Butler wrote for the Root in 2018, is illustrate their discomfort with the kinds of people who now have a voice and their audacity to direct it towards figures with more visibility and power.

But far too often, people who call for accountability on social media seem to slide quickly into wanting to administer punishment instead. In some cases, this process really does play out with a mob mentality, one that seems bent on inflicting pain and hurt while allowing no room for growth and change, showing no mercy, and offering no real forgiveness let alone allowing for the possibility that the mob itself might be entirely unjustified.

See, for example, trans writer Isabel Fall, who wrote a short story in 2020 that angered many readers with its depiction of gender dysphoria through the lens of militaristic warfare. (The story has since become a finalist for a Hugo Award.) Because Fall published under a pseudonym, people who disliked the story assumed she must be transphobic rather than a trans woman wrestling with her own dysphoria. Fall was harassed, doxed, forcibly outed, and driven offline. These types of cancellations can happen without consideration for the person being canceled, even when that person apologizes or, as in Falls case, even when they had little if anything to be sorry about.

The conflation of antagonized social media debates with the more serious aims to make powerful people face consequences is part of the problem. I think the messy and turbulent evolution of speech norms online influences peoples perception of whats called cancel culture, Aleem said. He added that hes grown resistant to using the term [cancel culture] because its become so hard to pin down.

People connect boycotts with de-platforming speakers on college campuses, he observed, with social media harassment, with people being fired abruptly for breaching a taboo in a viral video. The result is an environment where social media is a double-edged sword: One could argue, Aleem said, that theres now public input on issues [that wasnt available] before, and thats good for civil society, but that the vehicle through which that input comes produces some civically unhealthy ways of expression.

If the conversation around cancel culture is unhealthy, then one can argue that the social systems cancel culture is trying to target are even more unhealthy and that, for many people, is the bottom line.

The concept of canceling someone was created by communities of people whove never had much power to begin with. When people in those communities attempt to demand accountability by canceling someone, the odds are still stacked against them. Theyre still the ones without the social, political, or professional power to compel someone into meaningful atonement, but they can at least be vocal by calling for a collective boycott.

The push by right-wing lawmakers and pundits to use the concept as a tool to vilify the left, liberals, and the powerless upends the original logic of cancel culture, Ibrahim told me. It is being used to obscure marginalized voices by inverting the victim and the offender, and disingenuously affording disproportionate impact to the reach of a single voice which has historically long been silenced to now being the silencer of cis, male, and wealthy individuals, she said.

And that approach is both expanding and growing more visible. Whats more, it is a divide not just between ideologies, but also between tactical approaches in navigating those ideological differences and dealing with wrongdoing.

It effectuates a slippery-slope argument by taking a rhetorical scenario and pushing it to really absurdist levels, and furthermore asking people to suspend their implicit understanding of social constructs of power and class, Ibrahim said. It mutates into, If I get canceled, then anyone can get canceled. She pointed out that usually, the supposedly canceled individual suffers no real long-term harm particularly when you give additional time for a person to regroup from a scandal. The media cycle iterates quicker than ever in present day.

She suggested that perhaps the best approach to combating the escalation of cancel culture hysteria into a political weapon is to refuse to let those with power shape the way the conversation plays out.

I think our remit, if anything, is to challenge that reframing and ask people to define the stakes of what material quality of life and liberty was actually lost, she said.

In other words, the way cancel culture is discussed in the media might make it seem like something to fear and avoid at all costs, an apocalyptic event that will destroy countless lives and livelihoods, but in most cases, its probably not. Thats not to suggest that no one will ever be held accountable, or that powerful people wont continue to be asked to answer for their transgressions. But the greater worry is still that people with too much power might use it for bad ends.

At its best, cancel culture has been about rectifying power imbalances and redistributing power to those who have little of it. Instead, it now seems that the concept may have become a weapon for people in power to use against those it was intended to help.

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What is cancel culture? How the concept has evolved to mean very different things to different people. - Vox.com

On Friday evening, New York Post journalists will gather at a Lower Manhattan watering hole to toast Laura Italiano. The invitation reads, Possible computer crime charges of aiding and abetting a Twitter trend by alleged social media influencer Laura Italiano. The silver-penned yarn spinner is expected to plead Not guilty, citing her lack of technological savvy, and duck jail time thanks to her deep contacts on both sides of the bench.

Current and former staffers are still gobsmacked by Italianos resignation. In a series of tweets last week, she announced she had quit after more than two decades at the rakish Rupert Murdoch tabloid. The Kamala Harris storyan incorrect story I was ordered to write and which I failed to push back hard enough againstwas my breaking point, Italiano told her followers on April 27. The Post responded with a statement: The New York Post does not order reporters to deliberately publish factually inaccurate information. In this case, the story was amended as soon as it came to the editors attention that it was inaccurate.

The piece ended up on the front page of at least one of the Posts April 24 print editions. Cover stories are usually bragging rights, but this one turned out to be more like a scarlet letter. First published online the previous evening, the article suggested that taxpayers had footed the bill for the distribution of Harriss 2019 childrens book as part of a welcome kit given to migrant children at a Southern California shelter. In reality, there was evidence of only a single copy of the book, Superheroes Are Everywhere, on a single cot inside the Long Beach facility, and it turned out to have been gifted as part of a local donation drive.

The Post later took the story off of its website and republished it with an editors note acknowledging the error. But that didnt happen before Republican politicians and conservative medialike the Posts corporate cousin, Fox Newsran wild with the apocryphal yarn, dishing it out as red meat for the anti-Biden crowd, and elevating it to the podium of the White House press secretary. After the truth materialized, via a Washington Post fact-check, Murdochs Post was treated to a healthy serving of crow. And Italianos reputation, despite her penitent departure, was covered in mud. Sweetie, you LIED, snapped one of the random Twitter critics. On CNNs State of the Union this past Sunday, Jake Tapperreferred to Italiano as a so-called journalist, though not by name. It was embarrassing and demoralizing, a Post staffer told me. This was devastating to everybody, another agreed.

The episode appears to reflect larger tensions at the Post. Sources characterized it as a symptom of the intense and ever-growing pressure to crank out the type of cheap content that gets devoured online, especially now that the Post says it is profitable for the first time in eons. That said, Im told this particular story was assigned for print. But stories that traffic in the culture wars, fearmongering, and general outragelike the manufactured Harris scandal, or the vaccine-hysteria the Post recently injected into Americas bloodstream, before doing a 180 with a pro-vax front pagetend to perform well in the clickbait economy. Theres more bang for the buck when such stories can be quickly slapped together with little or no original reporting.

The childrens-book article was conceived based on a Reuters photograph. No one I spoke to was able to confirm precisely how everything went down, but one version of the backstory is that the item began as an extended photo caption and snowballed into the ensuing shit show; another is that Italianos original marching orders were to look into the Reuters image. Theres a lot of sympathy for Italiano, who is highly regarded among her peers, but even sympathetic sources acknowledge that she is not blameless. (Reached on her cell, Italiano declined to comment.) Overall, people just sound really bummed about the whole thing, and about the state of the Post in general. One disenchanted staffer said, The Post has always been a balancing act of catering to the masses and the elites. Lately, it feels as if everything is now for the masses.

The imbroglio unfolded in the wake of a recent leadership change. The new top brass is Keith Poole, imported from Murdochs British tabloid operation. Poole is credited with supercharging The Suns flailing website, and is now tasked with charting the Posts digital domination. Previously, Poole worked for more than a decade at the rival Daily Mail, whose massive online mojo is the envy of competing tabloids everywhere. If they see something at the top of the Mail, theyve gotta get it too, a former Post journalist said. Overall, I think thats kind of what got to Laura, and the fact that she was getting hammered over this story. Another one of Italianos erstwhile colleagues told me, What happened to her is making me sick. I think she became the latest victim of this insane culture-war moment, where the right is desperately searching for something nuts to go at Biden about, and the left is completely punishing and unforgiving.

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This Was Devastating to Everybody: Inside the New York Posts Blowup Over a Bogus Story at the Border - Vanity Fair