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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.

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

Over the course of the pandemic, the stark political divide in the US around implementing public health measures has at times been as perplexing for public health officials as the virus itself.

On the one hand, the former Republican president Donald Trump avoided making any clear directives about Covid-19 while he was still in office last year, and the conservative talkshow host Tucker Carlson likened mask-wearing for children to child abuse. On the other, something as simple as easing restrictions on outdoor masking has revved up a new heated debate among cautious residents of Democratic cities.

In the United States, our federalist approach to government creates problems. And Im not recommending we do away with it, but I do think we have to come up with creative solutions to responding to epidemics, said Ricky Bluthenthal, an associate dean at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. He pointed out that while scientific expertise and emergency response lies at the federal level, states and local governments are in charge of implementing them.

But though the specific circumstances of this moment and country seem unique, some experts say that another, time-tested approach could have helped cut through some of this polarization and the culture wars: harm reduction.

The principles of the harm reduction model can differ, but focus on some core concepts. It accepts that some people will continue harmful behaviors. It aims to build a healthy community without judgment or coercion, providing other health-focused services. It also tries to minimize risky behavior by carefully tailoring messages, and choosing trustworthy messengers to approach each community instead of relying on broad government guidance.

While harm reduction has largely been used to combat drug abuse and HIV/Aids, experts say it could inform the coming months, and how the US tackles other health crises in the future.

Since the idea of a Covid-19 vaccine was introduced last year it has been met with skepticism in some quarters. Almost half of Republican men surveyed said they are not planning to take the Covid-19 vaccine. And many other Americans hesitant about the vaccines have been seen as anti-vaxxers a term otherwise reserved for a very small population of people who believe inoculation is harmful.

To combat this, public health officials have largely pushed studies and fact-based arguments in their attempt to enforce mask mandates and vaccines. And Democrats have campaigned on the idea that they are the party of science.

But through the lens of harm reduction, that approach could backfire.

Whether or not you believe the misinformation or belief someone holds, that belief is real to them, said Emily Bancroft, a public health expert who consults with governments and local partners across Africa to deliver healthcare through the non-profit Village Reach. We think people just need to hear the facts. No, you need to acknowledge these feelings are real.

Bancroft gave the examples of a widespread belief in witchcraft in Malawi. When setting up a prenatal health hotline for expectant mothers, health workers would often encounter these local beliefs that contradicted evidenced-based health guidance. But rather than attempting to dispel these ideas, the workers were trained to acknowledge them, and then advocate for healthy practices throughout the prenatal and postpartum process.

Recently, the media outlet Vice talked to Americans who were scared about getting the Covid-19 vaccine for various reasons, including side-effects or how recently the trials happened. When asked why many of them eventually changed their minds, it wasnt facts or science, it was knowing someone who was immunocompromised, or even watching devastating news from other countries on TV.

In other harm reduction models, combating risky behavior can mean trying to engage people in an intervention without judgment, whether or not they comply with the specific guidance.

In recent years, for example, public health workers have shifted from trying to get people who suffer from substance use disorders to cease all drug use and instead try to minimize risky behaviors such as sharing needles, which can spread infection and viruses. For example, a harm reduction group in Baltimore houses syringe service programs, but also ancillary services to build trust, said Susan Sherman, a Bloomberg professor of American health in the department of health, behavior and society at Johns Hopkins and co-director of the Baltimore HIV laboratory.

In the case of Covid-19, the interventions would be different, but could focus on having people wear masks in the highest-risk situations, instead of most of the day, or focusing on vaccinations for only the most vulnerable groups.

Setting up masks versus business is a false dichotomy, just like sterile syringes versus drug treatment, is false dichotomy, Sherman said, pointing out that many people who were ardently opposed to wearing masks throughout the pandemic also felt that Covid restrictions were unnecessarily harming the economy and business owners.

Working with a population that is distrustful of the government, or authority, also requires taking culture and history into account when choosing which messenger and medium to inform the public.

In Israel, a significant population of ultra-Orthodox Jewish families did not want to get vaccinated, partly because of unfounded conspiracy theories, according to NPR. One ultra-Orthodox government consultant, Ari Blumenthal, found a tragic but effective window of opportunity. When a young, pregnant woman died after refusing a vaccine he asked the family for permission to share her story. The family, too, started to speak publicly about their loss. It humanized the risk, and the community started to get vaccinated at higher rates.

A similar strategy reached some of the last people in India who were refusing to get the polio vaccine. Some Muslim communities were fearful because of widespread distrust of the government and rumors about the vaccine containing pig products, which they do not consume. It was only when science-minded imams, or religious leaders, stepped in and publicly vaccinated their own children that things began to change.

Finding those messengers in the US can prove a challenge, said Sheila Davis, the CEO of Partners in Health who holds a doctorate in nursing. While many countries have built a system of community health workers over time, the US relies mainly on doctors offices or clinics, making it hard to disseminate more personalized information.

Daviss organization has attempted to fill some of those gaps. In high-risk communities such as agricultural Immokalee, Florida, or neighborhoods of Chicago they set up community health teams to figure out the needs of the population. She also pointed out how quickly vaccination programs were carried out in Navajo communities because the tight-knit communities already had built-in communication systems and leaders who they relied on for information.

They were very clear who was the most vulnerable in their communities, and who needed the most support, she said.

While much of US Covid-19 interventions have been focused on masks, social distancing and vaccines, those working with high-risk communities say that the best public health models take into account the whole community and their needs beyond the specific virus.

Davis said getting people vaccinated against the virus is only one part of the picture in communities like Immokalee Partners in Health also provided food assistance, mobile rapid testing, financial aid and other social services to 35,000 households.

Its providing tangible, concrete things making sure were addressing the whole person, she said. That includes making things like vaccines and masks as easy to obtain as possible.

Similarly, Shermans group in Baltimore offers showers, clothing, reproductive health consultations and other services to women suffering from drug abuse to keep them engaged in the system and get a sense of their needs. Harm reduction organizations are nimble, they know how to ramp up their services and meet people where they are, Sherman said.

This approach could also serve to address the economic concerns families faced during the pandemic, and the frustration with lockdowns and other safety protocols that were sometimes viewed as a threat to livelihoods, income and education. Closing schools, for example, might have been done more judiciously since children remain at low risk for contracting Covid-19.

That has downward impacts schools in other countries were not closed throughout the pandemic. Perhaps that would have gone a long way and wouldve been a neutralizer, Sherman said.

The US is at a pivotal moment in the pandemic. About half of the adults in the country have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, while the virus claims thousands of lives every day in countries like India and Brazil, threatening the progress made across the globe.

In some ways, its not the government, or the virus trends, but communities of people who will decide when the pandemic ends. For example, Joe Bidens administration announced last week that vaccinated Americans dont need to wear a mask when outside as long as they are not in densely populated settings. But even with a greenlight from the highest public office, many vaccinated people in cities like New York, Boston and Washington DC continue to wear their masks outside.

While the political system is not bound to change any time soon, public health experts said there are lessons to make it easier to keep people safe in the coming months.

You have to segment your audience and tailor your message, Sherman said. If we set the foundation, and set the message about liberty centered around the person who could get the virus that could make a difference.

And if were vigilant, the US could even emerge from the pandemic with a stronger network of messengers than it began with, even if disagreement and discord remains.

We can really use this opportunity to build a public health and community workforce that didnt exist before, Davis said. And we may not be able to combat the final percentage [of people who dont want vaccines] but I focus my energy and attention on people who are wanting to try and make a difference.

See the original post here:
How harm reduction models can save US lives in the pandemic - The Guardian

Whatever else, the man is certainly eccentric. He appeared on The Joe Rogan Podcast and took a vexed-looking hit from a pot-laced cigar, launching a thousand memes. (The SEC slapped him with a $20 million fine for joking in a tweet the month before that he would take Tesla private once its share price reached, wait for it $420.) He engaged in a jealous vendetta against a diving expert whod advised the 2018 Thai cave rescue operation. He began dating the influential cool-girl synth-pop star Grimes, infuriating her Bernie-loving young fanbase. They had a child and named him X A-12. (Its pronounced like its spelled.)

Along with his unapologetic dedication to the free market and association with right-leaning figures like Kanye West and Joe Rogan, such incidents have made him a reliable culture-war punching bag. But Musk isnt the first controversial SNL host, nor the most politically fraught Donald Trump himself has hosted twice, once while a presidential candidate. In the early 1990s, a stint from misogynist shock comedian Andrew Dice Clay led to a boycott from (and the eventual departure of) cast member Nora Dunn. But Clay and Trump, provocative entertainers above all else, have far more in common with each other than they do with Musk, an honest-to-God engineer, aspiring space colonist, and the second-wealthiest man on the planet. Its far weirder that Musk is joining the show, as if Carl Icahn or Steve Jobs were suddenly tapped to host American Idol. Perplexity would seem a more appropriate response than outrage.

And yet: the biggest institutions in both comedy and media are disproportionately young, urbane, and progressive. Since 2016, SNL has affixed itself solidly in the firmament of liberal-leaning late-night television through its relentless tweaking of Trump, as well as a series of occasionally bizarre and earnest political statements. Despite SNLs eternal thirst for buzz, turning to an Ozymandias-esque capitalist like Musk would have been an awkward fit even in the cooler atmosphere of the pre-Trump era. (It didnt help, of course, that he piped up on Twitter immediately after his hosting gig was anounced, floating the idea of a presumably derisive sketch about Woke James Bond.)

Even as mainstream comedy is increasingly wracked by concerns about equity, representation, and punching up or down, SNL occasionally betrays its genesis in the more anarchic world of post-Watergate 1970s showbiz. With that legacy in mind, bringing on Musk is simply the price of doing business that is to say, staying in headlines like the one affixed to this story.

The loathing Musk inspires from the left is uniquely intense and personal, not unlike that directed toward his fellow techno-optimists in the Democratic Party like Andrew Yang and Pete Buttigieg. Musk shares their cardinal sin: that of cringe, an obliviousness toward, or unwillingness to acknowledge, the tastemakers who define pop culture at its highest level which increasingly includes policy positions, like police abolition or massive wealth redistribution. Musk has remained stubbornly committed to a brash and vague tech-bro libertarianism that was already wearing out its welcome among cultural elites in 2011, and seems fully retrograde in the world of 2021.

Musks arc as a public figure serves as a neat lesson in how and where the battle lines of our current culture wars came to be drawn.

***

Before evaluating his cultural impact or status, its worth asking: What does Elon Musk actually do?

Arriving in the United States from his native South Africa (by way of Canada) in the early 1990s, Musk was at first like any number of other young techies striving to make it in Silicon Valley during the early days of the World Wide Web. An early success with an internet city guide startup led to co-founding X.com, one of the first federally-insured online banks, which eventually led to a merger with the competitor Confinity itself co-founded by Peter Thiel, who would later become a far more direct liberal antagonist than Musk himself.

Confinity boasted a money-transfer service of which you might have heard: PayPal. Both Musk and Thiel are members of a cohort known as the PayPal Mafia, men who used their money and connections from the service to launch companies like YouTube, Yelp, and LinkedIn. After a bout of corporate musical chairs Musk departed the company in 2000, eventually receiving a payout of more than $100 million. That helped him seed the two companies hes still best known for: Tesla, the pioneering electric car company, and SpaceX, the rocket, satellite and aeronautics manufacturer.

But Musk cut a significantly different cultural figure than other 21st century tech tycoons like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Where Bezos brought us same-day delivery of cat food and laundry detergent, and Zuck developed a forum for meeting other Ravenclaw Clinton Supporters In Peoria, Illinois (CLOSED GROUP NO LURKERS), Musks investments are capital in the truest sense of the term requiring construction and manufacturing at a mass scale, while looking forward, not backward like so many of those who hope to re-industrialize our increasingly service-oriented economy.

Some of the ire Musk has earned is serious. Black workers at Tesla accused the company of a culture of racism. Various investigations revealed unsafe conditions at the companys futuristic, highly-automated factories, and Teslas have experienced a series of high-profile safety incidents that have deepened the perception of Musk as a corner-cutting flim-flam artist. Critics have also accused him of hypocrisy for his relentless cheerleading of cryptocurrency, the energy-intensive production of which could undermine Teslas ostensibly eco-friendly mission. (Studies find cryptocurrency mining responsible for a miniscule fraction of annual CO2 emissions.)

Theres also the matter of his rabid online fanbase, which treats any affront to their chosen ubermensch as personal and responds in trolling kind. His brand of celebrity is tailor-made to scramble the brains of his detractors: a futurist whose cultural attitudes are stuck in the past; a tech genius who tweets (frequently, nonsense) in the erratic style of a non-digital native; a guy who hangs out with Joe Rogan but is super fired up about the Biden climate agenda. As Insider columnist Josh Barro pointed out amid the initial outcry over his SNL appearance, Musks uncouth attitude and gauche bear-hug of market capitalism frequently blind his liberal critics to how his fundamental mission of scientific and environmental progress is perfectly aligned with theirs.

These contradictions, along with his cultural transgressions and alleged ethical shortcomings as a capitalist, make him a perfect target for the hyper-progressive, image-conscious social media mavens that shape our media landscape.

Its a position shared by a sizable number of Americans, but a decided minority of them. According to a recent Vox/Data for Progress poll, 68 percent [of Americans] say they disagree that its immoral for a society to allow people to become billionaires. Theyre especially warm and fuzzy, as it turns out, when it comes to Musk himself: his net approval rating among the general public is +27 points behind Bill Gates, but ahead of Bezos and Zuckerberg and 52 percent of Democrats see him favorably.

The extent to which SNLs decision to invite him was baffling depends on ones perspective. Inside the bubble the show inhabits and largely embodies, it was a betrayal of core principles. Outside, it was just another celebrity news item about the raffish eccentric who builds rockets and tweets all day about Dogecoin.

Musks actual appearance on SNL, however potentially awkward, will likely result in much less heat and light than the controversy surrounding it. In their definitive oral history of the show, Live From New York, Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller quote the series creator Lorne Michaels on the Dice Clay controversy. You dont invite somebody to your house to piss on him, Michaels said. [T]his person has put themselves in your hands, theyre completely vulnerable, the show only works if they look good, so why would you have anybody over that you dont like? What because you need the ratings? It doesnt make any sense.

And so will Musk be treated, even by the cast members who couldnt conceal their disdain for his presence none of whom, it should be noted, chose to follow in Nora Dunns footsteps and exclude themselves out of principle. The controversy around his appearance reveals the extent of the non-representative filter bubbles that social media has allowed Americans to place themselves in, not least those at SNL who are among Musks critics. They, to echo the apocryphal Pauline Kael comment about Nixon voters, likely dont have a representative number of people in their lives who see him not as a uniquely malevolent entity, but as an entertaining futurist with admitted personal flaws.

In that light, Musk might find himself in an unusual role when he takes the stage at 30 Rock to deliver the shows opening monologue: That of an emissary from reality.

Read the rest here:
How the Internet Turned on Elon Musk - POLITICO

Recently, the Carleton College historian Amna Khalid argued in our pages against what she sees as unproductively bureaucratic or administrative approaches to student demands for social justice and diversity on campus. I spoke with Khalid about her essay and her larger thinking. Here's some of that discussion.

You begin by noting what you suggest is an irony: While many student-activists insist that they are poised against the increasingly corporate logic of the contemporary university, they end up recapitulating and even intensifying it. What happens?

I dont think its primarily the fault of the students. They are operating inside the ber-administrative university. Every complaint on campus has to be filed through an administrative office. So Im not really blaming the students thats the system they know. But I do want to point out that there is a contradiction within their own logic. A neoliberal logic has now suffused the ways in which we think to the extent that we are unable to conceive of alternatives to bureaucratic solutions.

But I also think that as educators it is our responsibility to point out to students where the gaps in their logic are. Thats our job. We must challenge them to help them grow. We must do this responsibly, but I dont think that means handling them with kid gloves.

Some critics have suggested that students own real desire at some very intimate level is for bureaucratic management.

Perhaps. But its more complicated and I think theyre unaware of it. First, I dont think that all students feel this way. Arguably its a minority, albeit a loud one, that is setting the tone here. These are students who feel that theyre entitled to a certain way of being treated. I dont know why that is I really dont. But coming from the outside: I think it is a peculiarly American thing. Id argue that kind of entitlement has been fostered by the growth of the administrative university. Students are told: Youre entitled to a certain standard of well-being, support services, recreational facilities, which is why we must create offices to cater to all these needs.

This entitlement dovetails with what I call debased identity politics. The result is powerful and potent. Theres both a sense of entitlement and a sense of being a victim a dangerous combination.

You mention the quixotic rhetorical goals offered by many university administrations as they try to satisfy the demands of student activists. Another word for quixotic rhetorical goals is cant. Do students ever bristle?

Students are capable of noticing when administrative measures are perfunctory. Often they are further frustrated by this. But their next step is to ask for more administrative solutions. We have lost the capacity to think outside of administrative solutions: Whether its bias-response teams, diversity training, cultural competency or sensitivity training. Initiatives like these debase the very idea of diversity into a meaningless etiquette exercise.

Theres always the risk that an essay like yours will be received as a kids these days lament a sort of debased culture wars piece. But far from just complaining, you offer solutions, like the course of study at Pitt. And what you suggest is, rather than hiring outside consultants or whatever, using the expertise of faculty members themselves.

At Pitt, theyve used their own faculty theyve pooled their intellectual resources in order to understand social-justice problems in not just an academic and abstract sense but also in terms of the local situation. I love it because its truly multidisciplinary. Theyre reading scholarship. Some of that scholarship you might agree with, some you might not. Theres viewpoint diversity that suggests robust engagement. And most of all the course seems to open up conversation and pose intellectual questions as opposed to providing the kinds of pat answers that trainings provide.

A number of universities have created seminars and lecture series. I do worry sometimes that these lecture series are offering only one point of view, which is not that dissimilar from the kinds of training I refer to. My problem with the training model is that it presumes that there is a perfect recipe for doing diversity: Just put in the right ingredients and youll get your pie. Thats not how this works!

Conflict and disagreement are necessary for reaping the benefits of diversity. Engaging with difference engenders discomfort and risk. We have become conflict averse and the fear of causing offense reigns supreme. But you cant do this work without taking the risk of occasionally offending someone, and learning how to forgive. Walking in someone elses shoes is rarely comfortable or pleasant at first. But a novel perspective is its own reward. When you learn that, you become more willing to embrace risk and conflict as positives.

More:
The Review: Hilarious Netanyahus; Diversity Demands; an Interview With Amna Khalid - The Chronicle of Higher Education