Cancelling the cancellers
Conservatives embrace cancel culture in failed assassination fall out
Calls for deportation of a comedy band over a failed joke and efforts to get ordinary working-class people sacked for saying terrible things out loud…
These are the kinds of actions one might expect from a progressive woke cancel culture mob, but in the wake of the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump, it’s conservatives who have led the charge to cancel their political enemies over speech.
The irony is thick, given that some of those doing the cancelling are known for their prior staunch efforts to protect free speech, raising questions about whether some wish protect free speech in principle, or just the speech they agree with.
Assassination joke misfire
In Australia, a storm in teacup developed this week after a tasteless joke seeded clouds of discontent within conservative ‘freedom’ circles.
If you haven’t heard, Kyle Gass, of comedy band Tenacious D, quipped "Don’t miss Trump next time” as a 64th birthday wish while on stage in Sydney on Sunday night. It was in very poor taste, though the audience hooted and laughed.
Being that the duo is famous for taking irreverent silliness all the way to 11 on the dial, with antics like running on the beach in boxers and unitard in their cover of Chris Isaacs’ Wicked Game, and their peak silly song ‘Tribute’, you might expect a collective eyeroll in response to Gass’s misstep.
But these are woke cancel culture times, defined by the dogged, humourless commitment to interpreting jokes as serious statements of intent, and the hysterical belief that words are tantamount to violence.
Gass’s bandmate Jack Black issued a formal apology and announced the cancellation of the band’s Australian tour. Gass soon apologised himself, and has reportedly been dropped by his agency.
But that was not enough for upset Trump supporters Down Under, who enthusiastically called for Tenacious D’s deportation from the country.
“Tenacious D should be immediately removed from the country after wishing for the assassination of Donald Trump at their Sydney concert,” said Senator Ralph Babet of the United Australia Party in statement, viewed over four million times on X.
“This was not a joke, he was deadly serious when he wished for the death of the President…Anything less than deportation is an endorsement of the shooting and attempted assassination of Donald J Trump, the 45th and soon to be 47th President of the United States,” he said.
Senator Babet reasoned that as Australia had wrongly deported Novak Djokovic in 2022 over his anti-Covid vaccination views, we should now also deport Tenacious D.
“Australia wrongly locked up Novak Djokovic and deported him because he allegedly undermined public trust in vaccination. Allowing Tenacious D to remain in Australia after calling for the death of a President is unthinkable, and it affirms the weakness of our current Prime Minister,” Senator Babet said.
Commenters praised Senator Babet for his “leadership.”
Left-wing news site Crikey was quick to point out the apparent double standard:
“This is the same senator who in April refused to take down graphic footage of the attack on Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel from his X account because: “Without free speech our nation will fall”. Late last year the senator sent Communications Minister Michelle Rowland 152 “postcard-style” submissions regarding the draft Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill “on behalf of members of the public”, like the following:
Simon Collins of the West Australian similarly called out the hypocrisy of “blowhards” calling for Tenacious D’s cancellation and deportation, people who at the same time “proclaim to be advocates for free speech.” That said, Collins failed to mention the central role he allegedly played in getting Perth comedian Corey White’s run of shows cancelled at the 2021 Fringe Festival over an offensive joke.
Raising the hypocrisy stakes even higher, conservative influencer Chaya Raichick used her ‘Libs of TikTok’ platform (with over 3.2 million followers on X) to doxx minimum-wage workers and get them fired for wishing the Trump shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had aimed better.
Raichick boasted on her Substack,
“In fact, because of Libs of TikTok, TEN DERANGED LEFTISTS have already been FIRED from their jobs because we showed the world that they support murdering President Trump.”
It is uncertain how many of these ten were public figures, but at least some of those fired are reported to be ordinary working-class Americans, including Home Depot worker Darcy Waldron Pinckney, who ill-advisedly posted to Facebook, “To [sic] bad they weren't a better shooter!!!!!”
This effort has been enthusiastically supported by Riachick’s followers. “We got another one!” posted one commenter under a post doxxing a New Jersey Education Association employee for expressing her disappointment on social media that the shooter missed.
Yet, Raichick and her supporters previously complained loudly when Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz doxxed her, with Raichick calling Lorenz’s actions “abhorrent.”
Protected speech vs. incitement to violence
In the US and Australia, as in most Western liberal democracies, free speech is protected. The US has robust speech protections under the First Amendment, while Australia has the less robust implied freedom of political communication.
However, where speech causes, or is likely to cause harm, governments put legal limitations on speech rights. While the proliferation of hate speech and online harm bills is a testament to the ballooning definition of harm in Western academia and policymaking, incitement of physical violence is a foundational interpretation of the limit to free speech.
In both Australia and the US, speech that incites someone to commit a crime of violence is against the law, and in the US it is a felony to threaten the life of a president.
But not all statements expressing a wish for harm are a ‘true threat.’ In a 1971 interview with Flash Magazine, Groucho Marx quipped, “I think the only hope this country has is Nixon’s assassination,” but he was not arrested.
In contrast, David Hilliard of the Black Panther Party was charged in 1969 - and then acquitted in 1971 - for stating publicly before a crowd President Nixon was “responsible for all the attacks on the Black Panther Party nationally,” adding “We will kill Richard Nixon.”
Asked to explain the different treatment of the two cases despite the similar rhetoric used by Marx and Hilliard, US Attorney James L. Browning, Jr. responded,
“It is one thing to say that "I (or we) will kill Richard Nixon" when you are the leader of an organization which advocates killing people and overthrowing the Government; it is quite another to utter the words which are attributed to Mr. Marx, an alleged comedian. It was the opinion of both myself and the United States Attorney in Los Angeles (where Marx’s words were alleged to have been uttered) that the latter utterance did not constitute a "true" threat.”
In other words, context matters.
Bad jokes or incitement?
Conservatives going after people wishing that the Trump assassination attempt had been successful, whether joking or otherwise, claim that their comments are “call[s] to political violence,” to use Senator Babet’s phrase.
But jokes like Gass’s birthday wish wouldn’t meet the legal threshold for incitement to violence, says James Allan, Professor of Law at the University of Queensland.
“A reasonable person would have to understand it as actually trying to incite violence,” Professor Allan told me. “I think he was just being a virtue-signalling leftie. I don’t think he actually intended to counsel violence, and I suspect most people wouldn't take it that way.”
Dr Reuben Kirkham of the Free Speech Union of Australia (FSU) agrees that Gass’s joke would not qualify as incitement under the law in New South Wales, where Gass said the bad thing.
“Outside of incitement provisions focussed on specific protected characteristics, the person must intend that the offence be committed. A joke at a comedy event is unlikely to meet this standard, let alone to the 'reasonable doubt' standard,” Dr Kirkham said, echoing Professor Allan. “It might be in poor taste, but taste is thankfully not something that the law polices,” he added.
But Tony Nikolic, Director of Sydney law firm Ashley, Francina, Leonard & Associates told me he believes that Gass’s comment was “clear-cut incitement and should be called out.”
“Free expression is a cornerstone of democracy. However, rhetoric that crosses into inciting violence or hatred can have dangerous consequences,” Nikolic said. “We have laws to address that in Australia and they should have been used to indict the offender.”
Conservative game theory
Professor Allan said that while he doesn’t think prosecution or deportation are appropriate in Gass’s case, there are social consequences for saying “idiotic things” from a public platform.
“I definitely wouldn't support [Gass]. His agent has dropped him. People don't have to associate with people who say idiotic things. If he came out with a grovelling apology…I'd be inclined to say, OK, fine.”
Nevertheless, he warned that cancel culture writ large is not a good strategy for anyone who truly values protecting free speech.
"The problem is you go down the cancel culture route and you become as bad as the other side,” Professor Allan said. “I understand that there's a certain sort of game theory element, that if they do it to us, we need to do it back to them, and in some areas I agree with that.
“But with speech, it is better not to play the cancel game. The other side reveals how they actually think. We want to know that. We should fight against our views being cancelled and fight hard, but not make the error of cancelling theirs. The more they talk, the more people can see the insipid, doctrinaire foundations to their views.”
Others disagree.
In an article called ‘In Defense of Cancel Culture’ in the American Spectator this week, Nate Hochman argued that the right should adopt a new, much more aggressive strategy in dealing with its political opponents: mutually assured destruction (MAD).
Hochman’s thesis is essentially that the left has debased the political discourse to such a degree that playing nice and principled is a losing game. Instead, he counsels “a short-term escalation to force a long-term de-escalation.”
This means punishing progressives for their bad behaviour in the same way that they have done to conservatives until they understand, “at a visceral level, the penalties for the system that they themselves constructed.” He reminds readers that roughly half of Democrats wanted to fine and imprison unvaccinated Americans in 2022 (in the US, Covid vaccination is a highly partisan issue).
Once progressives feel that the negatives of the cancel culture they’ve fostered outweigh the positives, said Hochman, “then, and only then, will the incentives truly change.”
Commentators in the blogosphere and on social media have offered similarly revanchist takes.
“No one wants to live a world characterized by (metaphorical) nuclear exchanges, but nuclear exchanges, once they become part of the universe of discourse, and [sic] held off only by deterrence, not decency,” wrote author Devon Erikson on X.
Pseudonymous Substacker
catalogued a selection of such nuclear exchanges, including this “short list of how "Turn the other cheek" absolutely didn't moderate the Left”.“The left has been absolutely ruthless and relentless in its pursuit of total monolithic discursive purity,” he inveighed, suggesting that so long as conservatives are surgical in their use of political violence to achieve their goal - “ending leftist violence” – all will be well. “We can be magnanimous after victory.”
Doxxing ordinary people puts harm in ‘digital granite’
Free speech purists will find the MAD strategy a hard pill to swallow - especially those who have paid a price to take a principled stand against cancel culture.
Former corporate journalist Alison Bevege is one of these people.
In 2020, during the first year of the Covid pandemic, Bevege was asked to work on an article on ‘Bunnings Karen,’ after footage circulated online of an unmasked woman arguing with Bunnings staff over her refusal to wear a mask inside.
But then, “it wasn't enough just to kind of shame Bunnings Karen - they wanted me to find out her name, to try to find her on social media. And I didn’t want to do that,” Bevege told me, explaining that there should be a distinction between how we dole out social consequences to public figures and how we deal with private citizens. She left the Daily Mail soon after.
“You know, cancel culture has two components. One component is the shaming of the act, where you might share the video of some stupid thing that someone did, and everyone can laugh at it. I don't really have a problem with that. That's part of how we reinforce social norms,” said Bevege.
“But it's the second part of cancel culture that I don't like. And that is when you try to make that person really suffer by, for example, trying to get them to lose their job or trying to make it stick to them forever in a permanent way, like trying to damage someone with it.”
Bevege, who now publishes on her own Substack, Letters From Australia, and drives buses, gave the example of a prospective employer googling the name of a person who’s been shamed online.
“When you have a member of the public, you don't know if that person's had a bad day, if they're mentally ill, if they've just lost their parents, if they're drunk or on drugs. But when you name someone online it's in digital granite. It’s there forever, and can really affect their lives.”
This is where Bevege draws the line. In MAD game theory though, this is the acceptable cost of “ending leftist violence,” if the victim is a Home Depot worker wishing for a successful presidential assassination.
Deportation should not be used for censorship of debate
In the case of public figures like Gass doing dumb things on stage, Bevege said people should by all means “rip the shit out of him…and don't go to a show,” but that deportation would be “ridiculous.”
“I like Senator Babet because he's really stood up for the vaccine injured. But we’ve got to stop deporting and banning people for speech,” said Bevege, recalling the time polarising UK personality Katie Hopkins was deported from Australia for joking online about planning to breach Covid quarantine rules and for describing the lockdown as a "hoax".
Nikolic and Dr Kirkham also raised concerns over migration laws being used as a tool for censorship. Nikolic has been a vocal critic of the conservative Australian Government’s deportation of star tennis player Novak Djokovic in January 2022 for his anti-Covid vaccination views. And, Dr Kirkham pointed to the delay of Irish womens’ rights and gender critical activist Graham Linehan’s visa application earlier this year while Australian authorities conducted a “character assessment,” despite Linehan having no criminal record.
“Freedom of speech exists for the views that you don't like, and you have to tolerate those views,” said Bevege.
Unfortunately, an increasing number of conservatives seem to be running short of tolerance.
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A thoughtful, nuanced take, as always. Thanks Bek.
Good ending. Toleration of contrary opinions is difficult (especially when those views cause *actual* harm, e.g. "vaccines are safe and effective"), but in cases like this the totalitarian that lives in all our pockets comes into crystal clear view.