Most Cancelled of them All
Who's been wiped off the public record for wrongthink?
In the last couple of days, two Americans asked variations on my headline question.
First, this anonymous account:
Then, academic Darren Beattie:
Both men are Americans, so they got (largely) American answers. Milo Yiannopoulos was a popular choice, as was Alex Jones. However, a number of people pointed out that Jones is still very much in public consciousness (including “Schwabe”, the anonymous questioner):
There’s also the point that Jones has a defamation ruling against him, in a jurisdiction notorious for its weak libel and slander laws. This reasoning applies a fortiori to people like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, with their criminal convictions. Unlike victims of cancellation, those three actually received due process of law. If you’ve gone through the courts, I think that puts you in a separate — in some ways more fortunate — category.
Schwabe’s list is worth thinking about:
Not being American, some of these names were unfamiliar — which sent me off searching (both the public internet and my personal correspondence).
This served to remind me that I had heard of all of them (albeit dimly) at one point or another. I’m most familiar with Gavin McInnes, who interviewed me in early June 2018, when my third novel came out. I still have our email correspondence, and records of our mutual retweets. This was part of the usual blizzard of publicity that occurs when a book by a prominent author is published.
Stefan Molyneux, a Canadian, really has been quite thoroughly disappeared. Because I used to work in more-or-less libertarian policy circles and have been a policy wonk in parliament, he was somewhat familiar to me. My main recollection of him concerns repeated advice not to hit your children, but it does seem he did go very odd later, after I’d left wonk-world and moved on to covering Brexit.
Some of the other Americans listed in response to both questions have also been unpersoned. As in, I’ve not seen hide nor hair of them for donkeys’ ages, and I’ve covered this beat for years.
The US-specific nature of the suggestions in both men’s mentions led me to this point:
And shortly thereafter, to this:
Various suggestions were offered, but the frontrunners appear to be Tommy Robinson and Graham Linehan. The latter’s fall was especially precipitous: from beloved comedy writer to substacker booted off social media. However, Robinson was debanked, which is a deeply sinister way to shut someone up. What next? Turn off Robinson’s gas or electricity in the middle of winter?
People really do need to think their thoughts through to the end on this “accountability” or “consequences” nonsense. Harsh criticism is fine — one of my three novels was very controversial when it came out, and folk let me know exactly what they thought of me, in print, on the telly, and even in person. People routinely disagree with things I’ve written. Such is a columnist’s lot; if everyone started agreeing with me I’d start to worry.
The individuals who wrote to the Law Society in 2012 trying to get me disbarred are another matter, however. My novels and commentary have nothing to do with my ability to practise law.
To be fair, debanking is impossible to do fully in the UK, because everyone has a right to a Post Office account. That said, Post Office accounts were originally designed so money (including benefits) could be paid to people in remote parts of the country (like the Outer Hebrides and Shetland), and are historically associated with long-term poverty.
In the US, debanking’s effect can be existential.
Generally, being upper-middle-class is a prophylactic against full cancellation. The person may disappear from the public eye, but they still have an (unmortaged) property, investments, and other assets. Robinson’s social class genuinely made him more vulnerable.
In Linehan’s case, I do wonder if (back in the day) his agent failed to negotiate what lawyers call “residuals”. These are sums of money a scriptwriter is paid every time a programme he wrote (or co-wrote in Linehan’s case) is repeated on telly. If my experience is any guide, this isn’t always done, which means a scriptwriter gets a large lump-sum up-front, but if he isn’t financially canny, that money isn’t properly invested.
However, even the upper-middle-classes can be done down. One (UK) tweep reminded me of another American, geneticist James Watson, who doesn’t appear on either of the two lists above. Watson was forced to put his Nobel Prize medal up for auction after being cancelled for drawing a link between IQ and race and suffering a dramatic drop in income. I suspect, based on comments to the Financial Times, that he needed the money to pay his house off. Once again (based on experience) “I want to buy a painting” is often code for “this is how much I owe”.
Watson was very fortunate the individual who bought the medal then returned it to him, so in that sense the story has a happy ending.
More broadly, we cannot have a situation where the only people with freedom of speech are upper-middle-class Shire Tories with significant investments and no job from which they can be sacked. The J. K. Rowlings of the world cannot be expected to carry, like Atlas, the weight of liberal disagreement on their shoulders.
Mind you, I’d still like to know who’s the most cancelled person in your jurisdiction.
Answers on a postcard, please.
Yep, a lot of people are under the impression that I am paid for repeats of Father Ted and The IT Crowd but nope. It wasn't so much my agent's fault as that was the way it was done after TV Channels decided they couldn't afford paying the kind of sums that David Croft and Jimmy Perry received for Dad's Army repeats. I received no money for my show 'Count Arthur Strong' going to Netflix, because I was still paying off the money I got for writing it for the BBC (who didn't repeat it, because again they didn't want to pay me for it). Thank God for Substack
Geoffrey Rush seems to have been pretty cancelled.