Underestimating Cancellation

Contrapoints released a video on her own cancellation and cancel culture more broadly.

I don't know how CP manages to produce an hour and forty minutes of talking head content and make it thoroughly engrossing. I watched it at 2x speed but still. I commend Natalie for the sober-minded and humble analysis, while also standing her ground.

Something I've only recently appreciated is how much I was living in fear of being cancelled, broadly speaking. Some of you may be familiar with how much of a public figure I am, mostly by luck in being at the right places and knowing the right people. Overall, it's relatively low on the totem scale, primarily because I've taken precautions over the years.

But I want to highlight one incident from a year ago that I experienced. I was part of a leftist gun rights group that had suddenly gained the attention of some random amateur sleuths. I had resigned from the group in protest after an incident (See the inaugural episode of the podcast for more info) but a week after that happened someone found out my identity and doxxed me on Twitter. At the time, it was the only search result for my name.

I've been wrangling with years of chronic un/under-employment and really depressed as a result. I was very diligent with keeping my internet presence relatively clean for fear of alienating prospective employers with all the weird shit I engage in. The doxing was horrifying to me. I think I had what can be described as a panic attack, or something very close to it. I started to think through the possibilities and how my already shitty job prospects would tank even further. I drugged myself to numbness and binge-ate my way through that ordeal. It was bad.

That "cancellation" ended up resolving itself in a startlingly clean way (the guy who doxed me happened to have emailed me, then took down the post and apologized after I gave some context). But in several points through 2019 I've had some appearances on national news networks. Tucker Carlson showed a picture of me on Fox News and referred to my so-called affiliations with domestic terrorists. My name was never mentioned, but despite the infinitely higher visibility, I felt at peace.

What had changed in the intervening time is that I now run my own practice as a solo attorney. And because of the field I specialize in (public defense) I'm nearly immune to cancellation. I don't have a boss or supervisor, and my clients don't give a fuck about what Twitter thinks about me. It has been tremendously peaceful and I hadn't realized how much of a burden that fear had imposed on me all these years.

What Natalie said about how "cancellation" is only effective against the powerless really hit home. That seems tremendously unjust to me. I've only been able to immunize myself from that fear through social, communal, and (crucially) professional and financial independence. Not everyone has that privilege.