Alright, now that I have posted all of Beer Run and advertised my interview with Terry Bartley, I will now completely destroy my reputation and write about the dreaded Cancel Culture.

I will begin by laying my ideological cards out on the table: I’m a recovering Republican. This is a member of the Harvard Federalist Society speaking here. I started reading the National Review when I was in 8th Grade. What changed? Well, with me, nothing really. I still believe what I used to: free markets, a strong national defense, and the radical idea that judges should interpret the laws the way they were written. The problem is that the GOP changed what they believe, which is now protectionism, isolationism, and that Democrats and John McCain eat children. I voted Libertarian in 2016 and haven’t stopped.

So what’s my opinion on Cancel Culture? I’m not a fan, but it’s nothing to whine about. In every age, there are certain things you can’t say without becoming a public pariah, even where free speech is operative. Try talking about sex the way a normal person does today during the Victorian age and see where it gets you. George Carlin famously said there were seven words you couldn’t say on television. Today, if he did the same bit, all those words would be racial slurs, which I think counts as an improvement given that Carlin’s words were merely crude, not demeaning. Our age is as sensitive to race as past ages were to sex. That’s not obviously wrong.

Still, the flip side of that is it makes having a public debate about something really difficult. When I was in college, professors talked about the need for this nation to have an honest conversation about race. It’s difficult to have an honest conversation about anything when you make so many opinions taboo, particularly when those opinions aren’t really outside the norm.

There’s a reason I keep using the Victorian era as an example: a failure to have an honest conversation can have real consequences. Take a look at some of the anti-masturbation devices of that time (but don’t blame me for the nightmares). Right now we’re having a public debate about transgenderism which could potentially have a wide-ranging impact on the way our society works, from public restrooms to women’s sports to women’s prisons. That debate is marred by the fact that one side says there’s no debate to have. For some people, any suggestion that transgender women can’t be treated the same as biological women is akin to endorsing eugenics. This convinces nobody, but it shuts a lot of people up.

On the other hand, Kanye. Yeah, Kanye. I don’t think I need to say much more. When you make your white supremacist handler and Alex Jones look like the reasonable people in the room, you’ve achieved a new level of offensiveness. It was really something seeing Jones, who declared that parents who lost their children to a school shooter were crisis actors, trying to moderate someone else’s opinions. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.

But I think it encapsulates what’s wrong with our political conversation. Amidst all this political correctness, it doesn’t stop a multi-platinum recording artist from saying “I Like Hitler” live. All the outrage in the world didn’t stop Donald Trump from claiming a judge was biased against him because the judge was Mexican (he was born in Indiana), or that he saw Muslims in New Jersey cheering after 9/11, or denying he lost the 2020 election, or telling people to sterilize their insides with bleach, or meeting with Kanye and his groyper twerp buddy. Gosh, there are so many examples.

All the political correctness in the world hasn’t kept these people from being racist in public. Maybe, it’s because that kind of stigma doesn’t work against people who don’t have any shame. Honestly, that was probably part of Trump’s appeal. I have to admit I left the GOP because I couldn’t understand how Trump fit into the party’s values unless we really were the racists and idiots the other side always accused us of being. He wasn’t even consistently a Republican. Trump has been a registered Democrat in this century.

Were we the racists that we were accused of being? Some of us were. I underestimated how much race played into the opposition Obama faced. However, I wonder if a lot of support for Trump came from the theory that he could beat the censoriousness with his pure shamelessness. Political correctness is really just the attempt of the left side of the aisle to use the Overton Window ( a shorthand term for the bounds of acceptable political speech) as a weapon to knock the other side out of the debate. Maybe what people were looking for in 2016 was someone who would drive a steamroller right through that window and shatter it into a million pieces. Conservatives started to believe that society was better off without an Overton Window.

Once again, what’s the problem? It didn’t work. The past six years have seen both the normalization of white supremacists like Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes speaking at mainstream conservative events and the widespread condemnation of figures like J.K. Rowling for taking very mild positions against admitting transgender women to women’s prisons. The terms “Alt-right” and “Woke” came into being at roughly the same time in human history. Trump’s offensiveness did nothing to stop the censoriousness of the Left, and their censoriousness did nothing to make him less crude and bigoted.

You may call this BothSidesism, and that’s true, to the extent that humans are flawed regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. However, I would argue that what I’ve described are the two polar opposite attempts of both sides of the aisle to drive the other out of existence, and neither are effective. Liberals believe they can make racism and homophobia disappear if they just stigmatize enough. Conservatives think they can defeat the stigma by being patently offensive. They just talk past each other.

We end up right where we began: of course, society has limits on speech considered acceptable. It always has. That’s true even where there is a First Amendment (which only applies to the government anyway). If you make those limits too restrictive, it makes important conversations difficult. Make it too loose, and things that really ought to be settled, like whether or not Nazis are evil, suddenly are up for debate. What’s the way forward? If you’re a liberal, the next time someone says something offensive, maybe consider just letting it go and moving on. If you’re a conservative, the next time someone gets canceled in public, consider the idea that maybe they deserve it. Some people ought to be pariahs. The fact that you have to explain that to “conservatives” is a depressing fact of modern life.

That’s my totally boring, totally offensive opinion for the day. Let’s hope I don’t get canceled.