So let’s back up for a moment. Why did cancel culture of the 2010s strike so many of us as so bad and wrong?

Some of it surely had to do with proportionality: The punishment rarely fit the “crime” (which was almost always debatable).

Some of it surely had to do with changing sensibilities and sensitivities, and a sense that the orthodoxy being enforced was invented yesterday, not a reflection of prevailing sentiments. Thus it was unpredictable: You couldn’t really be sure you weren’t running afoul of the new tyrannical enforcers, because the shift in pieties (or language) had happened practically overnight.

But there was something undergirding it that felt especially stupid: The kids were the enforcers, overthrowing the adults. Not because the adults had exercised bad judgment or shown themselves to be incapable of faithfully executing the roles they’d been given. In some cases, they were canceled as they exercised good judgment: Consider the case of Mike Pesca, a Slate journalist (and, disclosure: my friend) who had been discussing how the publication ought to cover the firing of New York Times writer Donald McNeil, who referred to a racial slur in context on a trip to Peru with high schoolers; could a white person ever write or say nigger in context? Don’t we make a use/mention distinction? Some vocal portion of his workplace apparently disagreed, and he was dismissed after he’d worked there for seven years. It was never about morals, it was never about quality of product being produced; it was about power in the workplace, wrapped up in something that, to the young, resembled morals enough to give them plausible deniability.

Now, something a little different is happening, for which people are using the same name. Professors, teachers, nurses, and doctors who have celebrated the assassination of Kirk are being purged from their workplaces. It’s conservatives swarming this time, phoning employers, making them aware of the misdeeds, asking for their scalps.

Most of me thinks it’s wrong and bad on principle—since I don’t ever want to be fired for my own speech (and thus want to maintain a very wide sense of what we societally tolerate)—but also as a strategy, since I don’t believe conservatives gain very much by weeding out the people with dumb beliefs who are in positions of relatively little power and importance. People have little impulse control and use social media like a diary; I’ll never understand the crying-in-a-car TikTok woman genre, but I’m fine living in a society with people who get off on that. (Also: What even is a position of relatively little power and importance? Teachers and professors are entrusted with impressionable minds. Isn’t this extreme power?)

But a not-that-tiny piece of me sees this as substantively different: Cancel culture grievances were mostly petty and minor, issues that could have been resolved if participants were willing to be 10 percent more charitable toward their perceived opponents, and if bosses were willing to instruct their inferiors to get over themselves. James Damore’s Google memo about heritability of certain traits and brain differences between genders and how to reduce the gender gap among engineers is a good example; anyone who claims to have felt threatened was being an opportunist, looking to amass power and get the hit of collective effervescence that comes from vanquishing an opponent.

Of course, there were also the “offensive” acts that were not really relevant to the workplace, but that the 2010s cancelers implied indicated something about the tainted souls of the powerful: Adam Rapoport, the Bon Appetit editor in chief, who in 2020 handed in his resignation after colleagues dug up a boricua (Puerto Rican)/durag Halloween costume from 2013. Rapoport’s photo was “just a symptom of the systematic racism that runs rampant within Conde Nast as a whole,” said one chef/editor who worked at the magazine, while others alleged black women had been systemically mistreated under Rapoport’s leadership.

With Kirk’s killing, the posters who lose their jobs are saying something actually bad, something that society has long seen as beyond a crossed line; we don’t cheer the killing of people with whom we disagree. This isn’t the Cultural Revolution. We don’t flog people. We don’t put them in stocks in the town square. And we don’t get titillated when a bullet flies into their neck and they spurt out blood and crumple to the ground; it’s gruesome and awful and it happened as a thousand impressionable young people looked on. Looked at one way, this was an insane person committing an extrajudicial act of violence. Looked at another, this was a public execution for the crime of being conservative—which is, apparently, judging by their reactions, what a lot of people had been wanting.

When a working professional can’t manage to exercise self-control and refrain from posting in public about how grateful they are that the assassin had the balls to shoot their shot, you have to wonder about their judgment. It’s perhaps especially odd for professors to say as much. (Don’t they spend their time…speaking their mind…in public?) And is there perhaps some value in maintaining or enforcing a consensus of what types of things lie beyond the pale? I don’t want pedophilia apologists as kindergarten teachers, to use an extreme example; I also probably don’t want a doctor treating me who cheers on the murder of people who think like Kirk.

In general, I trust that reputable employers have done some amount of quality/maturity/professionalism/judgment vetting. Surely celebrating political violence runs afoul of these basic expectations, and that’s what they’re responding to when they fire someone who posted gleefully about Kirk, which is materially different than the made-up social justice dogma that was being enforced before. (It would be better if employers self-policed rather than succumbing to the demands of angry mobs.) We’ve always had taboos, and the taboo against political violence is a strong one worth keeping, not one we should constantly have to renegotiate.

Scenes from New York: Gov. Kathy Hochul, a sort of forgettable, generically bad Democrat who inherited the spot when Andrew Cuomo left in a hurry, endorsed Zohran Mamdani; nobody followed her lead. lol.