Those who are condemning this letter should ask themselves why a strategy to end genuine injustice is being applied to people who state facts. It’s the misuse of cancel culture that is the problem. There are two elements to its misuse: deliberate and inevitable.
It’s not wrong to call someone out for racism or similar. But people have seen the success that calling someone out for racism can have - shaming publicly, targeting employers, getting people fired - and have realised they can apply that strategy to anyone and anything who doesn’t agree with them if they do it cleverly. I think it’s deliberate. And I think people here will be able to recognise certain groups who see advantages in using those strategies.
But I also think it was inevitable. What is acceptable in public discourse changes and shifts. But the more you take an extreme action to solve a problem - even if it’s deserved - the more likely people will lose sight of what they’re doing in the frenzy and inevitably it will cross the line. People become so caught up with their sense of injustice that they can’t step back and see what they’re attacking might be something perfectly reasonable, or accurate: the fact there are only two sexes for example.
Because people are taking a sledgehammer to knock down a house, they think they can just keep using it to crack a peanut. The sledgehammer never gets put down, just goes from smashing one thing to another. I imagine it’s satisfying; smashing things like that can be. But at the end of the day they’re left standing on a pile of rubble and peanut shells and want to convince the rest of us it was all worth it.
And that leads me to my final point. Left wing parties have struggled to get elected because they don’t get the electorate. Labour lost the “Red Wall” because of stuff like this. Normal, regular people get fed up with it. They just will not get elected unless they accept that. If those in opposition and their supporters - certain columnists for example - keep lecturing people about how they’re supposed to support things like cancel culture and if they don’t they’re bad people, then those people will continue to shun them. They need to play the game, but they’re too busy sitting on their ideological high horse on the opposition benches. It might seem lofty from there, but it ain’t much bloody use is it?