For a Libertarian Cancel Culture
On December 1, 2024, Elon Musk decreed: “Cancel culture has been canceled.” Musk had his reasons for saying this. After all the mainstream media, the Deep State, and the Big Tech had tried to cancel Trump in every way, he had just won a landslide victory in the presidential election. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also a target of massive cancellation for years, helped in this Trump victory and was nominated as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Musk himself was also instrumental in this victory, by buying Twitter/X and giving room to many – but not all – expressions of ideas that were previously canceled on this social network. But the main reason was that Trump’s victory marked a tremendous defeat for Wokism, which had until then been the main motivator of dissident cancellations and is the main declared enemy of Musk – who lost a son to this perverse ideology.
But is Cancel Culture really over? And would this end be something good or bad? For a long time we have seen the entire right wing, from conservatives to libertarians, complaining about the so-called Cancel Culture as an unacceptable attack on freedom. However, in addition to Cancel Culture not being an assault on freedom, it is the only way to achieve and maintain a free society.
The cancellation of a person occurs as follows. When someone is caught in an act or expresses an opinion that is considered intolerable by an organized group, this group starts a campaign to expose that person as someone socially inadequate, putting pressure on their personal relationships and even demanding that their employer fire them. Any person or company that continues to maintain relationships with the canceled party is also threatened with being canceled. If the state does not get involved – as happened in Trump’s cancellation and the censorship of social media – and no coercion is used, cancellation is compatible with libertarian ethics – even if that person loses friends, relationships, job, business, and social media profiles.
The problem is that Cancel Culture was dominated by progressives and was being used against correct and healthy ideas and, in this way, was moving us away from a free and dignified society. For example, until recently, saying that a man does not become a woman by declaring that he is a woman – and vice versa – led to cancellation. The threat of cancellation has led this absurd idea to dominate educational institutions, media conglomerates, the corporate and financial world, advertising agencies, sports federations, Hollywood and governments, with devastating social effects, especially for children who are victims of mutilations and irreversible hormone treatments.
However, not only can we, but we must use Cancel Culture against these wrong and harmful ideas. Anyone who says that a man turns into a woman by declaring himself to be a woman – and vice versa – deserves and should be canceled. He must be boycotted, both professionally and socially. Of course, everyone should be free to say what they want, but at the same time, everyone should also be free to dissociate themselves from people who defend false, degenerate, and pernicious ideas, or simply ideas considered unpleasant.
When analyzing Cancel Culture from the reverse perspective, it is difficult to understand how it gained a bad reputation among the right. It seems like a case of “throw the baby out with the bathwater”, rejecting a good method because of a dirt that is contaminating it. Much aversion was aroused by the successive cancellations of people who were only telling the truth and defending adequate and decent ideas. However, the procedure, limited to the private social boycott, is not only valid, but necessary, especially for libertarians engaged in the culture war. Hans-Hermann Hoppe teaches us that privately owned capitalism and egalitarian multiculturalism cannot be combined and
“… that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social II discrimination” and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives.”
The session in which Hoppe expounds this strategy is considered controversial by many libertarians, especially when he speaks of “physically removed”, but it is an undeserved polemic, the result of misinterpretation, because he was talking about private neighborhoods, the relationship between tenants and landlords with prior covenants between private property owners, and did not advocate any aggression against property rights. On the contrary, he fully defends the right to private property and its corollary right to discriminate. And “if one wants to reach the goal of a private property anarchy (or a pure private law society)” he proposes that “true libertarians must embrace discrimination” by exercising the right to evict whomever they want from their property. ” Without continued and relentless discrimination, a libertarian society would quickly erode and degenerate into welfare state socialism.”
In opposing Cancel Culture, Philipp Bagus et al. deals with academic freedom, and indeed, no idea should ever be canceled in universities or in any teaching environment. By the way, when discussing in the classroom the concept of time preference of homosexuals, Hoppe himself was one of the first canceled by microaggressions – an event that put an end his career as a university professor. However, although we must promote the study and discussion of transgenderism, Nazism, communism, democracy and all kinds of spurious and harmful ideas, we can and should also cancel those who defend these ideas. Actually, it is more important to cancel a teacher who espouses these ideas than, for example, a plumber or doctor, as teachers have the potential to negatively influence hundreds of students per school year. In fact, the more influential a voice is, the more fundamental and urgent its cancellation.
Recently, libertarian institutions that have always opposed Cancel Culture have been criticized for canceling one of their oldest and most prestigious members. But cancellation is not only a valid mechanism, but it is necessary for libertarians to cancel any Zionist who advocates land theft, ethnic cleansing, and the murder of innocents. Hoppe says that sometimes “a small dose of ridicule and contempt may be all that is needed to contain the relativistic and egalitarian threat,” but if one insists on espousing sadistic and genocidal ideas, “in civilized society, the ultimate price … is expulsion, and all-around ill-behaved or rotten characters (even if they commit no criminal offense) will find themselves quickly expelled from everywhere and by everyone and become outcasts, physically removed from civilization. This is a stiff price to pay; hence, the frequency of such behavior is reduced.”
The only problem with non-aggressive Cancel Culture is that it was dominated by progressives. We should only use it for good and cancel anyone and everyone who advocates multiculturalism, egalitarianism, Zionism, “hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism.”
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