During 2003 and 2004, before being awarded early tenure for award-winning scholarship, there were two attempts to cancel me at the university where I work. The first came in response to my opposition to the Bush regime’s pending military action against Iraq. The campaign was organized by the College Republicans, who lost their faculty sponsorship for the audacity of their stunts.
The second came in response to a paper I gave at an academic conference in New Orleans critical of the damage caused to the Fox River in Northeastern Wisconsin by the paper mills’ dumping of PCBs and their refusal to clean up the mess they made. The latter campaign was much more serious, as it involved the deployment of astroturf groups organized by polluting corporations.
In both instances, the faculty rallied around me and I weathered the storm. I was tenured and remain at my institution. I’m coming up on a quarter century of research, teaching, and service.
It is perhaps poetic, then, that, as I approach the end of my career (a few more years left, but retirement is looming), that there would once more be an attempt to cancel me, only this time from the left (or what claims to be the left these days). Readers can find the link to the story at The College Fix: “UW-Green Bay students want professor fired for alleged racism, transphobia.”
It’s ironic that the example of my alleged racism is a piece I wrote in 2008 covering Jesse Jackson’s criticism of Barack Obama’s dog whistling about what bigoted whites see as the problems with black people. This is what would have back then been called an anti-racist take (since then, as I have shown on this blog, antiracism has come to represent anti-white sentiment).
My reflex to defend black Americans from the stereotypes Obama and others use is in part a product of my parents, who dragged me into Civil Rights activism in my diapers. My parents were activists in the movement and, later, the antiwar movement. My father, a Church of Christ preacher, was radicalized by the events of the 1960s and turned to liberation theology. We marched together. We went to black churches. We broke bread with black Americans.
When I was a toddler—this would have been in 1964—we had to flee a small-town church in West Tennessee after receiving death threats from the Klan, many of whom turned out to be congregants. Then in 1970, we were thrown out of a church in Sharpsville, Tennessee. We lived in the preacher’s house, a tiny cinderblock dwelling supplied by the congregation. I remember the night the mob came to the house with baseball bats and ax handles to drive us out.
I know what it looks like to see a principled man canceled because he stood straight and strong for social justice (which meant something very different then than now).
It is, for this reason, weirdly appropriate that the Jesse Jackson blog post was selected, which the students had to find by searching the Internet archives while my blog was down for maintenance. I imagine a conversation that went like this: “I’m offended by Professor Austin.” What offended you? “I found an article from 2008 where he quotes Jesse Jackson using the N-word.” Wait, you went searching for an example of him using an offensive word and had to go all the way back to 2008 to find him quoting somebody who used an offensive word? “Yes. And I was offended.” Could it be that you wanted to be offended?
These circumstances provide me with yet another opportunity to emphasize the things that make the American Republic so great and to identify the perils she faces in perpetuating her greatness into the future, namely threats to the constitutional rights to free conscience, press, and speech—and to remind people of points I have made over the years in my essays to this blog and in speeches at teaching and workshops:
While there is a right to engage in offensive speech, there’s no right not to be offended. If there’s a cost associated with offensive speech, then speech is not free. If I say something offensive, then you may ignore it, agree with it, or object to it. Ignoring, agreeing, or objecting to offensive speech costs nothing. If you cancel or punish offensive speech, there is a cost imposed. Then speech isn’t free. If you desire that a speaker be cancelled or punished for his utterances or writings, then you cannot claim to believe in free speech.
College students don’t need to announce their opposition to free speech. They need only seek the cancellation of the speaker. The desire speaks for itself. It is an authoritarian desire. Tragically, the illiberal impulse is rampant among our youth.
One thing that the proponents of cancel culture will tell you is that getting somebody disciplined or terminated from their job isn’t cancel culture but “accountability culture.” They’re saying this about the actions taken against me in this case. Actually, accountability culture is making people answer for their misdeeds. Making arguments and expressing opinions is not wrongdoing. Therefore, there is nothing for which to be held accountable. The premise is fallacious.
What’s happening here is an instantiation of cancel culture. Cancel culture is an illiberal impulse to harm a person’s reputation or career, or to intimidate them into silence, because some individual or group doesn’t like the things he says.
Usually, those who claim to be offended or hurt by speech are actually worried that others may hear or read words that may enlighten those they believe are under their charge. They feign offense and harm to punish those whom they find disobedient or insufficiently deferential to their beliefs to make an example of them. It’s a power trip. At its core, it’s authoritarianism.
Islamic clerics and their mobs attack people for blasphemy not because they’re offended by seeing a cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. They exploit the cartoon as an instrument to chill speech critical of Islam. The goal of Muslim cleric and his mob is to Islamize society. Mocking the prophet undermines that goal. Attacking those doing the mocking is the attempted negation of the undermining.
As I have shown on these pages, Islamists developed the term “Islamophobia” to smear those who criticize the doctrine. It’s the same spirit as the accusation of “transphobia.” Like Islam, transgenderism is an ideology. For the true believer, no one is allow to criticize the ideology because the zealot seeks to make it total, to make others conform to doctrine. You may recall Christopher Hitchens rhetorically asking his audience: “What are the first five letters of totalitarianism?”
Knowing this, the totalitarians make themselves out to be victims, crying that the criticisms make them “unsafe.” This is the culture of “safetyism” that college administrators have incubated and socialized.
These are the children of DEI. “Safety” as a euphemism for “speech I don’t like” is not something that occurs organically—certainly not everywhere at once. Safetyism is a teaching, a preachment. One implication of safetyism is that “speech is violence” (so is silence, we are told). The “safe space” is then constructed and used to suppress problematic voices.
This is the “inclusion” piece of the authoritarian project of the corporate state. Because everybody is to feel included, facts and opinions that make them feel excluded are forbidden. To be sure, not everybody is to feel included. If a point of view is disallowed, then those who express it are excluded—and reported. In this way, the cult of safetyism transforms youth into a Stasi-like apparatus, where the names of those who speak forbidden words are shared with the authorities and the media.
There are obvious features of cultural revolution at work here, as well, such as mobbing members of the older generation. Those who dwell in the adult world have been here before. These phenomena are organized by forces above young people, other adults who use them as a means to an end. Again, I have written about these things on Freedom and Reason for many years and at great length, so I won’t belabor the point.
These developments are precisely why irreligious and other heretical forms of speech are essential for preserving a free and open society. Those who would cancel others for their speech are those who desire a closed society where they get to choose what speech is uttered and thus what thoughts are thunk. No man is worthy of the job of commissar.
I might as well as have been called an “infidel” or “witch.” Neo-religions function the same way as the traditions ones, perhaps the only difference being the level of intensity; because they are younger, the new religions are eager to establish hegemony over everyone. They’re desperate for their worldview—which rests on impossible things—to be validated. This is why the constant demand for “affirmation”: it betrays their doubt and insecurities.
I don’t like controversy and conflict. But nobody owns me, and I am not accountable to the trans activist. I am an autonomous person with my own mind. I do what I do because, while the truth has its own integrity, without people prepared to defend it and advance it, it will become lost to consciousness.
Without truth, there is only power. In some real sense, as we used to say in the South, the devil has the power you give him (the sociologist Max Weber famously gave us the secular version in defining obedience to authority). Giving zealots power is irresponsible in light of their desire to close minds and societies. They wear cat ears to appear harmless. Cat ears are one of the insignia of the New Fascism.
Finally, we need to say this out loud: pulling one’s pants down in public is a vanity project, often a manifestation of clinical narcissism. When people have accomplished little in life, they lean on identity, as if who they are gives what they say some special significance. But few people beyond their ilk really care that they think they have superpowers. When others affirm them, know that most are acting in bad faith—and snicker behind their backs because they are ridiculous. They put up a front because they don’t want to have to deal with the temper tantrum—or the agents of DEI.
In reality, compassionate and rational people pity those who think identity matters. They think to themselves, as we say in the South, “Bless their hearts.” Me, I don’t fear the agents of DEI or their minions. I understand what this is about. And now you do, too.
freedom and reason 