Reactions to a Cancellation Campaign

Every time I publicly react to attacks made against me on public forums by cancellation campaigners such as those made recently by fraudulent and widely discredited "antifascist researcher" Shane Burley on various relatively popular anarchist platforms, I get a variety of responses from friends, allies, acquaintances, critics, and others.

Responses are generally as complex as the left is.  They are often deeply at odds with each other, and often full of contradictions that desperately deserve to be explored.  I'm going to assume here a basic familiarity with what a cancellation campaign is, how it is conducted, and what kinds of allegations are involved with this one.  Lots more background info can be found at davidrovics.com/trolls.

I'll try to accurately represent the different types of responses I get in bold, and then I'll share my analysis of this response.

Don't feed the trolls.  You shouldn't respond to their attacks, it only encourages them, and makes them more powerful.

If it were a matter of random idiots with small platforms saying stupid things about people a bit more well-known than they are in order to get attention, I would probably agree.  But when the trolls include published authors and lengthy essays published on relatively popular platforms, there are lots of important reasons to respond to allegations point by point.  If possible, on the same platforms!  Granted that cancel culture-oriented platforms (such as It's Going Down or the Anarchist Federation, among many others) don't tend to believe in the idea that those being attacked having any kind of right to defend themselves in their forums, for lots of different Nexus justifications, these responses inevitably need to be published on other platforms.

Those engaging in cancellation campaigns are trying to exclude people from on- and off-line forums and platforms, trying to ruin lives and destroy careers -- sometimes with great success, other times not so much.  The way they go about doing this is by making allegations, generally in online forums.  The allegations will be made whether we respond to them or not.  How we respond to allegations may or may not improve our situations with regards to those allegations.  But the idea that not responding is somehow always better than responding has no basis in reality of which I am aware.

People who tell me not to respond to the attacks are often people who are not so much part of the Nexus, not aware of the size of the audience my attackers have, or of the impact that cancellation campaigns have on people like me, in terms of cancelled gigs and other very real problems.  For many people, it's only when I respond to the attacks that they hear about them.  Those are not the people I'm writing these responses for.  The attacks are ongoing, whether or not people are aware of them.  I respond to them only occasionally.

Regardless of whether your critics are right or wrong, you shouldn't have doxxed them.

I didn't dox anyone.  This is a pernicious lie, and an intentional one being repeated ad nauseum by my cancellation campaigners.  I exposed a network of mostly anonymous Twitter accounts that systematically work together in cancellation campaigns, all of whom are in regular contact with cancellation campaigners Shane Burley, Spencer Sunshine, and Alexander Reid Ross.  These three cancellation campaigners operate in the open, in public, on Twitter, for all to see.  To dox someone is to reveal their identities and/or their addresses.  I have not done that to anyone.  Associates of these campaigners have, however, done this to me.

You're just doubling down again.  You should admit your mistakes and accept criticism.

People who say this are either unaware of the long background to the accusations here, unaware of past mistakes I have admitted to, or they are on the side of the cancellation campaigners in most or all ways.  For the record, however, to respond to accusations with a principled argument is making a principled argument.  The phrase "doubling down" is one of Shane Burley's favorite pet phrases, and it has no place in the realm of actual debate, which is not what is happening when it comes to false allegations made by cancellation campaigners.

You're a boomer being attacked by the youth, who you don't understand.  You should learn from the youth.

This is a position taken by people who would like to give the impression that the cancellation campaigners represent any kind of mainstream position within the left or anarchist scenes anywhere in the world.  They don't.  They're a fringe, and huge numbers of people deeply oppose what they do, as is obvious to many of us who have been attacked by such people and fought back against this nonsense.  Despite my age (55), I'm deeply enmeshed in global social movements that include people of all ages and other demographics.  Cancel culture is not a youth phenomenon, and opposition to it isn't limited to older people.  This is a myth propagated by supporters of cancellation campaigning.

I don't agree with getting your gigs canceled, but you should not have platformed a Nazi.

This is a very popular position, and I would most emphatically like to encourage people who think this way to rethink their positions here and on a lot of other things.  I appreciate that these folks don't think my life should be ruined because I allegedly interviewed a Nazi.  But there is a massive, gaping flaw in this position, which is that there is this whole concept of "platforming" in the first place.  To be very clear:  I don't agree with your position on the concept of platforming.  We have a fundamental difference of opinion here, and it's not going to go away.  I believe in the importance of communicating with everyone, publicly, including people we might characterize as members of the far right, fascists, and lots of other people many of us might find appalling.  There are a lot of reasons to have these kinds of conversations in public forums.  This is my firm belief, based on experience.  I reject the platform/no-platform concept of reality.

Don't you ever talk or write about anything else?  Are you obsessed with "cancel culture"?

People who put "cancel culture" in quotes are generally part of the Nexus, and are generally deeply involved with cancellation thinking themselves.  Anyone asking if I ever write about anything else is likely someone who is neck deep in cancel culture themselves.  But to the extent that this point is ever made by people with honest intentions:  what happens is in some forums, posts related to cancel culture are widely ignored, whereas in other forums, they get a lot of attention.  Anyone truly interested in what I'm writing about can easily look on my social media feeds or website and see what I've been up to, which is overwhelmingly unrelated to the cancellation campaign against me.

Regardless of the accusations, I don't take Shane Burley seriously because of who he is affiliated with and who he publishes for.

There are lots of reasons to be critical of people who are basically leading a destructive cult.  However, to the many people who write me to say they don't like Shane because he has published for various journalistic outfits that are owned by evil corporations or evil governments, my response is your position is ridiculous.  The whole basic thrust of Shane's cancellation campaigning tends to revolve around the notion of guilt by association.  That is, I'm guilty for associating with certain people Shane says are fascists or antisemites or whatever he has decreed they are.  This is thought crime nonsense.  It's just as stupid to think that in the modern world if someone publishes an article on a website that receives corporate or state funding, they are that state or corporation, and they agree with everything that state or corporation does.  This is the kind of thinking we need to overcome, not embrace because it might be convenient in order to try to make someone like Shane Burley look stupider than he already makes himself look through his cancellation campaigning and daily spewage of lies online.