In a much quoted tweet, Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has defined (“defined”) “cancel culture” as follows:

We define cancel culture as “the measurable uptick, since roughly 2014, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or *would be* — protected by the First Amendment.”

That’s from a tweet posted in 2022, but Lukianoff has repeated that “definition” many times since then. I’ve seen it in FIRE’s Facebook posts as recently as yesterday.

Just to be clear, then: as far as FIRE or Lukianoff are concerned, a “cancellation” in the relevant sense is a termination, disinvitation, de-platforming, or punishment of any kind for speech that is legally protected by the First Amendment. And “cancel culture” is the supposed “uptick” in this activity since 2014, relative to some unspecified baseline.

Here are some very clear cases of “cancellation” that fall directly within Lukianoff’s “definition”:

1. A child says something that invites the disapprobation of her parents, and is punished.
2. A job applicant applies for a job, says something that invites the disapprobation of the interviewer, and fails to get the job.
3. An employee says something that elicits the disapproval of a manager, and fails to get a promotion.
4. An employee says something that elicits the disapproval of Human Resources, and is fired without cause.
5. One friend or lover says something that offends the other; the offended person breaks things off with the would-be offender, and they never speak again.
6. One spouse divorces another after discovering the other’s sexts to a third party.
7. One person lies to another. The liar is caught and ostracized.

I generated and typed up these seven examples in less than a minute. Give me an hour, and I could probably generate about a hundred similar examples. Give me a day, and allow me to generate permutations of the above (and maybe pay me $20/hr), and I could probably generate a thousand.

What does that prove? One or both of the following:

(a) Either cancellations by Lukianoff’s definition are extremely ordinary phenomena with little ideological valence that have essentially been with us since the dawn of time, or
(b) Lukianoff’s definition is far too broad to capture what he has in mind, and is therefore useless to do so.

Neither options helps him. If (a) is the case, there’s nothing unique about cancellations, and little reason to think that they constitute a “culture” that’s come into existence since 2014. If (b) is the case, Lukianoff’s definition fails, and it’s frankly unclear what he’s talking about. Since I think (a) and (b) are both true, I think Lukianoff’s claims are vulnerable to both criticisms.

In order for Lukianoff to prove the existence of “cancel culture,” he would have to identify a non-arbitrary baseline such that the specific sorts of cancellations he has in mind somehow quantitatively swamp ordinary cancellations of the kind I’ve listed so as to constitute a qualitative category called “cancel culture,” a culture of specifically ideological cancellations wildly different from ordinary cancellations of the kind I’ve described.

Good luck with that. Just consider my example (4), regarded not as a discrete example, but as a general category of examples, viz., people fired because they said the wrong thing to someone in a position of power over them at work.

In the US, with a few very ad hoc (and hard-to-enforce) exceptions, employment is subject to the at-will employment doctrine. The at-will doctrine says that a person can be fired “at will” by his or her employer, for any reason or none, with or without notice, with or without documentation of cause. In other words, you can literally be fired on the spot for saying anything. What you say may well be legally protected by the First Amendment, but that won’t help you in the workplace.

Consider the implications of at-will employment for on-the-job speech. It doesn’t matter how innocuous or true the claim you’ve made. You can be fired for it. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t said anything. You can be fired for being silent at the wrong time. It doesn’t matter if you said the right thing at the right time. You can be fired for saying it in the wrong tone of voice. It doesn’t matter if you said the right thing at the right time in the right tone of voice. You can be fired for saying it anyway, simply because the relevant person didn’t want to hear it when you happened to say it. The at-will doctrine protects sheer caprice in the workplace, and caprice can be used to punish speech acts in a variety of ways, including termination.

The at-will doctrine has been in force in US employment law since at least 1900, probably since well before then. So we’re talking about at least 120 years of at-will terminations applicable to virtually every employee at virtually every place of employment in the United States–a lot of people in a lot of places over a long period of time. It defies credulity to think that only a few or none of these took place because someone said the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time. In any case, anyone who wanted to throw out claims about “upticks” would need data one way or the other.

What we are being asked by people like Lukianoff to believe is that they have measured an “uptick” in, say, wrongful terminations since 2014 that qualitatively exceeds all of the wrongful speech-inspired terminations that have taken place since 1900, and that these wrongful terminations constitute a special category of their own, namely “cancellations” of a specifically ideological sub-type (albeit of a sub-type that Lukianoff et al can’t seem to define, and whose distinctive importance they can’t seem to explain).

Lukianoff gives no evidence of having tracked non-ideological terminations across all places of employment in the US even since 2014, much less since 1900, or 1890, or 1875, or whatever. Obviously, he gives no evidence of having tracked events of types (1)-(3) or (5)-(7) in my minute-long survey, either, much less the hundreds or thousand examples I could have generated had I spent the (pointless) time doing so. But that’s what would be required to demonstrate the existence of an “uptick” of the relevant kind. It’s a lot of work, and work of a kind that can’t be accomplished by viral tweet.

Here is my challenge to anyone who believes in the existence of “cancel culture” by Lukianoff’s definition: show us the data. Go out into the world, and gather data from 1900 to the present inclusive of all speech-acts that have led to significant adverse consequences for anyone. Then narrow the focus from roughly 2014 to the present. Then provide a serviceable definition that captures the sub-type of cancellations that you regard as the specifically problematic, ideological variety justifying contemporary anti-cancel-culture usage. Then show us that these special cancellations constitute an “uptick” so large that their existence amounts to a culture of its own, requiring the use of a special category of its own, “cancel culture.” If you can do (all) this, you’ll have justified your claim that “cancel culture” exists. So far, defenders of the Lukianoff-type haven’t done that, or come close to doing so, and there’s no good reason to think that they can.

I don’t deny that there is a problematic form of “cancellation” out there, that certain ideologues have gotten addicted to it, and that something has to be done about it. What I would say is that the ideologues opposed to it (a la Lukianoff and FIRE) have done an exceptionally poor job of defining it, of making verifiable claims about its scope, and above all, of explaining why it deserves the distinctive, outsize rhetorical attention they’ve given to it given the utterly quotidian nature of the thing they’re attacking (at least taking Lukianoff’s “definition” at face value). Ideological ramifications aside, “cancellation” is not a new phenomenon. People have been imposing adverse consequences on one another for speech for as long as there has been speech. Some of this is coercive, some not; some wrongful, some not.

There is no reason why cancel culture of the ideological sort Lukianoff has in mind should swamp the attention devoted to (say) ordinary at-will terminations of a non-ideological variety. It is as unjust to be wrongfully terminated because you’re a professor who’s said something ideologically taboo in the classroom as it is to be wrongfully terminated because you’re a business analyst who’s rubbed your project manager the wrong way with a hard-to-palate criticism, or a janitor who takes an “overly adversarial tone” in conversations with management, or an employee with a grating tone of voice that people would rather not hear. Either way, you’ve been wrongfully terminated over something you’ve said. What exactly is the big difference supposed to be? Ideological controversy may be sexier than non-ideological life, but unemployment is unemployment, whether sexy or not.

And lest we over-emphasize victimization-through-punished-speech-act, let’s remember that some speech deserves the imposition of adverse consequences. People should not be permitted to lie, cheat, commit fraud, threaten one another, break promises, defame one another, falsely accuse one another, or verbally promote injustice with impunity. Arguably, all of these things, though promoted by speech, are injustices, and arguably injustice of any kind deserves push-back. Push back is not pleasant for perpetrators of injustice, but it’s not meant to be. Life–to quote a great philosopher–is not a TV dinner.

On the whole, contemporary claims about “cancel culture” confuse these issues. They operate with an ill-defined term whose meaning is a moving target, but supposedly “known” to everyone. They make sweeping, unverifiable claims about the scope of the phenomenon referred to by this term. They treat the term as though it was obvious that it referred to something specifically ideological, to be distinguished from cancellations of the ordinary variety–e.g., ordinary appointment-cancellations (however disruptive), broken promises, divorces, non-ideological ostracisms, ordinary terminations of employment, ordinary acts of speech-inspired vindictiveness–when it obviously is not. And then they’ve weaponized discourse on the topic so that any adverse consequence imposed on anyone for anything becomes a “cancellation” of some invidiously totalitarian variety, even if the cancellation in question (e.g., de-platforming open, explicit fascists) is motivated by a desire to undercut incipient totalitarianism.

It’s a juggernaut that really needs to stop. So another challenge for Lukianoff et al: either come up with a better definition of “cancellation” and “cancel culture,” or admit that you haven’t produced a defensible one. But stop pretending that everything about “cancel culture” is so obvious. It isn’t.