Glenn Greenwald was cancelled from the Harper's Letter warning about "cancel culture"

On July 7, 2020, a group of 150 elite writers and academics, ranging from David Brooks to J.K. Rowling, signed their names to a letter in Harper's Magazine crying the alleged censorship of so-called "cancel culture" which is to say, angry voices on the Internet who disagree so vehemently with views they consider abhorrent that they use their right to free expression to boycott those views. "The Letter," as it's come to be known, was spearheaded by Thomas Chatterton Williams, and gestures broadly towards a few high-profile instances of "cancelling" without actually committing to any details or specific arguments beyond vague platitudes about "free speech"; supposedly, most of the signatories did not even read the final content of the actual letter before agreeing to add their name in support of these generic notions.

About a week later, evenmore writers and media professionals most of whom were far less renowned than Chomsky or Brooks or Rowling, including myself presented "A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate," that addressed the specific instances alluded to in the original The Letter, while also pointing out the plainly transparent irony that, if you're a marquee name publishing a letter about a censorship inHarper's fuckingMagazine, you are, by definition, not actually being censored or cancelled. If you're a famous intellectual or writer, and people get pissed at you for, say, repeatedly spewing transphobic bullshit, and they stop buying your books because we live in a capitalist society and they do not want to financially support rhetoric that they consider to be hateful or harmful, then that's not censorship. Read the rest