Was Candace Owens 'Canceled?'
Trying to pin down the slippery definition of 'cancel culture'
Conservative firebrand, Candace Owens, announced last week that her relationship with Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire had come to an end.
If none of those names mean anything to you, congratulations! You are officially a *mostly offline* person. I suggest that you close this tab, enjoy a glass of something cold, and take a walk. Ideally, somewhere with flowers. Most of this will mean little to you.
However, if you nodded knowingly through that first paragraph, you may be broadly familiar with the contours of this incident. Owens, whose popular podcast was hosted by the conservative Daily Wire, had grown increasingly vocal in her opposition to Israel’s campaign of violence in the Gaza Strip. This irritated Shapiro, a staunch Israel supporter, and it probably didn’t help that some of Owens’s other pet issues are…a little out there. Her belief, for example, that Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, is actually a man is neither well-supported by evidence, nor is it exactly mainstream on the right.
In the runup to Owens’s departure from the DW, tensions between herself and Mr. Shapiro had also turned very public. Shapiro criticized her Israel commentary as “faux sophistication” and called her both “ridiculous” and “disreputable.” Owens responded with a quotation from the Book of Matthew about being unable to serve both God and money, to which Shapiro wrote, “Candace, if you feel that taking money from The Daily Wire somehow comes between you and God, by all means quit.”
The announcement of Owens’s apparent* ouster was met with immediate cries of hypocrisy from Mr. Shapiro’s many detractors. Shapiro, a harsh opponent of “cancel culture,” had just fired (maybe) an employee for expressing views he found distasteful. Isn’t that…”cancel culture?” Has The Daily Wire become the very thing it’s generated so much favorable attention (not to mention, money) for attacking?
*I use the word “apparent” here because much is unknown about the precise details of Owens’s departure from DW. By some accounts, she was just at the end of a contract cycle, and the parting of the ways may have been more mutual than initial reports suggested. However, Shapiro sat down with conservative commentator, Dave Rubin, to discuss the matter, and while he was largely magnanimous, he did seem to suggest that Owens’s unpalatable views played a role in the split.
My own (rather knee jerk) reaction to the hypocrisy charge was an emphatic no. Whatever ugliness preceded the cutting of ties between Owens and DW, this lacked too many traditional hallmarks for what happened to her to be considered a “cancellation.” But the questions nagged at me. They were valid, and challenging. How exactly was this different (if it really was) from some untenured professor getting tossed out in the cold for offending student sensibilities?
Since the cancellation idea has loomed large in our public discourse for some time, I thought this was an interesting enough object lesson that we ought to unpack it some. And my hope is that we can use it to more carefully define the parameters of the “cancel culture” phenomenon.
Bad Faith
First, it needs to be noted that however valid the cancellation questions are, they are not necessarily offered in good faith. One of the more common rebuttals from progressives accused of engaging in “cancel culture” is that the right does exactly the same thing, but it’s only considered a problem on the left. This argumentative strategy works, not because the claim is true, but because the term is genuinely nebulous. What precisely “cancel culture” describes or doesn't is subject to intense disagreement. It also has a highly negative connotation - “canceling” someone is harder to defend than simply “firing” them - so it’s understandable that those accused of participating in the behavior are a bit sensitive about it.
On the surface, the charge that Owens was canceled seems to hold water. After all, she does appear to have been forced out of a job for expressing unpopular views; a feature of many (though not all) cancellations. But too many other staples are absent for this episode to fit neatly into the category.
No Pitchforks
The first missing piece is that Owens’s spat was quite directly (and publicly) with her employer, not with some external or online mob. Sure, there were voices calling for her to be fired, but there’s little indication that DW cared. Fighting with your boss - especially doing so before an audience of millions on social media - is a risky gambit for anyone, and termination of employment isn’t a surprising outcome for those who choose this path. Not falling afoul of your employer is a fairly standard requirement for remaining employed.
“Cancel culture” describes something different; not that your boss might take issue with you, but that your boss might cave to pressure from others who’ve taken issue with you. Put differently, that it might not matter how good you are at your job, or how well you maintain your professional relationships; if people complain about you, for whatever reason, valid or not, you could get the boot.
Even in cancellations that were unquestionably appropriate, like that of convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, external pressure was a key factor. Nobody could’ve accused Weinstein of making bad movies. Indeed, Weinstein’s success as a producer is likely what kept him a free man for so long. By most accounts, Hollywood knew Weinstein was bad news, and rumors about his sexual misconduct had spread for years. It wasn’t until an outside activist campaign, bolstered by the #MeToo movement, applied sufficient pressure on both the studios and law enforcement that he was finally held to account.
Which is another difference re Candace Owens: her departure was directly related to her job performance. She said things on her show that her employers who subsidized the show didn’t like. In many famous cancellations, the offending behavior either wasn’t work-related at all, or was only tangentially so. Gina Carano was fired by Disney from her role as Cara Dune in The Mandalorian, not because fans didn’t like her, but because she popped off too many times on social media. No one in their right mind could have confused Carano’s (idiotic) musings on Instagram with the views of The Walt Disney Company, but it didn’t matter. The internet got mad and Carano was out.
Setting Matters
Context is also relevant to determining whether professional/reputational consequences are regular order, or if they belong under the umbrella of “cancel culture.” A college professor, for example, ought to be safe in their job even when expressing unpopular views. Central to the mission of a university is the free exchange of ideas and the unwavering pursuit of truth. Of course, universities do not always live up to this expectation, and professional sanctions of faculty for speech violations abound. When this happens, and the punishment is sufficiently severe, “cancellation” is an often-used and appropriate term.
Harvard Law professor, Ronald Sullivan, hit the unfortunate trifecta of being punished a) by a university, b) due to conduct unrelated to his job performance, and c) as the result of mob outrage. His crime? Enraging students and staff by acting as a defense attorney for Harvey Weinstein.
In a fun twist, the ringleader of his cancellation was the now-disgraced ex-president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, whose own comeuppance came a few years later after revelations that she’d plagiarized much of her scholarly work. The Gay case was also a prominent instance of defensive progressives accusing the other guys of being the true cancelers. And, as with Owens, the charge was dubious; no one in a position like Gay’s could have expected to survive revelations of so much academic misconduct.
But the Daily Wire is not a university. It is an intensely conservative media outlet, and one that doesn’t pretend for a moment to host a full range of viewpoints. An example I planned to use when outlining this piece (sadly, Shapiro himself beat me to it) is that nobody familiar with Ben Shapiro’s or other DW staffers’ views on abortion rights (they are firmly anti-choice) would reasonably expect the publisher to host a columnist or commentator who was openly pro-choice.
Shapiro described this dynamic by invoking the “Overton Window” - the range of permissible viewpoints that can be expressed within a space. Imagine a writer for Scientific American or National Geographic coming out as a flat-earther, or a moon landing denier. Would anyone realistically expect those periodicals to continue publishing their work? When they cut ties, would we call it “cancel culture?” I think we would not. Shapiro also drew a relevant distinction between a publisher and a platform in defending himself against hypocrisy accusations. It’s one thing to argue against banning somebody from social media, or removing their content from Youtube. It’s quite another to agree to publish them yourself.
But Still She Speaks!
On this score, Candace Owens has the means and the platform to carry on making millions by being an obnoxious conspiracy theorist. Her stock may even rise from this. Though here, we should address another derailing tactic commonly trotted out by the cancel culture apologists; that cancel culture doesn’t exist because some targets survive their cancellations. This is silly. It’s a bit like saying that gun violence isn’t a real problem because sometimes, shooters miss.
It’s also irrelevant to the point I’m making. Owens’s sustained popularity is unrelated to the question of whether or not the Daily Wire canceled her. You can very much be canceled, yet remain wealthy and famous. Alex Jones was, by any definition, canceled; he was completely run off of social media (and in case you’re wondering, no, I do not feel bad for him). That he held onto his core audience, and that he remains a wildly influential nutcase, doesn’t change what happened to him.
The cancel culture debate gives us a classic example of “the Venn diagram is a circle,” in that the people who claim the most confusion over what is or isn’t “cancel culture” tend to be the people most sympathetic to it. That makes this a difficult conversation to have. I’ve pitched my arguments here at people mistaking an ordinary termination of employment for a “cancellation.” But if those *mistakes* are being made by bad faith actors, I may as well go fart into the wind. “I know you are, but what am I?” is too powerful a weapon for the cancel culturites to simply drop it. They’ll never be convinced because they don’t want to be. So they alternate between feigning bewilderment and deflecting blame onto their opponents.
So What?
I care about this, not because I care about the reputations of Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, or the Daily Wire. I am indifferent in all three cases. I do care about our ability to honestly discuss social phenomena. And the idea that rather banal transgressions warrant the transgressor being run out of town and suffering professional and reputational ruin, is one I find deeply concerning. I do not wish to let the purveyors of this trend off the hook by pretending, falsely, that what they’re doing is no different to what everyone else does.
And make no mistake: that’s what this is about. That’s all this is about. Online leftists don’t care about Candance Owens. They aren’t claiming she was canceled because they’re sad about it, or because they’re sympathetic to her plight. They’re trying to discredit their own critics because they don’t like being stuck with the bill for 10 years of shitty behavior.
“Cancellation” was never intended as a catch-all term for anyone who loses their job, and Candace Owens was no more “canceled” than was Joey Tribiani when he publicly trashed the writers of his soap opera and got killed off for it. It can be tricky to parse out what does and does not belong in this category, but the voices screaming, “Gotcha!” can safely be ignored on this one. The Daily Wire is not out to ruin Owens (they’re still hosting the work she did while employed by them!), they aren’t trying to render her unemployable, and their reasons for being unhappy with her work appear directly related to said work. This wasn’t about extracurricular misdeeds or dubious accusations, and it wasn’t because they bowed to her critics.
Cancel culture’s is a hard definition to pin down. But to borrow (sort of) the famous words of Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it, and this is not it.