“Do you ever read any of the books you burn?” He laughed. “That’s against the law!”
Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
I’d originally intended this to be a section in Reclaiming Liberalism, but even citing just a handful of examples would have made that post too long and turned it into something else.
I’d also started writing this before the furor with Gary Lineker and the BBC. For my own brief comments on that – I think Lineker, a football pundit, should be able to express personal views on social media without being made to step down. I also think a BBC employee alluding to the Nazis when tweeting about the UK government is inappropriate (Gina Carano and Graham Linehan – who both feature in this piece (132 & 19) – might like a word with those on the ‘left’ now arguing that it’s fine).
The levels of hypocrisy from both left and right have been astounding to witness – some of those who would usually decry cancel culture have actively stoked the flames, whilst many who say it’s just some right-wing myth when it suits them have come out all in favour of free speech now that it’s speech they agree with. The fact is that the BBC is publicly funded and has always had rules about impartiality. As the BBC’s highest profile (8.7 million Twitter followers) and highest paid (£1.4 million per year) presenter, Lineker is bound by them to at least some extent (he had already been warned for breaching them in 2022). So there is some nuance to the situation and a need to establish where the boundaries are – the BBC just handled it terribly.
Beyond Gary Lineker, in just the last week or so we’ve also seen: Clare Fox no-platformed by Royal Holloway student’s union from an event about free speech because she had retweeted a transgender joke made by Ricky Gervais; Fiona Bruce dropped as an Ambassador for the domestic violence charity Refuge for a comment made whilst hosting Question Time, even whilst saying in their statement that, “we know the words were not Fiona’s own and were words she was legally obliged to read out”; Let Women Speak events in Australia protested, as always, by angry trans activists, with the women involved smeared by many journalists and politicians, and calls made to expel Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming from her party for attending because a group of men who had no involvement with the event performed Nazi salutes outside the Victoria parliament building – this was, of course, after attempts to ban Let Women Speak organiser Kellie-Jay Keen from even entering the country – and before a deranged mob violently shut down a Let Women Speak event entirely in New Zealand; Alfie Brown subjected to coordinated efforts to vilify and deplatform him because of an eight-year old comedy routine featuring the n-word which didn’t quite land, even though he issued a sincere and groveling apology for it; and students at Stanford University not only disrupting a campus talk by a conservative-minded judge, Kyle Duncan, but then going on to vandalise the classroom of the Dean who had publicly apologised to him for their behaviour.
Much like ‘woke’, cancel culture as a term is often lazily used or wielded for partisan political reasons, but it can’t be said that there is no such thing. There has been plenty written on the subject already, so I’m going to try to keep this lead-in extremely brief – the knee-jerk punishment, moral grandstanding, lack of proportionality, lack of regard to intent, context, fact or due process, heckler’s veto, self-censorship, and the spiral of silence were all things I wanted to write about, but others have already written it better than I could and the examples should speak for themselves. I recommend Cathy Young’s What Cancel Culture Is And Isn’t as one of the best overviews on cancel culture that I’ve read, with Jonathan Rauch’s The Cancel Culture Checklist, and Bari Weiss’s Resignation Letter also worth reading for insight into how cancel culture works in practice.
I do still wish to briefly note a few examples of what you could call ultimate cancellations – because nobody should ever claim that there is never any real impact: Caroline Flack, Hana Kimura, August Ames, Mike Adams, Austin Heinz, Benny Fredrikson, Carl Sargeant, David Bucci, Jill Messick.
These 150 examples (and I am confident I could have got to at least 200 without much effort) are collated to demonstrate that when some people claim that cancel culture doesn’t exist, that it’s just about ‘consequences’ or ‘accountability’ – well that’s just bullshit. They also comprise without exception those who have been ‘cancelled’ by the left – or at least those who would claim to be left-wing, progressive, or liberal. The right can be just as willing to engage in ‘cancel culture’ – and censorship is something that’s typically been associated with the right, often the religious right, but it’s the left that presently dominates the discourse on social media and within many cultural and political institutions where much of this plays out.
1. Kathleen Stock was subjected to a three-year campaign of slander and harassment online and at work after speaking out against proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act. Colleagues at Sussex University (where she was a philosophy professor) made her feel unwelcome and there were attempts to disinvite or no-platform her from speaking events. After publishing her book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters For Feminism in 2021, things escalated with masked student protestors putting up posters around campus and demanding the university fire her. For her safety, the police advised her not to attend university alone and to install CCTV cameras outside her house. Whilst university leadership belatedly supported her, the Sussex branch of the University and College Union sided with the protestors. As a result, she felt forced to resign. As the media, naturally, chose to interview her after this happened, and she ironically now has a larger platform for her views, her critics claim she hasn’t really been affected – the abuse and smears that made her life such a misery that she quit her job of 20 years apparently not counting.
2. Maya Forstater lost her job as a researcher at a think tank because of views expressed on social media relating to gender self-ID after colleagues at a separate office in the US had complained about her. After years of being outright lied about online as she took legal action against her former employers (the case gaining significant media attention after J.K. Rowling tweeted her support), an employment tribunal ruled that she had suffered direct discrimination on the basis of her gender critical beliefs. Her ultimate vindication only possible because of determination and a crowdfunder.
3. LGB Alliance – an LGB rights group founded by two lesbians – has been harassed and misrepresented via Twitter; constantly referred to as ‘controversial’ or ‘accused of being transphobic’ in the media; defamed as a ‘hate group’ by politicians; had crowdfunding campaigns suspended after co-ordinated complaints to the platforms hosting them; had Arts Council funding granted and then withdrawn after complaints by trans activists; had stalls at political party conferences granted and then withdrawn after complaints by trans activists; had a Twitter verification tick granted and then removed after complaints by trans activists; and had to spend thousands defending itself against an entirely vexatious challenge to its charity status from Mermaids and The Good Law Project. No actual evidence of ‘hate’ has been deemed necessary for any of this.
4. Boyz Magazine (a long-running lifestyle magazine for gay men) was monstered on social media for just a single tweet promoting an LGB Alliance webinar that said “Listen yourself to the founders of the LGB Alliance and then make up your own mind. You don’t have to agree but at least hear them out”. This resulted in several club events and Pride organisations ending their support for the magazine and the Terrence Higgins Trust deciding that purity politics was more important than HIV prevention and withdrawing planned advertising.
5. Swansea University’s Feminist Society members were forced to quit after being targeted by trans activists for publicly supporting Kathleen Stock and promoting a book by the author Helen Joyce. Rather than provide any support to the society (the activists did nothing to hide the abuse they were directing at them), Swansea University Students’ Union announced it would investigate the Feminist Society’s social media posts – but effectively (and clearly deliberately) did nothing the entire nine-month academic year, leaving them in limbo. They then deleted the society’s email account and profile page on the university website over the summer without providing any outcome to the investigation.
6. Kevin Price, a porter at Cambridge University, was targeted by student activists at work who demanded he be sacked, because as a Cambridge City Councillor (for the Labour Party) he felt he couldn’t vote for a motion that began with the words: “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary individuals are non-binary” – his remarks to the council noting that whilst he supported trans rights, he felt they were in conflict with women’s rights and he could not support a motion beginning with that blanket assertion. He resigned as a councillor over the motion.
7. Rosie Kay was forced out of her own dance company after complaints were made to the company’s board about her views on transgender identity – expressed in conversation at a private dinner party in her own home. For believing in the importance of single-sex spaces for women’s safety and not believing that non-binary is a literal sex, the board demanded she be investigated by an external HR consultant for transphobia. She refused to submit to any investigation which did not acknowledge her gender-critical beliefs were protected by law so had no option but to resign.
8. Gillian Philip, a children’s author with over 40 books to her name, had her contract terminated by her publishers after she added the hashtag “IstandwithJKRowling” to her Twitter account and a coordinated campaign was started to harass her and get her fired. She is bringing an employment tribunal claim against them for discrimination, but in the meantime now works as a lorry driver.
9. Kate Clanchy, a former state schoolteacher of 35 years, faced criticism over her Orwell Prize winning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me for portraying some pupils in a ‘racist’ and ‘ableist’ manner. Accused of using stereotyped language (not by her students) by including phrases like “almond-shaped eyes”, “chocolate-coloured skin”, and “unselfconsciously odd”, she was effectively subjected to a witchhunt – with continued abuse and defamation coming from three authors in particular. After apologising and agreeing to rewrite her book, she was then forced to find another publisher after refusing to accept the changes made by sensitivity readers, later writing in a scathing article for Unherd that “My [sensitivity] Readers though, have not been hired as literary people. They are there to help create a book that would play better on Twitter, not one that is better written.”
10. Amélie Wen Zhao withdrew her debut Young Adult Fiction novel Blood Heir before it was published due to criticism on social media. Her fantasy tale depicting an empire that enslaves magical minorities and where “oppression is blind to skin color” was deemed racist and insensitive to the African American experience of slavery. That Wen Zhao grew up in China, the novel inspired by human trafficking rather than the enslavement of black people, was deemed irrelevant. She did later publish the novel after an apology and significant changes after her publisher had a group of ‘multicultural academics’ evaluate the work.
11. Kosoko Jackson, a black, gay Young Adult Fiction author and ironically someone who had criticised Amélie Wen Zhao, self-cancelled his debut novel, A Place for Wolves, after complaints of ‘problematic representation’ and ‘historical insensitivities’. Despite pre-release praise, his romantic thriller set during the Kosovo War was criticised in a Goodreads review for centering Americans (one of the lead characters was American) and for having an Albanian villain (presumably rather than an American one). This criticism spread onto social media, even though most had not even read the book. He finally had a different debut novel released four years later.
12. Winston Marshall, banjoist for the popular band Mumford & Sons, received thousands of angry and abusive comments on Twitter after tweeting praise for conservative American journalist Andy Ngo’s book on Antifa (a left-wing self-declared anti-fascist movement). Despite apologising and agreeing to ‘take a step back’ to look at his ‘blindspots’, libelous articles painting him as ‘right-wing’ and ‘fascist’ continued, with much of the backlash falling on Mumford & Sons as a whole. Some months later he recanted his apology, writing that “The truth is that my commenting on a book that documents the extreme Far-Left and their activities is in no way an endorsement of the equally repugnant Far-Right. […] I also feel that my previous apology in a small way participates in the lie that such extremism does not exist, or worse, is a force for good.” To avoid bringing his bandmates any more trouble and for no longer wishing to self-censor, he announced he would be permanently leaving Mumford & Sons – the band he had performed with for 14 years.
13. Joseph Katz, a tenured professor at Princeton University, was dismissed after a backlash to an article he wrote which criticised a number of ‘anti-racist’ demands (as he put it: “some of them clearly racist and illegal”) that had been made by students and colleagues in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The university claimed to have fired him for having had a (consensual) sexual relationship with a student in the mid-2000s – something he had already been disciplined for two years prior. Stirred up by an ‘expose’ published in Princeton’s student newspaper (who had gone on a seven-month long fishing expedition) – which revealed the previously investigated relationship to the public – the university investigated him again and concluded by firing him, effectively subjecting him to double jeopardy.
14. Milli Hill, a bestselling author and founder of a network of support groups for pregnant women, was subjected to a torrent of abuse and dropped by a charity she worked with after commenting on social media that violence in childbirth was committed against women rather than against “birthing people”. Feeling banished by her own community, she later decided to close the network she had started.
15. Jenny Lindsey, a leading Scottish poet, was targeted by trans activists after speaking out on social media over posts by a transgender activist which advocated violence against women taking part in a demonstration in London. Hounded online, she then began to lose work, later discovering that fellow poets had come under pressure not to share a stage with her. After being warned by the police about threats to her safety, she felt forced to move home.
16. Neil Thin, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, was subjected to a two-month investigation after he expressed opposition to the renaming of David Hume Tower (named after the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, his name subject to cancellation over tenuous links to slavery and a single obscure essay in an entire body of work that suggests he probably held the same racist views as most people of the period). An anti-racism campaign group based at the university decided to start a campaign to get him fired, accusing him of being racist, sexist, and transphobic based on his Twitter posts. The complaints were eventually dismissed.
17. Chris Harrison was forced to ‘step aside’ from his long-running role as host of The Bachelor – an American reality TV show – after defending a contestant’s ‘racist’ behaviour. After photos emerged of Rachael Kirkconnell at an ‘Antebellum plantation-themed’ fraternity party (or rather an ‘Old South-themed’ party) a few years prior and she faced significant backlash, Harrison was confronted with a question about the furor during an interview. He responded by urging viewers to show Rachel “a little grace, understanding and compassion” and arguing that it was unfair to judge her before she had a chance to speak, but was then accused of “perpetuating racism” and made to issue an apology. He then lost his job.
18. Thomas Hudlicky, a Canadian-based chemistry professor, found his career destroyed after he authored an essay intended to honour a scientific article written three decades earlier. Whilst most of the essay was more technical, part of it expressed concerns about affirmative action undermining meritocracy in science – arguing that hiring practices had reached the point where a candidate’s inclusion in a preferred social group might override his or her qualifications. The article sparked an international backlash on social media, with one Science Magazine blogger even comparing it to German science under the Nazis. Hudlicky’s defence of “I expressed my opinions and my words were totally taken out of context” failed to appease anyone. The essay was removed (not retracted with an explanatory note as is custom but completely erased) from the journal (two editors were suspended simply for publishing it), a special issue of the journal planned in his honour was cancelled, invitations to speak at conferences and to review papers ceased, and citations to his papers were deleted.
19. Graham Linehan, the Irish television writer of Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd fame, became a show business pariah after beginning to speak out about the impact of trans ideology on women and children. He has said that trans activists have tried to destroy his life, going so far as to make vexatious complaints about him to the police and publishing his home address and other addresses linked to family members online. Even his finished Father Ted musical – which he believed would be too big to cancel – has been kept in limbo, the production company refusing to release it whilst his name remains attached to it.
20. James Dreyfus, star of British sitcoms Gimme Gimme Gimme and The Thin Blue Line, found himself erased from a role he played on Doctor Who (his name removed from the artwork of an audio CD and other related materials) after he signed two public letters – one in support of J.K. Rowling and one asking Stonewall to engage in respectful debate over their trans policies.
21. Kooks Burrito, a food cart business in Portland, Oregon, was forced to close after a backlash against the owners when they were accused of cultural appropriation. The owners, two white women, had given a magazine interview which said that whilst in Mexico, they had “picked the brains of every tortilla lady there […] They wouldn’t tell us too much about technique, but we were peeking into the windows of every kitchen, totally fascinated by how easy they made it look.” Quickly on social media the interview became an example of “how media perpetuates and reinforces racism and white supremacy” and within a day the business had shut down.
22. Vancouver Rape Relief, Canada’s oldest centre for female victims of rape and domestic violence, had its grant funding removed by the city of Vancouver after a campaign of harassment, defamation, and abuse from trans activists – including having a dead rat nailed to their door – just because they refused to change their policy of basing services on sex rather than gender identity.
23. Sarah Phillimore, a family law barrister, had her book launch removed from the Eventbrite ticketing site by their US-based trust and safety team for ‘violating its Community Guidelines and Terms of Services’. How the book, a series of essays on gender criticism from a range of people, promoted “hate, danger and violence” has yet to be made clear, which is why she is now suing Eventbrite for discrimination.
24. Karen Ingala Smith, CEO of a domestic and sexual violence charity and responsible for the Femicide Census project, had her book launch (Defending Women’s Spaces) removed from Eventbrite on the same grounds. It’s worth noting that she has also been refused Labour party membership for “conduct online that may reasonably be seen as to demonstrate hostility based on gender identity” – with 14 tweets cited covering issues such as violence against women, women’s sport, and lesbians. Apparently, it’s okay for Jess Phillips MP to annually reference the Femicide Census in Parliament (Karen has said that she is very grateful that she does), but not okay for the person who collated the names of murdered women that Jess reads out to be a member of the party.
25. Julie Bindel, the feminist campaigner and journalist, was de-platformed from a talk she was invited to give to local women at a library by Nottingham City Council on the grounds that her views on transgender rights were “at odds” with the Council’s policy. Her talk was about violence against women – the Council, whose actions were most definitely illegal, later issued an apology after Bindel instigated legal action. Prior to this, a talk she had been invited to give on “Prostitution, porn and political lesbianism” at York University was cancelled after complaints from trans activists – who’d have thought it would be the left censoring an event with that title?
26. FiLiA, a volunteer-led feminist organisation, had a planned year-long series of events working with girls excluded or at risk of being excluded from school in Portsmouth cancelled after accusations of ‘transphobia’, despite this having nothing to do with transgender issues. Their annual conference, the largest grassroots feminist conference in Europe, saw chants of fascism from outside protesters and penises drawn on the pavement in front of a vigil for murdered women in 2021. In Cardiff the following year, it found itself smeared by The Queer Emporium, who had given local shops trans flags to put up and told them that ‘a transphobic event’ was being held that weekend. In fact, conference speakers included Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who spent years wrongfully detained in an Iranian prison, survivors of sexual exploitation, and women who had experienced war and violence in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Rwanda. Despite being held in the capital city of Wales, the conference was ignored by both politicians and media – that FiLiA happen to recognise the category of people they advocate for apparently making them unworthy of recognition.
27. Robert Wintermute, a gay human rights lawyer, had a talk about sex and gender identity at a Canadian University shut down by screaming protesters who threw baking flour at him and unplugged the projector he intended to use for the talk.
28. Adult Human Female, an independently made documentary about women fighting to protect their rights, had its screening shut down by trans activists who occupied the lecture theatre due to show it at Edinburgh University. A later showing in Nottingham was cancelled on the day after the venue was bombarded with complaints.
29. We Need To Talk about Race and Gender, an event about racism and sexism organised by three black women (including Linda Bellos, a former Labour council leader, former co-chair of the LGBT Advisory Group to the Met Police, and originator of Black History Month in the UK), was cancelled by Lewisham Council after trans activists accused the organisers of being transphobic – the council claimed ‘safety grounds’ as the reason for cancellation.
30. Woman’s Place UK, a campaign group committed to upholding women’s rights in the Equality Act, has been relentlessly smeared as transphobic by activists, with these smears often lazily repeated by journalists and several Labour leadership contenders in 2019 unquestioningly signing a pledge to expel any members who express support for them. Many of their meetings have had to be moved at the last minute after coordinated complaints to the venues hosting them. Several have seen abusive protests from trans activists – including an event in Brighton where protesters kicked and banged the windows of the venue to try and drown out the speakers, and an event in Manchester where protesters stood outside the venue and chanted ‘Fuck Terfs’ through a sound system.
31. Boston Pride, one of the oldest gay-rights organisations in the United States, celebrated its 50th anniversary by dissolving itself after being boycotted by QTBIPOC groups (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, Person of Colour) for failing to centre them enough or sign up to demands to ‘demilitarize the police’ and solicit donations for ‘anti-racist organisations’ in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
32. Dorian Abbot, an American geophysicist, was invited to give the annual John Carlson Lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was then cancelled within eight days of being announced after left-wing activists protested on Twitter – not because of the lecture’s scientific content (it was about climate change) but because Abbot had criticised some aspects of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives in an editorial for Newsweek.
33. David Peterson, a tenured professor at a private college in New York, faced a campaign to get him fired after being photographed attending a Blue Lives Matter protest with his wife out of curiosity, for just 20 minutes. He had not spoken, held placards, nor worn a t-shirt and he had left hours before any of the clashes with Black Lives Matter protesters – he had merely briefly observed. Yet the facts failed to stop a social media campaign demanding his ousting, with a student-written article in the college newspaper even asserting (without a single example) that “there have been many claims of Mr. Peterson making students of color and queer students feel uncomfortable and unheard” – its absurdity ironically helping to place public opinion behind him in the wider media. But not before he faced an internal investigation from the college (which found no wrongdoing) and found his classes boycotted with posters placed upon his door saying “This is not a safe environment for marginalized students. By continuing to take this course you are enabling bigoted behaviour on this campus.”
34. Kevin Myers had his journalism career ended after an article he wrote (intended to be tongue-in-cheek) for the Irish edition of the Sunday Times on the BBC gender pay gap saw him accused of sexism and anti-Semitism. In reference to Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz – the two best-paid female BBC presenters, both Jewish – he had written: “Good for them. Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity.” Despite an apology for the fairly criticised piece, he was dropped by the Sunday Times and subjected to a pile-on across social media, which included former colleagues. The media coverage drew attention to a quite strangely written article of his for the Irish Independent in 2009 titled ‘I Am A Holocaust Denier’ (not chosen by Myers but still intended to be ironic) where he made hair-splitting objections to statements about the holocaust, including the etymology of the word, noting that most Jews were not killed in the ovens in Auschwitz but died by gunshot, overwork, or starvation. Despite being defended by the chair of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland who said he had “inadvertently stumbled into an antisemitic trope […] Branding Kevin Myers as either an antisemite or a Holocaust denier is an absolute distortion of the facts”, he was still described as such in parts of the media. He later sued Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE for doing so, winning a complete apology with damages.
35. The Child and Adolescent Mental Health Psychiatrists Conference, a conference for trainee child psychiatrists organised by Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, was to be held over Zoom, its aim to facilitate ‘thoughtful debate’ on supporting gender-dysphoric patients. Trans charities, academics, gender critical groups, and Tavistock staff were invited, but after trans activist speakers refused to share a platform with anybody with gender critical views and lobbied to have them removed, the event was cancelled just two days before it was scheduled to take place.
36. Sasha White was fired from her job at the Tobias Literary Agency in New York after a tsunami of complaints from trans activists over posts made on her personal Twitter account – which did not reference her employment. She had retweeted a post that said “TW [Trans women] being vulnerable to male violence does not make you women”, as well as multiple tweets by J.K. Rowling.
37. Rachel Rooney, an award-winning children’s author, was subjected to venomous treatment after publishing My Body Is Me! – an upbeat, rhyming picture book aimed at 3-6-year-olds. Because of her association with Transgender Trend (an organisation that calls for evidence-based treatment for children with gender dysphoria), she was relentlessly smeared, her book absurdly labelled “transphobic terrorism” by activists, with a core of around a dozen authors, librarians, and bloggers doing their best to try and drive her out of publishing. She found no support from the Society of Authors. Even Save the Children were bullied by activists into taking down from social media a charity video of actress Gillian Anderson reading an entirely different book she had written.
38. Kate Smith, the American singer with a career spanning five decades who died in 1986, had her popular rendition of God Bless America banned by ice hockey teams the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Flyers in 2019 because she had performed ‘racist’ songs in the 1930s – the Flyers also removed a statue of Kate that stood outside their arena. Despite That’s Why Darkies Were Born being described as a satire of racism and later being performed by the black musician and civil rights activist Paul Robeson, her performance of it in 1931 was enough to taint her legacy. As Smith’s family members said in an interview “It’s somebody who found the words to two songs that she sang, out of 3,000 that she recorded, and tried to make a case out of it”.
39. Woody Allen, the Oscar-winning director, lost his film deal with Amazon and was forced to find a new publisher for his memoir after Hachette staff staged a walkout. Several actors who have previously starred in his films have also distanced themselves from him or expressed regret for working with him. This was in response to the renewed attention to a complaint from his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow that he sexually abused her on a single occasion when she was seven years old in 1992. It’s hard to summarise the whole thing in a paragraph owing to the complicated history and its conflation with his relationship with his now wife of 25 years, Soon-Yi. However, an objective examination of the evidence, which remains pretty much unchanged from when he was investigated and cleared at the time, strongly suggests that he is probably innocent of the sole allegation made against him. His memoir may have found a publisher and he still makes films, but he remains frequently and casually included in the same breath as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby as a ‘disgraced, powerful man’. A blog by Allen’s adopted son Moses, and articles by Cathy Young and Hadley Freeman on the HBO documentary Allen described as a ‘hit piece’ are worth reading for a different perspective.
40. M.I.A, the British-Sri Lankan rapper and winner of multiple music awards, has long been outspoken and uncompromising – notably in her commentary on the oppression of Sri Lankan Tamils and her support for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. But after a number of tweets on covid vaccines that occasionally veered into the conspiratorial (though she has said she is not an anti-vaxxer), she found a planned interview with British Vogue pulled and was dropped from a collaboration with the GQ Awards. However, this wasn’t why she was removed from the lineup of Field Day Festival. Just a week after appearing on conservative American journalist Candace Owen’s podcast – where she spoke mostly about human rights abuses in Sri Lanka – she was notified by Field Day that “We must consider the wider risks to the festival and its stakeholders”, the communication then going on to paradoxically claim that their act of rescinding the offer was to ensure they remain “politically neutral”.
41. The Hideout Bar, a music venue in Chicago, was forced to close for several months – its owners arranging for a human resources firm to do an ‘equity audit’ of its business practices – after a former employer (who had been fired) wrote a lengthy social media post accusing it of being a “toxic workplace” and causing “trauma and pain”. His post lacked the necessary detail required to make any informed judgment on the validity of his complaints – he claimed ‘tokenism’ (he was black), being asked to take on extra work duties, and being mistreated by a customer – but it still quickly became treated as fact online. Social media pressure led to the cancellation of a large number of upcoming bookings and multiple promises to ‘do better’ from the venue’s owners. In short, a social media post was made and within days a Chicago institution was shut down, it being touch and go for a while as to whether it would be forever.
42. Patrick Harrington lost his 19-year-old Yoga business after posting a message of support for Black Lives Matter on the company’s Instagram page. A handful of his employees deemed it to be insufficiently sincere. Accusations of “tokenization of black and brown bodies” and membership cancellations followed and within the space of a week, Kindness Yoga had shut down – with Harrington and his wife later forced to sell their home due to the loss of income.
43. David Shor, a data scientist who had previously worked on the 2012 Barack Obama campaign, was fired from his role at a think tank and removed from an online community for ‘progressive’ data scientists after being accused of ‘anti-blackness’ and criticising the Black Lives Matter movement. At the height of the George Floyd protests, he had tweeted a summary of an academic study by a black political scientist that argued riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination likely tipped the 1968 presidential election in Richard Nixon’s favour. He now works as the head of data science for another organisation, but it was initially made a condition of his employment that he not say publicly who had hired him for fear of backlash.
44. Daniel Elder, a liberally minded prizewinning composer, found his career ruined after a social media backlash to a single post on Instagram that said “Enjoy burning it all down, you well intentioned blind people. I’m done.” This was in response to an arson attack on a courthouse in Nashville close to where he lived as part of the Black Lives Matter protests. For ignoring demands to apologise for the post, he found himself unable to work within the industry – his publisher blackballing him and local choral directors refusing to even program his music for fear of the consequences.
45. Tabitha Morris, was fired from her job of twenty years at a Kentucky hospital after a flood of coordinated complaints and threats in response to a video she had posted on Facebook. Angered by the rioting, she had stated in the video that she did not support the Black Lives Matter organisation and considered them to be hypocritical. Labelled a racist, activists doxxed her and made the video go viral. She then had a GoFundMe page (intended to seek legal advice and support her whilst seeking new employment) closed down after complaints from activists. She later said that she “should have used a different tone” but would not apologise for what she said – she agrees that ‘Black Lives Matter’ but not the ideology of the organisation. Unable to find a new job equal to the one she lost, she has since campaigned to end the practice of allowing employers to be able to fire an employee for any reason they want.
46. Samantha Pressedee, a little-known female comedian, ahead of an upcoming show wrote an article for the industry blog Chortle about the climate of censorship in the comedy world, noting in particular that nobody was talking about the very topical gender issue – self-ID being a policy she personally disagreed with. The comedy world responded by proving her right – her show was immediately cancelled, the venue stating that the “tone and conflict” of the article was not something they wanted to be associated with. A swarm of pronouned nobodies then ralied to abuse, ridicule, and humiliate her on social media.
47. Alistair Williams is a British comedian whose skit Brexit in a Burger King went viral in 2019. After appearing on stage with Nigel Farage at a Brexit Party event, he became branded a ‘right-wing comedian’ – whilst he does support Brexit, he says he was there simply because they’d offered him a gig and nobody else had. Williams does have a fairly unorthodox outlook on the world, though has described himself as liberal, but his comedy material isn’t ‘right-wing’ or objectionable and his sets would always get an extremely good reaction from audiences. Still, he found that many venues would no longer book him. He also found his YouTube Channel – which had his comedy skits on – repeatedly removed for breaching unspecified ‘terms and conditions’. He’s likened what’s happened to him as being like living under China’s social credit system.
48. Paul Embery, a left-leaning political activist and writer, was dismissed from his role as a Fire Brigades Union official (a role he had held for a decade) after speaking in a personal capacity at a pro-Brexit rally in 2019. The union claimed he had committed gross misconduct and had breached their policy that opposed leaving the EU (a referendum that had of course long ago already happened by the time of the speech). Two years later, he won an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal, with the judge stating that it appeared “right from the start… there was an agenda” to remove Mr. Embery from his FBU role, adding “How could any fair-minded member come to a reasonable belief on the facts that the claimant had committed any form of misconduct?”
49. Danny Baker was sacked by the BBC for tweeting an old black and white photo of an aristocratic couple holding the hands of a fully dressed chimpanzee under the caption ‘Royal baby leaves hospital’. It was in reference to the birth of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s baby and intended as a variation of a long-standing feature on his radio show in order to mock privilege. He deleted it and apologised immediately after being alerted to the potential racial connotations (which didn’t stop the social media backlash) and despite nothing in his long career to suggest he held any racist views, the BBC swiftly fired him for his “serious error of judgement”.
50. Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist and founding editor of Reality’s Last Stand (a site that publishes evidence-based articles on issues such as the biology of sex, gender ideology, and critical social justice), found his site’s PayPal account, used for donations, closed without explanation. He was told he would have to submit a legal subpoena in order to find out why. He also found his Etsy store shut down because complaints had been made on the grounds of ‘glorifying violence against a minority’. He sold mugs and t-shirts and the only graphics used were his website’s logo (its title and the male and female symbols), the slogan ‘Defenders of Reality’, and a political cartoon (unrelated to biology or transgenderism) he had created which had gone viral after being retweeted by Elon Musk. He was unsuccessful in appeal, Etsy sticking to its ‘glorifying violence’ justification – whilst also allowing multiple other sellers to list items with wording such as ‘Fuck J.K. Rowling’ or ‘Kill TERFs’ without issue.
51. Allison Bailey, a black lesbian barrister, was subjected to an internal investigation by her chambers (Garden Court) after they received complaints (one from Stonewall) accusing her of being transphobic because of her social media use and her involvement with the LGB Alliance. She also lost work after stating her opposition to her chamber’s adoption of Stonewall’s Diversity Champion scheme. After launching legal action against both Garden Court Chambers and Stonewall, she had her initial crowdfunding campaign taken down from the CrowdJustice platform after complaints from activists and faced torrents of abuse online. She was ultimately successful in her employment tribunal claim against Garden Court Chambers for direct discrimination on the basis of her gender critical belief, winning aggravated damages. She was unsuccessful in her claim against Stonewall (she is appealing), but it was something of a pyrrhic victory for the charity as it had been their advice on equality law that her chambers had been following when discriminating against her.
52. Abigail Shrier‘s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters found itself the subject of a cancellation campaign by trans activists – who hadn’t read it, of course, almost none of the reaction cited any specific claims or arguments made in the book (they still don’t), it was simply deemed to be hateful. Her book explored the “sudden, severe spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls” and suggested that whilst adults should have the freedom to choose medical transition, this probably wasn’t best for teenagers. Despite The Economist declaring it a Book of the Year, most major media outlets declined to review it (Science Based Medicine even removed a positive review after complaints from activists), Target briefly banned it from its stores, and her publisher was disallowed from buying sponsored ads for the book at Amazon.
53. Giggle, a social media app created for females only, faced enormous backlash from trans activists who made an orchestrated attempt to have it removed from Apple Store and Google Play. Its Australian founder Sall Grover is now embroiled in a ridiculous but obviously stressful court case on ‘human rights’ grounds, after a complaint from a trans activist named Roxy Tickle (who is very obviously male) who had been barred from using the app.
54. Jo Phoenix, a criminology professor, was subjected to a public campaign of harassment for her views on sex and gender whilst employed at the Open University – she had signed a letter criticising Stonewall’s influence in universities and expressed the view that male-bodied prisoners should not be in women’s prisons. She had a seminar at Essex University cancelled after trans activists sent emails en-masse that accused her of being transphobic and a credible threat was made that students planned to barricade the room. After refusing to allow the content of her talk to be vetted for a rearranged event (she had given the same talk without issue in Canada a month prior), the invitation was rescinded and she was blacklisted from future invitations. Told not to speak about her research by managers and publicly vilified by colleagues – with an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion representative for her faculty even calling her a transphobe and TERF on Twitter – she eventually felt forced to quit, taking on a new role at Reading University, and is now proceeding with an employment tribunal claim.
55. Kathleen Lowrey, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta in Canada, lost an administrative role in the department because of complaints that her views on gender made students feel “unsafe”. She had in the past written for Feminist Current but rarely brought her views (essentially that biological sex is real and lesbians don’t have penises) up in class discussions. Because the complaints were made informally and anonymously, she was never made aware of exactly what was being complained about.
56. Mary Kate Fain was fired from her job as a software engineer at a Philadelphia agency called Promptworks after posting an article on her personal Medium account that was critical of the concept of non-binary identities. After word of her article spread among the Philadelphia tech community, she was ostracised by former friends, kicked out of multiple slack groups, and had invitations to speak at two conferences rescinded. Activists then targeted a women’s organisation she worked for on a volunteer basis and harassed them into firing her too.
57. Vanessa Vokey, a graphic designer with a small online presence, was fired from her job at a Pizza shop for alleged online transphobia – sharing a Feminist Current article and questioning why a male was allowed in a private Facebook group she was part of called ‘Females with Autism’. After posting her design for an I Love JK Rowling t-shirt on Instagram, she was met with abuse and swiftly banned from three different online merchandising platforms, including Etsy, ‘for promoting hatred’ after trans activists decided to target her accounts with complaints. The designs literally just said ‘I Love JK Rowling’.
58. Christian Hensen was forced to step away from Spitfire Audio, the music technology company he had founded, and to temporarily deactivate his Twitter account, after he posted a single tweet expressing support for JK Rowling and Graham Linehan – which also stated his concerns about the large number of autistic children identifying as trans. Activists demanded Christian be denounced, Spitfire Audio’s CEO complied. He eventually quit the company entirely.
59. Vicky Hungerford, a senior talent booker for the UK metal music festival Bloodstock, was removed from her position following backlash to a tweet criticising including preferred pronouns in email signatures. Bloodstock posted that she had “taken a step back” from her role “and will be taking the time to properly educate herself for a better understanding”.
60. Amanda Craig was dropped as a competition judge by women’s writing magazine Mslexia over her signing of a letter to The Times objecting to the abuse faced by J.K. Rowling and other women online. She says she received little support from her union The Society of Authors.
61. Adam Rapoport, the editor-in-chief of food magazine Bon Appetit was forced to resign after a “brownface” photo (taken at a Halloween party 16 years before) surfaced on social media. He was wearing a t-shirt, do-rag, silver chairs, and a baseball cap, the outfit intended to portray a stereotypical Puerto Rican. His face was not blacked up.
62. Donald McNeil was forced to resign from his job at the New York Times (having worked there for over 40 years) after using the n-word in a discussion about someone elses use of the slur – in the context of clarifying a question rather than in a derogatory way. This had occured on an educational trip to Peru with students two years prior to the publication of an article about it in The Daily Beast. Despite McNeil having already been investigated by the paper at the time, the social media storm led the NYT to change its mind on the outcome and effectively fire him – its chief executive issuing a statement that said “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent”.
63. Ian Burama lost his job as editor of The New York Review of Books in a #MeToo-related editorial dispute. He had not been accused of assault himself, rather he had printed an article by someone who had been (media personality Jian Ghomeshi had been charged with multiple counts of sexual assault and acquitted at trial) – ironically, a reflection on the theme of conviction by hashtag rather than the judiciary. The immediate online furor, before the article had even been published, resulted in him leaving his role. A public letter in his defence from more than 100 New York Review of Books contributors failed to save him. Burama later found that several of the magazines where he had written for three decades would no longer publish him.
64. Al Franken, the comedian turned Democratic senator, was pressured into resigning from the Senate in 2017 by colleagues after a woman accused him of sexually harassing her during his comedian days, producing an eleven-year-old photo of him pretending (not physically doing so) to grope her breasts. In the days that followed, several other women came forward to claim that he had made them feel uncomfortable in the past. Although Franken had asked to be allowed to appear before the Senate Ethics Committee to give his side of the story, the Democrat House leader demanded his resignation without investigation. Multiple senators who had called for his resignation have since expressed regret for doing so and said he should have received due process.
65. Nolan Bushnell, founder of the defunct video games and home computer company Atari, was due to receive an award from the Game Developers Choice Awards. This was withdrawn after social media outrage over the ‘sexist culture’ he presided over in the 1970s and 1980s. The outrage wasn’t from anybody who had actually worked there, however. It had initially been stirred up by a single political activist based entirely on stories about the company’s raunchy culture featured in historic media articles. A dozen female employees of Atari during that period spoke out to defend him – not one came forward in support of the smear campaign. He still didn’t get to have his award.
66. Chick-fil-A, a chicken-based fast food franchise with over 2000 restaurants in the US, opened its first UK restaurant in Reading in 2019. Just eight days after opening, it announced that it would be closing at the end of its initial six-month lease (all of its employees consequently losing their jobs) – the shopping centre it was based in choosing not to renew. A #getthechickout campaign and demonstration had been organised by Reading Pride, who accused it of being “a business based on anti-LGBT beliefs” because its CEO had spoken out against same-sex marriage in 2012 (in the US) and its charitable arm made donations to Christian organisations – at that time solely to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and The Salvation Army.
67. Din Johnson‘s Portland-based coffee shop business Ristretto was boycotted after his wife, journalist Nancy Rommelmann, started a YouTube series that critiqued the #MeToo movement. Despite Nancy being neither an owner nor an employee of the business, 30 current and former employees wrote an open letter denouncing the series and claiming that by extension the business had become an unsafe working environment by “invalidating assault survivors”. The backlash resulted in local suppliers refusing to supply coffee beans to the business and within two years, the chain of four coffee shops had been forced to close.
68. Madji Wadi, a Palestinian-American whose restaurant and grocery store had been featured on local television programs, faced a furious social media backlash after a series of anti-black, anti-semitic, and homophobic social media posts made by his daughter as a teenager surfaced online. The posts were undeniably offensive, but even firing his daughter from the business (she had already publicly apologised and said she was a different person now aged 23) failed to appease the mob. He lost $5m in contracts as other businesses cut ties, had his lease revoked by his landlord, and was forced to lay off dozens of staff to keep things afloat – even though he hadn’t personally done anything wrong.
69. Amy Cooper saw her life completely upended after a dispute with black birdwatcher Christian Cooper (no relation) in New York’s Central Park had the misfortune to have occurred on the same day as George Floyd’s murder. The dispute allegedly began after Christian requested that Amy’s dog be leashed and then beckoned the dog towards him with a treat. Christian posted on Facebook a part of their exchange that he filmed, where Amy is heard saying “I’m taking a picture and calling the cops […] I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” What the facts are still aren’t entirely clear – Amy claims she felt threatened and the video lacks the full context of the interaction – but the incident went viral nonetheless, receiving over 40 million views on Twitter alone. Amy was swiftly fired from her job, forced to hand her dog into the dog shelter, banned from the park by the New York City mayor, charged with making a false report to the police (later dropped), received numerous death threats, and eventually felt she had no option but to leave the US. As her attorney put it: “Based on a misunderstood 60 seconds of video, she lost her job, her home and her reputation”. Even Christian Cooper later said that he didn’t believe her life needed to be torn apart over what happened.
70. Emma Sarley saw history repeat itself. Sort of. Frederick Joseph, a black author with a sizeable number of social media followers, posted a grainy 27-second video of him and his fiancé berating a white woman out dog walking for allegedly telling him to “stay in your hood”. In the video Sarley says very little, she later clarified in a statement that she intended no racial undertones in her interaction and that she had spoken to Joseph because his dog was being aggressive with other dogs. After Joseph continued to post as much identifying information as he had on Sarley, his followers tracked down her social media and professional profiles which Joseph proceeded to share on Twitter, tagging her employers. Within a matter of hours, Sarley had been fired. The lack of context to the video and the fact that Joseph has a long history of aggrandising petty incidents that have nothing to do with race was deemed irrelevant. Despite going from anonymous to that day’s main character on the internet, few media sources bothered to seek Sarley’s side of the story.
71. Griffin Green lost his new graduate job after uploading a video to TikTok where he shared his disdain for bodegas (convenience stores on nearly all New York street corners) in comparison to chain grocery stores like Kroger and Whole Foods. The video was entirely without malice, yet went viral, even being commented on by gossip blogger Perez Hilton, who asked his Twitter followers, “did anyone else view this as racist?”. Green then did indeed find himself branded as racist, earning the nickname the Bodega Bro. The backlash led to internet users finding earlier TikToks which showed an employment letter from software firm Outreach. After a Twitter user tagged the company and suggested they revaluate his employment, they swiftly responded to confirm that Green was no longer employed by them – leaving him with a one-year lease on a New York apartment but no job.
72. Roy Chubby Brown, Britain’s self-described ‘rudest comedian’ saw a number of his shows cancelled by local councils in 2022, though not for anything he had said recently. Even in his 90s heyday, he was never considered mainstream – his bawdy, profane, and politically incorrect brand of comedy making him even less so now (though he is clear he’s playing a character) – but he hadn’t suddenly got more ‘offensive’. Lancaster City Council claimed his show was not compatible with their values (a petition against his show had attracted just 59 signatures), and a Sheffield councillor proudly proclaimed that he wasn’t welcome in “my city” – which was a bit telling. There was quite clearly some classism underlying the decisions as if his mostly working-class fans couldn’t be trusted to understand that they were listening to jokes. As Brown pointed out “I’ve been playing the city hall for 40 years […] and suddenly they decide I’m not suitable anymore. Why wasn’t I suitable for the last 40 years, that’s what I want to know?”
73. David Starkey, the outspoken and conservatively-minded British historian, faced great backlash after saying during an interview for a podcast discussing Black Lives Matter that the slave trade was not a genocide, “otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain would there? An awful lot of them survived.” An undeniably offensive thing to have said, even if unintended (Starkey has said he meant ‘damn’ as in many, not as if it was a bad thing). His comment became a major story in the media and despite apologising profusely, it led to him losing several honorary doctorates and fellowships, having book contracts cancelled (with his publisher saying they would never publish a book by him again), and his Medicott Medal for Services to History withdrawn. He (along with podcast host Darren Grimes) also found himself the subject of a rather pointless criminal investigation for ‘hate speech’ (later dropped) after complaints were made. Some may question how the erasure of everything he has ever achieved is a proportionate level of accountability for a single comment.
74. Lindsey Ellis, a popular YouTuber and film critic, received backlash after posting a tweet comparing the animated film Raya and the Last Dragon to the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender – she had suggested the former was derivative of the latter. Some people decided to take this as her suggesting that Avatar, a show (made by white people) influenced by East Asian cultures, was actually the origin point for other stories that had East Asian cultural elements. Her unfortunately worded follow-up tweet, beginning: “I can see where if you squint I was implying all Asian-inspired properties are the same” only served to confirm she was a racist in the eyes of the mob. Much abuse then followed. In the wake of the backlash, Lindsay released a nearly two-hour-long apology video – which still wasn’t enough. She then permanently closed her social media accounts and YouTube channel.
75. Carlson King, a popular YouTuber and Twitch streamer known as CallMeCarson to his fans, effectively quit the internet after being accused of exchanging nudes with two underage fans. Now that sounds a whole lot less shocking when you consider that the ‘underage’ fans were 17 and Carlson was 19. Chat messages showed that both he and the fans appeared to be equally engaged in the exchange. Regardless, he was disavowed by collaborators and now has articles and social media comments online forever implying that he is a paedophile, predator, and groomer.
76. Hugh Sheridan met immediate backlash after being cast in the lead role for the Sydney production of the musical stage play Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He was to play the character of a genderqueer punk singer who has a botched sex change operation, but an open letter was soon penned from the trans group Queer Artist Alliance Australia demanding he be replaced with a transgender actor. The letter gained so much attention, and Sheridan so much personal abuse, that the show’s American creators issued a statement clarifying that Hedwig was “not a transgender story” and so anybody could play the role. Despite this, the show’s Australian producers chose to cancel the show entirely. Sheridan has since spoken about how he was made to feel suicidal by the backlash – exacerbated after he dared to respond to an activist who had sent him abuse online by calling them “insane”.
77. Will Johnson, a Canadian literary editor for the Humber Literary Review with an extensive history of pro-LGBT editing, was fired from his position for defending gender critical feminist Meghan Murphy’s right to freedom of speech – he didn’t even say he agreed with her. She had come under attack for daring to hold a speaking event in a public library. Johnson was then told by Humber to remove all references to his former time at Humber from his social media.
78. Kara Lynne was fired from her role as community manager for the American video games distributor Limited Run Games because who she followed on her personal Twitter account was deemed not to support an “inclusive culture” (If you’re wondering: Libs of Tik Tok, conservative US political commentator Dave Rubin, lesbian YouTuber Arielle Scarcella, trans YouTuber Blaire White, and former Star Wars actress Gina Carano). She’d been targeted by trans activists on the Resetera video game forum after posting that she was excited to play Hogwarts Legacy.
79. Troy Leavitt, a videogames developer for Hogwarts Legacy, felt compelled to resign from his role – after being used as collateral damage to try and smear J.K. Rowling – over an obscure YouTube channel he hadn’t posted anything on for several years. Painted as ‘far right’, ‘anti-feminist’, and a ‘holder of bigoted views’, anyone who actually bothered to watch his videos would know he is nothing of the sort. In actual fact, he is a lapsed Morman who now describes himself as a “liberal, atheist, skeptic” who votes independent or libertarian. The ‘offending videos’ included rational and unbiased observations on Gamergate from a developer’s perspective; his personal feelings (which were mostly of disappointment) on the sexual harassment allegations made against Disney’s John Lasseter having been a huge fan and having met him through his work – as he put it, a defence of forgiveness, not of wrongdoing; and thoughts on the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. The majority of his videos were just about video games or atheism.
80. Nick Buckley was sacked from the award-winning charity he had founded in Greater Manchester after writing a Medium article criticising Black Lives Matter. His article had stressed that whilst “of course black lives matter”, the political agenda of the UK organisation was “neo-marxist” and “divisive” and had very little to do with George Floyd’s murder in the US. He had shared this article only via his professional network on LinkedIn, yet it ended up being disseminated over social media. A coordinated effort, which included a petition, was made by a mob of left-wing activists to pressure his charity’s trustees into dismissing him. They complied. After the story was highlighted in the media and a counter-petition was started by a former trustee to support Buckley, he was reinstated. The petition had ended by noting: “It only took 400 signatures on an online petition to have Nick removed. Just 400 people can wipe out 2 decades of public service and remove him from a charity he founded.”
81. Jess De Wahls, an embroidery artist based in London, had her work removed from a gift shop after complaints (just eight, as it turned out) about a blog post on sex and gender she had written two years before. She found out via social media, with the Royal Academy publicly announcing they would no longer be stocking her work because of her “transphobic views” (she doesn’t believe that people can change sex and thinks trans activists can be extremely abusive – the point proven in the immediate aftermath of the RA’s announcement). After the story was picked up by the media, the Royal Academy issued an apology and put her work back on sale, its chief executive describing the original decision as a “failure of communication”.
82. Cindy Sheehan, a prominent voice in the US anti-war movement after her son was killed in Iraq, was de-platformed from an anti-imperialist peace event due to her mildly-expressed criticism of trans activism. She had commented on Facebook in defence of a friend who was accused of “being a TERF”.
83. Rachel Ara, a feminist artist, saw her work dry up after having a lecture on fine art at Oxford Brookes University cancelled at the last minute after students from the LGBTQ+ society accused her of holding transphobic views. Prior to being de-platformed, her career as an artist had been going well, with regular speaking invitations and her work shown at venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Barbican.
84. Marie-Luise Vollbrecht, a PhD candidate at Humboldt University in Germany, had a lecture on the evolution of biological sex cancelled after an abusive campaign by trans activists. In the days before the scheduled event, they mass-reported her to both the university and her PhD supervisor and abused the university e-mail server to message the entire study body, telling them that she was a ‘TERF’. She had previously co-authored an open letter with other academics calling for an end to inappropriate and ideologically driven coverage from the state media on the issue of gender identity ideology and the use of puberty blockers on children.
85. Megyn Kelly had her daytime talk show cancelled by NBC after a social media outcry over on-air remarks she made about the appropriateness of blackface as part of Halloween costumes. She had said, “When I was a kid, that was OK as long as you were dressing up as a character”, adding “Luann de Lesseps wants to look like Diana Ross for one day, and I don’t know how that got racist on Halloween” (de Lesseps had caused controversy after dressing up as Diana Ross on an episode of The Real Housewives of New York City the previous year). Despite a public apology for the remarks, her show was swiftly cancelled and a few months later her contract with NBC was terminated.
86. Sue Schafer, a middle-aged graphic designer with no public profile, attended the Halloween party of the Washington Posts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Tom Toles just a week after Megyn Kelly’s comments. Her face covered in black makeup and wearing a name tag saying “Hi, I’m Megyn Kelly”, she had intended her costume as a joke that would appeal to the overwhelmingly liberal partygoers (Kelly had been a long-term host on Fox News before her shortlived talk show). It didn’t go over well and she was repeatedly challenged about it by other guests. Realising it was possibly the dumbest thing she had ever done, Schafer phoned Toles and apologised the following day, and that was that. Or so she might have thought. Two years later, after being tipped off by a guest at the party who presumably had some issue with Toles, The Washington Post decided to run a 3000-word story titled: “Blackface Incident at Post Cartoonist’s 2018 Halloween Party Resurfaces Amid Protests”. They justified its newsworthiness on the grounds that it had happened at Toles’ home and another columnist had also been at the party, so they had some sort of duty to report on it (really, they just wanted to get ahead of any potentially negative story). Many within the newsroom questioned why they were publishing it. All it achieved was that Sue Schafer found a blackface photograph of herself prominently featured in a national newspaper and consequently lost her job.
87. Kelly Childs and Erinn Weatherbie, a mother-daughter team of vegan cupcake bakers in Canada, had their publishing deal with Penguin Random House cancelled for engaging in “conduct that reveals prejudice against Black people”. What sort of conduct you might ask? They posted a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. on Instagram, followed by a black square in support of Black Out Tuesday (the collective online action in protest of police brutality against black people). Whilst receiving over 1000 likes, this saw them accused of “performative allyship” in the comments section. After a stream of abuse, they deactivated comments on the post and were then accused of “silencing black voices”. A successful campaign was then launched to cancel their book deal. No evidence was provided by Penguin Random House as to how they were prejudiced against black people.
88. Natasha Tynes had her book deal cancelled after a vicious backlash to a poorly judged tweet. Tynes had tweeted out a photo of a DC Metro worker (a black woman whose face was partially obscured by a cap) eating on the metro, despite there being a ban on such behaviour for the general public. Even though she deleted the tweet within the hour, the internet did not forgive. Interpreted as an attempt to shame the worker and as racism (despite Tynes being an immigrant of colour), the online abuse poured in, to the extent that she spent that evening hospitalised after having panic attacks. Her book deal was instantly cancelled (her publisher denouncing her in a public statement) and her debut novel (one she had spent several years writing), picked up by a smaller publisher, now has over 2000 one-star reviews on Goodreads from people who haven’t read it. Natasha later told an interviewer that she believes if the publisher hadn’t reacted in the manner they did, then the media wouldn’t have reported it (the story was covered internationally).
89. Martin Shipton lost his judging role at the Welsh Book of the Year awards after an argument on Twitter about the Black Lives Matter movement. The Western Mail journalist had questioned why protests were being allowed during covid lockdown and what value there was “in holding a demo in front of Cardiff Castle about the murder of a black man in Minneapolis”. He said it was “politically naive and virtue signaling“. After backlash from social media users, some of whom got quite abusive, he responded robustly. Literature Wales described his comments as “aggressive” in a statement announcing his removal. They didn’t speak to him before doing so.
90. Gordon Klein, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles was suspended and banned from campus after a petition was started demanding his firing. He had refused a request (by a white student) to allow black students to be graded more leniently in the final exams over grief caused by the death of George Floyd. He had questioned how he was supposed to know who was black as classes were currently online and sarcastically asked what he was supposed to do with mixed-race students, “a full concession or just half?” After a screenshot of the email was shared online and a petition was started by students, the University suspended him. He was reinstated 21 days later after it was established that there was nothing that needed to be investigated – yet an email sent out to students by the department dean immediately after his reinstatement still strongly implied that Klein had done something wrong. Klein says that this has damaged his reputation and he has lost consultancy work. He is now taking legal action against the University.
91. Ilya Shapiro, a law professor, was suspended from a job he hadn’t yet started after backlash to a series of tweets he made about President Biden’s promise that his next Supreme Court nominee would be a black woman. Shapiro had argued that Biden’s nominee “will always have an asterisk attached” and that Sri Srinivasan, an Indian-American, was “objectively” the “best pick”. It was his use of the term “lesser black woman” (a ‘lesser’ pick in relation to Srinivasan) that caused an immediate backlash and saw Georgetown Law start an investigation. Shapiro quickly apologised for the “poor phrasing”, but was still subjected to a smear campaign – the tweet deliberately mischaracterised as suggesting that black women, in general, were ‘lesser’. After a four-month investigation, Shapiro was cleared of any wrongdoing – yet he chose to step down anyway, criticising both the investigation and Georgetown’s speech code – he had been effectively cleared on a technicality as he hadn’t officially started his role at the University at the time of the tweets. Shapiro said in an opinion piece published at the same time as his resignation, “I would have to be constantly walking on eggshells”.
92. Steven Greer, a Professor of Human Rights at the University of Bristol, was subjected to a five-month investigation after being accused of Islamophobia. The Bristol Islamic Society put in a formal complaint over the content of one of his optional course modules and started an online petition demanding his dismissal. He was accused of “Islamophobic rhetoric” for including the 2015 Paris terror attack in a lecture slide and for highlighting the inferior treatment of women and non-Muslims in Islamic countries. He was fully exonerated of all allegations, but the module was still removed from the course – and despite the University noting the abuse Greer had faced, they still “recognised” the concerns of the Islamic Society (even though they’d been found to be baseless).
93. Adam Habib, Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, found himself suspended from the university after being accused of racism by students. During an online meeting, a student asked if the university’s commitment to Black Lives Matter was sincere when some academics continued to use racial slurs, notably the n-word, in the classroom. Habib responded by saying he would personally address any allegations brought to him but used the word in question whilst doing so. When challenged by students, Habib, a mixed-race South African, apologised for any offence but explained that “I come from a part of the world when somebody uses it, the context matters.” As he later said on Twitter, “You cannot impute maligned intention without understanding context. Do I believe that only blacks can verbalise the word. No, I don’t”. After a selectively edited video of the incident was shared online, a campaign began to get him fired and the student union issued a statement describing Habib’s comments as “unacceptable, disgusting and to be unequivocally rejected”. He was later cleared of any wrongdoing after an investigation but still expected to participate in ‘restorative justice’ exercises.
94. Noah Carl, a young conservative scholar, lost his research fellowship at Cambridge University after an open letter was circulated by a group of academics describing his work as “racist pseudoscience” and demanding he be investigated. Some of Carl’s research (not his primary focus) touched upon the link between genes and intelligence. Is that research flawed? I wouldn’t know. But neither would a large number of the 500+ academics who signed the letter – signatories coming from academic departments as completely unrelated to the issue as Music, Art History, Visual Cultures, Modern and Medieval Languages, and Gender Studies. What is clear is that claims made about Carl and treated as fact by many journalists and social media commentators – that he is a member of the ‘alt-right’, that he attended a ‘secret eugenics conference’, and that he published a paper arguing in favour of racist stereotypes – were completely untrue.
95. Bristol Free Speech Society saw an event with Emma Fox (a research fellow for the Henry Jackson Society) cancelled on security grounds after a planned protest organised by the Islamic Society and the Students’ Union. Fox (who now works for a counter-extremism think tank) had authored a University Extreme Speakers report in which Bristol ranked tenth. For this, she was branded ‘Islamophobic’. The Bristol Free Speech Society said in response: “We believe that the question we asked in our first event of this term, ‘Is there a problem with free speech on university campuses?’, has been clearly answered: yes.”
96. The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies‘ conference on prison reform was cancelled by The Open University after trans activists vowed to disrupt the event over the group’s policy that women’s prisons should be female only. Said policy was not a primary theme of the planned conference. Over 100 delegates had already bought tickets.
97. Josh Slocum was forced to step down from his position as executive director of the non-profit Funeral Consumers Alliance (which works to stop bereaved Americans from being ripped off by funeral homes). A public smear campaign by the “wokest subset of the FCA’s member organizations” described Slocum, a gay man, as engaging in “hate activity” because he hosts a conservative podcast – or rather one that is critical of the social justice left (Slocum describes himself as a former leftish-Democrat, now libertarian conservative). ‘Transphobe’ was the label wielded most viciously – he had spoken out against the harm done by trans activists to LGB people and children, and produced videos focused on Fred Sargeant (a gay rights activist who was actually at the Stonewall Riot) after he was beaten up by trans activists at Vermont Pride. As he later said of the mob, it was “made up of colleagues and “friends” who had known me for years and even decades. People whose homes I had stayed in suddenly believed, or pretended to believe, that I was a bigot and a dangerous man”. Even after resigning, he saw his podcast targeted – losing most of his income after Patreon decided to ban him.
98. Wild Womyn Workshop, a radical feminist merch shop run by lesbian artist Angela C Wild, found itself censored across social media after being mass-reported by trans activists. She received three bans in three days over three different platforms – Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram – and had to go through the appeals processes for reinstatement. This wasn’t the first time Angela had been targeted – after J.K. Rowling tweeted a photo of her wearing a t-shirt from Wild Womyn Workshop that said “This Witch Doesn’t Burn” her sales went through the roof, but she also faced a torrent of social media abuse. The hosting server for her website was also contacted to try and pressure them into taking it down.
99. Nina Paley, a cartoonist, had a crowdfunding campaign hosted by IndieGoGo cancelled after the project had successfully raised 150% of its target. All funding was returned to donors with no prior notice, explanation, or chance of appeal. A gender critical radical feminist, her planned comic book (which had already gone to the printers before the sudden cancellation) was called Agents of H.A.G. According to the synopsis, “Women are disappearing from all over the Internet” But WHO is disappearing them? Menopausal Woman and Sidekick track down the nefarious BanHammer – and get help along the way from an unexpected ally”. Paley later commented that IndieGoGo had weeks to cancel the crowdfunder if it violated their terms of service (they also had weeks to come up with a reason for how it violated their terms of service. No explanation was ever forthcoming).
100. Steven Earnest was fired from his role as a theatre professor at Coastal Carolina University after being accused of “racial insensitivity” and “being dismissive of students of color”. He had sent an email questioning why the university had apologised for a perceived racial bias incident that proved to be entirely baseless, writing that he didn’t think the incident was “a big deal”. A group of students had complained after entering a classroom and finding a list of names of black students written on the blackboard, which they interpreted as the singling out of non-white students. As it transpired, the names had been written by a visiting artist who had been working with a black student who had said she felt isolated and would like to get to know other non-white students in the department – the names had been written as a sort of brainstorming session of who she might be able to try and make friends with. The visiting artist simply hadn’t thought to wipe them off before leaving the room. Despite the facts making clear that the incident had been completely misinterpreted, Earnest was still expected to express outrage over it and solidarity with those offended. His failure to do so led to protests from students who he had “never interacted” with and the termination of his contract. He was reinstated two months later only because of legal support from the civil liberties group The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
101. Jeffrey Lieberman, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association, saw his career destroyed after a single tweet about Nyakim Gatwech, a black Ethopian-American model of South Sudanese descent: “Whether a work of art or freak of nature she’s a beautiful sight to behold”. Because people are idiots, his use of the expression “freak of nature” was taken to mean he was calling a black woman a ‘freak’, rather than as a clumsy compliment. Despite an apology in which he said he was “deeply ashamed” about his “racist and sexist” message and the subsequent deletion of his Twitter account, he was immediately suspended from his position at Columbia University, removed from his position at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and forced to resign from his role with the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
102. Mike Richards stepped down from his hosting role for the American game show Jeopardy! after filming just a week’s worth of episodes. He had been shamed in the media for ‘crude’ comments he had made about women on a podcast he hosted seven years prior. Comments included, that one-piece bathing suits made women look “really frumpy and overweight”, that women “dress like a hooker” on Halloween, and that one of his female assistants was a “booth ho” in reference to her past work as a model. He had also used the words midget and retard on some of the shows – the podcast was intended as a “series of irreverent conversations between longtime friends who had a history of joking around”, as he explained in his groveling apology. After being brought to public attention by what was essentially a hit piece on the sports and pop culture website The Ringer, his remarks were framed as all sorts of ‘-isms’ on social media and the national news. Despite the apology, he was forced to resign. A week later he was fired from his role as executive producer, not only for Jeopardy! but on Wheel of Fortune too.
103. Greg Clarke was forced to resign from his role as FA Chairman after referring to black football players as “coloured” whilst giving evidence to a parliamentary select committee. He apologised instantly after it was pointed out to him during the evidence session that the term was outdated, saying: “I deeply apologise. I am a product of having worked overseas, I worked in the USA for many years where I was required to use the term “people of colour” because that was a product of their diversity legislature. Sometimes I trip over my words.” That he had meant no racist intent and his comments about black players were actually positive ones – he was giving evidence on the subject of diversity in football and the abuse faced by black footballers – didn’t matter to those who then lambasted him. A social media backlash ensued, with MPs and ‘progressive’ political and cultural commentators all joining in the attack. Every word of his evidence was then taken apart, selectively quoted, and misconstrued: he was accused of stereotyping Asians, of being sexist about women in sports, and of saying that being gay was a “life choice”. None of these things were accurate representations of what he had said. Regardless, he quickly resigned in humiliation as people who for the most part had no interest in football whatsoever got to feel incredibly virtuous for a day or so.
104. Lauren Lough had her Lambda Prize nomination pulled after a Twitter argument. Her essay collection was removed from contention in the category of best lesbian memoir after she defended a forthcoming Sandra Newman novel from charges that it was transphobic. The premise of Newman’s novel was in short, ‘what if all the men disappeared from the earth?’ It hadn’t yet been released. When online activists accused the book of being transphobic, Lough responded by arguing that they should wait until they’d actually read it before condemning it. She was defending Newman as a friend – neither describe themselves as gender critical. Regardless, the Lambda Prize swiftly informed her that she was no longer a nominee. Providing no examples of the tweets they were referring to, nor even speaking to Lough beforehand, they put out a statement that concluded: “As an L.G.B.T.Q. organization, we cannot knowingly reward individuals who exhibit disdain and disrespect for the autonomy of an entire segment of the community we have committed ourselves to supporting.”
105. Adrianna San Marco, a student at a New York University, lost her job writing for her local newspaper after she described institutional racism as a myth in an opinion piece for a separate conservative website. Her argument was based on publicly available law enforcement data and existing studies that challenge the notion that African Americans are disproportionately targeted by the police. Within two days of publication, she was terminated – the newspaper editor claiming her article was ‘racist’ and ‘harmful’. She later faced such a barrage of harassment at her university for the piece that she discontinued her studies there.
106. Micah Sample found himself suspended from student leadership positions, charged with harassment, formally investigated, and kicked out of the Honor’s College at Indiana University because of a jokey (edgy, even) rant he had written on Facebook about campus guidance on avoiding offensive Halloween costumes. Nothing he had written was crude or threatening (read it via the link), but after some students complained to the University, they launched an investigation – also issuing a statement denouncing the post which made it sound a lot like they had already decided the outcome. Sample was found guilty of harassment and disruptive behaviour – the witness statements from complainants in the 91-page report making for utterly comical reading. One complainant described the post as a “vicious neglect of the well-being, both emotionally and mentally, of others”, another noted “the evil in his words”, and another said, “HIS WORDS ARE FUELED w/HATE” and claimed reading them had caused a near mental breakdown.
107. Angelos Sofocleous, a Durham University student, was banned from a proposed debate at The University of Bristol because he had tweeted “women don’t have penises”. The debate was ironically about free speech on campus. In the following months, he was removed from his position as assistant editor of Durham’s Philosophy Journal, dismissed as General Editor of the university’s student magazine, and pressured to resign from his position as President-Elect of Humanist Students. Both dismissals were later found to be ‘unfair and undemocratic’ by Durham Students’ Union as they did not follow proper procedures, not allowing him to explain his views or any opportunity to appeal.
108. Mimi Groves, a white 19-year-old high school cheerleader, lost her scholarship offer to the University of Tennessee after a video in which she used a racial slur (not maliciously) went viral. A former classmate with a grudge against her posted to social media a three-year-old, three-second Snapchat video Mimi had sent to a friend celebrating getting her learner’s permit in which she had used the n-word as punctuation, as in “I can drive, n—-r”. Deliberately waiting until she had chosen a college so it would have maximum impact, coincidently shortly after George Floyd’s murder, mixed-race Jimmy Galligan shared the video online. It soon went viral across all major social media platforms, with Mimi’s photograph also shared, resulting in the university receiving hundreds of angry emails and phone calls demanding she have her offer withdrawn. She ended up going to a community college. As she later said of the video, the word was in “all the songs we listened to, and I’m not using that as an excuse. […] It honestly disgusts me that those words would come out of my mouth […] How can you convince somebody that has never met you and the only thing they’ve ever seen of you is that three-second clip?”
109. Lisa Littman, a Brown University assistant professor, published a paper looking at what she termed to be “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in adolescents and young adults. Through surveying the parents of teens, she found that trans-identification was taking place in peer groups in which friends became gender dysphoric at the same time, that a large majority of these youths were female, that many had identified as LGB prior to identifying as transgender, and a disproportionate number also had mental health issues or learning disabilities. In short, her paper suggested there might be an element of social contagion going on. Almost immediately, a small number of trans activists complained – none of them with any background in academia – and in response, both Brown University and PLOS ONE (the peer-reviewed scientific journal it had been published in) put out statements expressing concern about its impact on the transgender community, with PLOS ONE saying they would engage in a rigorous re-review of the paper. Effectively nothing in the paper was changed by the review – but it hasn’t stopped relentless smearing of both Littman and the study. She even lost her consulting job over the hostility generated by it. Whilst it and her later study on detransitioners have been cited by the French National Academy of Medicine and Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare, as they move away from an affirmation-only approach to childhood transition – trans activists continue to either pretend her research doesn’t exist or to portray her as some sort of anti-trans junk scientist (whilst tellingly not arguing to conduct further research).
110. James Esses was expelled from his Masters’ degree in psychotherapy, without warning, in a two-paragraph email, after speaking out about his concerns regarding the medicalisation of children with gender dysphoria. He was given no opportunity to appeal. Shortly before, he had launched a public petition which asked the UK government “not to criminalise essential, exploratory therapy” as part of their planned conversion therapy ban. The petition received over 10,000 signatures in just four weeks, during which time he had written articles about it and given a number of interviews to raise awareness. He is currently taking crowdfunded legal action against Metatonia (the course provider) for discrimination on the basis of his gender critical beliefs.
111. Amy Hamm, a Canadian nurse, has found herself before a disciplinary tribunal following an investigation by her regulatory body, not because any of her patients had complained about her or because of anything she had done at work, but because of complaints made against her involvement in the placement of a huge ‘I (heart) JK Rowling’ billboard in Vancouver. The charge against Hamm reads, “Between approximately July 2018 and March 2021, you made discriminatory and derogatory statements regarding transgender people, while identifying yourself as a nurse or nurse educator.” Aside from the billboard, which is what initially drew her to trans activist attention, a number of social media posts were cited by the two people (one anonymously) who decided to complain about her. The statement made by Hamm’s lawyer sums up quite well the sort of views expressed by Hamm: “This case is fundamentally about speech: whether a nurse can publicly debate a topic that is as politically charged as this one; whether she can advocate on her own time for women’s rights to not have intact male bodies in their prisons, changerooms, rape crisis centres, and sports teams, and for care to be taken not to rush children and adolescents into life-altering and permanent changes to their bodies.”
112. Kenneth Zucker was fired by Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and had his Gender Identity Service shut down after a sustained campaign by trans activists who accused his clinic of ‘conversion therapy’. An external review published by the hospital in response to the complaints had concluded that the clinic was out of step with current best practices (ie. it was cautious about automatically affirming every child who claimed to be transgender) and that he had called a transgender patient “a hairy little vermin”. Following three years of media silence on the advice of his lawyers, Zucker was vindicated. The report was withdrawn (having been poorly evidenced), he received a public apology for defamation (the allegation of his comment to a transgender patient had been entirely false), and he was awarded over $500,000 as a settlement.
113. Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, a book written by BBC Newsnight producer Hannah Barnes, certainly can’t be called ‘cancelled’ as such, but it’s not for want of trying and it’s going to act here as a proxy for censorship more generally. Rejected by 22 publishers (none of them said anything negative about the book, but some expressed concern that it might be controversial and were worried about a backlash from other authors or junior staff), it was accepted by Swift Publishing and became an immediate bestseller. Yet, for almost a month you’d have been unlikely to find it in many Waterstones across the UK – it wasn’t available even for order anywhere in South or Mid Wales, nor in any of its three Glasgow stores, among others. It’s part of a common trend for books on such themes – described here in a Daily Mail article as ‘selective censorship’. Whilst its release was covered in virtually all major UK newspapers – including a big magazine feature for The Sunday Times – The Guardian took two weeks to mention it in its newspaper. As Hadley Freeman wrote in a column for The Times: “books by women that question gender ideology, such as Material Girls by Kathleen Stock and Trans by Helen Joyce, were similarly rejected by every publisher but one – and then went on to sell by the truckload. By contrast, the trans activist Munroe Bergdorf had 11 publishers fighting to publish her memoir, Transitional, and got a six-figure deal. A week after it was published last month, it was at No 2,838 in the Amazon charts.”
114. Selina Todd was banned from speaking at the Oxford International Women’s Festival, an event she had helped to promote, because of pressure from trans activists over her connection to Woman’s Place UK. She had previously been given two guards to protect her on campus (she is a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford) because of threats from trans activists. She has also faced a number of petitions demanding she be disciplined, sacked, or no-platformed from speaking events because of her criticism of gender self-ID.
115. Rosa Freedman, a human rights lawyer and professor at Reading University, found herself subjected to online and in-person abuse, including death threats and having her office door urinated on, after submitting evidence to a Holyrood committee warning that conflating the terms sex and gender on Scotland’s official census would undermine women’s rights. She had also signed a letter criticising the Stonewall Diversity Champion scheme. This led to her being disinvited to a holocaust memorial event she was due to speak at, despite being Jewish and an expert on antisemitism. The University later apologised.
116. Raquel Rosario Sanchez, a Bristol University PhD student from the Dominican Republic, was subjected to a bullying campaign by trans activists over her links with Woman’s Place UK. After her complaints about it to the University dragged on for two years and her mental health was severely affected, she took civil action against the University for failing to support her. She was unsuccessful – ultimately, Bristol University argued that it did not owe a duty of care to its students so did not act unlawfully. The judgment did confirm, however, that she was the victim of “violent, threatening, intimidating behaviour or language” by trans activist students, that there was a “failure to respect the rights of others to freedom of belief and speech”, and that the University took an “excessively long time” to respond to her concerns. She (and three other students) did later win a separate case against Bristol’s Students’ Union. A feminist society, Women Talk Back, had been disciplined for excluding male-born trans women from talks on rape and sexual assault. The Union later admitted that “affiliated clubs and societies may lawfully offer single-sex services and be constituted as single-sex associations” under the Equality Act, and agreed to a settlement.
117. Joan Smith lost her role as co-chair of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls board after she raised concerns with the mayor’s office about transgender women using rape and domestic abuse refugees.
118. Evening With Cancelled Women, an event organised by the Women’s Liberation Front, was cancelled by The New York Public Library after pressure from trans activists. All of the six women (Natasha Chart, Dominique Cristina, Libby Emmons, Linda Bellos, Meghan Murphy, and Kellie-Jay Keen) slated to speak had been victims of social media bans, protests, or firings for their views on sex and gender.
119. Jessica Mulroney, a Canadian fashion stylist and marketing consultant, became the centre of controversy after threatening the career of black lifestyle influencer Sasha Exeter – something Sasha dubbed “My Amy Cooper Experience” [See example 69] in an Instagram video. As a result, Jessica lost multiple contracts and her TV show – even her husband was forced to resign as host of a Canadian entertainment program. However, as it turned out, the blindly-accepted narrative of what had happened simply wasn’t true. Six months later, previously undisclosed texts and messages emerged which exonerated Jessica and showed that Sasha was the one doing the threatening and had provoked Jessica into responding in kind (Canadian Television executives had been in possession of these messages for months but had chosen to sit on them).
120. Mike Tunison went from a moderately successful freelance journalist to working as a janitor after being named on the Shitty Media Men list (a crowdsourced spreadsheet of anonymous, unvetted sexual misconduct allegations that went viral during the #MeToo movement). He had been accused of “harassment, stalking, physical intimidation”. Nobody came forward, even anonymously, to provide any further detail and Tunison does not know who might have written it. A side note to the accusations was a claim that an “HR file at The Washington Post” (where he had previously worked) existed that would presumably back up the allegations. When he called the newspaper for verification, he was told his file contained no mention of any such thing. After the list went viral, he saw his freelance work fizzle out, with just one of the 12 media outlets he previously contributed to still offering him work. Stephen Elliott, author of the Adderall Diaries, was also named on the list. Accused of rape, he was fired by his agent, shunned by the literary world, and lost friends. After five years, he won a defamation lawsuit against the list’s creator (Moira Donegan – now a Guardian journalist), winning a “six-figure” sum in damages.
121. Florian Jaeger, an academic at the University of Rochester in New York, had his career and reputation ruined after sexual misconduct allegations were weaponised as part of an academic grudge against him and then later took on a life of their own as part of the #MeToo movement. Despite three investigations clearing him, he was painted an “abuser”, “predator”, and “rapist” (he hadn’t been accused of the latter). He faced campus protests and petitions demanding his firing, was disinvited from conferences, had threatening letters sent to his house, and saw his two accusers featured in Time Magazine’s ‘Women of the Year’ as #MeToo “silence breakers”. The third investigation was led by former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White and took nearly four months at a cost of millions. Its findings were the same as the previous two, concluding: “We found that some of the complaints’ allegations were true, and Jaeger’s behaviour and statements, at times, were viewed by many (both male and female) as insensitive, unprofessional, cruel and occasionally containing sexual innuendo”, but continued by saying “the complaints’ narrative – framed through the language of sexual predation and retaliatory animus towards women – is largely without factual basis”, adding that many of the claims were “embellished”, “distorted”, or “sensationalised” in order to “demonise” him. After a year and a half on leave, he found himself stuck at Rochester, his publishing and grants slowed to a crawl, with rumours and the occasional protest persisting even three years later, unable to leave because who else would hire him?
122. Jeremy Kappell was fired as WHEC’s chief meteorologist after jumbling his words and saying “Martin Luther Coon Park” rather than “King” during a live New York broadcast. He immediately corrected himself and later made a sincere apology. Several colleagues spoke out in his defence and it was clear to most fair-minded commentators that he had made an innocent mistake – there being no evidence to suggest he was racist and so ‘must have been thinking it to have said it’. However, a number of public figures, including Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren, demanded his firing. Within three days, WHEC complied.
123. Dominique Moran, an unknown 23-year-old Mexican-American student, lost her job at Chipotle (a chain of American fast-food restaurants) and was branded a racist all over social media and the national news after a video circulated online where she could be seen refusing to serve a group of black men. The video was watched at least 7 million times. The pre-existing narrative of a white woman racially profiling African Americans was an easy one for social media and partisan commentators to disseminate. The facts were somewhat different: her refusal to serve the group of black men had nothing to do with racism, but everything to do with their history of ordering food, receiving it, and then running away without paying (they’d done this just two days before). Her reputation was restored and she was offered her job back (she declined) after a bit of online sleuthing by a stranger, who discovered that the man who had posted the video had previously posted multiple times boasting of not paying for Chipotle – though she received no apologies from anyone who had attacked her online. It should have been clear to begin with that there was more to the story than ‘white woman being racist’, as aside from Moran being clearly Hispanic/Latino as much as her skin colour is white, a black colleague is also seen in the video and wasn’t bothered by what was happening – but internet mobs rarely ask questions.
124. Sara Cristensen saw her business destroyed after a social media post. She was hiring for a Marketing Manager and had asked applicants for a link to their public social media accounts. One of the applications she received was from a candidate whose Instagram account was full of photos of them in very little clothing. “Without thinking”, as she put it, she shared one of the photos (the name and head cropped out) to her Instagram Stories page without identifying or tagging the applicant, intending to make the point that such photos wouldn’t help applicants to find professional jobs. After receiving an email from the applicant asking her to take it down, she deleted it – just 57 people had seen the Instagram post at that point. Or so she thought. Unknown to her, the applicant had shared the post on her Twitter account, claiming to have felt “objectified”. A large account then retweeted it and within hours, the narrative of Sara and her company being “body shamers” and “misogynists” took hold and blew up, first across social media and then across mainstream media. She lost some of her clients almost immediately. Over the following nine months: her home address was published online, she received thousands of hostile emails and phone calls – including death threats, countless negative reviews of her business were left on various platforms, her company’s website was targeted with malware, and all of her social media accounts were shut down after being mass-reported for ‘violating community standards’. Even after hiring a Crisis PR consultant and issuing a sincere apology, the backlash didn’t stop and she was forced to let go of all of her employees and contractors – everything she had worked for completely gone.
125. Taylor Selfridge, a reality TV star, was dropped by MTV in 2020 after “racially insensitive” tweets from 2012 (when she was 17/18) resurfaced on social media. Tweets included: “We have to greet everyone at work but sometimes I won’t greet the Black people because they scare me” and “My uncle is dating an Asian. Aunt Ping please make me sushi.” Despite an apology, in which she said she had now grown up – MTV pulled a special episode of Teen Mom she had filmed from its schedule and ended their working relationship with her, putting out a statement condemning “systemic racism”. She remains active as a social media influencer but hasn’t made any television appearances since.
126. Grant Napear was fired from sports radio station KHTK and forced to resign as the play-by-play announcer for the NBA’s Sacramento Kings after a single tweet. When asked for his thoughts on the Black Lives Matter protests by a former player, Napear responded with “ALL LIVES MATTER… EVERY SINGLE ONE”. The backlash was swift. He later said that he was unaware that some people perceive ‘all lives matter’ to be a signal for racism, but strongly maintains that he did nothing wrong by posting the tweet. He is currently suing for wrongful termination.
127. Caroline Farrow was no-platformed by the University of Exeter Debating Society for her “anti-LGBT activism” – even though she had spoken at the University several times before, including in a near-identical debate three years earlier. The debate was about sex work. After intervention from The Free Speech Society, she was re-invited – the university farcically claiming an “error”. A committed Catholic, she campaigned against same-sex marriage (and accepts the outcome), which in the eyes of some ‘progressives’ has made her fair game for abuse and character assassination. It’s her position on gender identity (she doesn’t believe people can change sex or that children should be given puberty blockers) that has drawn the most vitriol however. Trans activists have: had her arrested, stopped her travelling, tried to have her children removed, set up anonymous social media accounts and blogs to cyber-stalk and abuse her, targeted her husband’s work, sued her (unsuccessfully) three times, visited her house, ordered fast-food to her home, cat-fished her children, and contacted employers and media agencies to try and get her sacked and de-platformed.
128. John Gibson was forced to resign as CEO of Tripwire Interactive, a video games development company he had co-founded, after a single tweet expressing support for an abortion ban in Texas. He had tweeted this: “Proud of #USSupremeCourt affirming the Texas law banning abortion for babies with a heartbeat. As an entertainer I don’t get political often. Yet with so many vocal peers on the other side of the issue, I felt it was important to go on the record as a pro-life game developer”. After social media backlash and several within the industry threatening to boycott his company, he decided to step down just three days after posting the tweet.
129. Scott Cawthorn, creator of the independent video game franchise Five Nights at Freddy’s, retired from video game development completely after his personal political donations were shared online (whilst publicly available, somebody had gone looking for them). Between 2015 and 2020 he donated roughly $36,000 to a number of Republican candidates, including Donald Trump. LGBTQ activists decided this made him homophobic, transphobic, and racist. After threats were made to his family, he published a (fairly well-received) post on his franchise’s Reddit community explaining “I’m a republican. I’m a Christian. I’m pro-life. I believe in God. I also believe in equality, and in science, and in common sense. Despite what some may say, all of those things can go together”. He then announced his retirement.
130. George Hook, Irish journalist and rugby union pundit, became as he put it a “retired broadcaster” after being suspended for comments made about rape on his Newstalk radio show. In the context of discussing a high-profile rape trial, whilst describing rape as “awful” he also raised questions about the personal responsibility that young girls were taking for their own safety. He was quickly accused of ‘victim blaming’, with colleagues, women’s groups, and even politicians publicly denouncing him; choosing not to recognise the point he was actually trying to make, even if they disliked how he said it. Despite apologising, he was then sacked. He later said of the incident: “It cost me my job, certain views that when we send our girls out we have a responsibility to tell them that if they have 10 vodkas they’re not in a good position to defend themselves against predatory males. And that was viewed that I was sort of supporting a rape culture.“
131. Scott Adams, creator of the satirical Dilbert comic strip, was dropped from hundreds of newspapers and branded a racist after making deliberately provocative comments about race relations on his YouTube show. Making international news, even the supposedly neutral BBC headlined the story as “Dilbert comic strip dropped by US media over creator’s racist tirade” as if it was a factual statement. Referring to a poll in which 26% of black respondents disagreed that “It’s OK to be white” and 21% weren’t sure, he had said “if nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people […] that’s a hate group. I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people, just get the fuck away […] because there is no fixing this”. Less noted in the many news articles was that he went on to say: “I’m going to back off from being helpful to black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. I’ve been doing it all my life. And the only outcome is I get called a racist”. The social media response was to take every word literally. As he later explained in a podcast interview with the black American media personality Hotep Jesus (likely unseen by most of those criticising him), he was making a point using hyperbole about the media’s stoking of racial division and how counterproductive this was, not advocating discrimination or segregation. He said he had fully expected a negative reaction but hadn’t anticipated it would become as big a story as it did and he was simply trying to move the conversation.
132. Gina Carano was fired by Lucasfilms from her role on The Mandalorian TV show for a social media post. Carano had previously drawn ire from social justice activists for comments on pronouns (amusing), facemasks (neither here nor there), and election fraud (a bit stupid). However, it was an Instagram post she shared implying that being a Republican today was like being Jewish during the Holocaust that started a #FireGinaCarano hashtag. Or at least that was how it was interpreted. Whilst alluding to Nazi Germany is usually unwise when making any sort of moral or political point (though many on the left do this all the time), the point was about how it has become normal to dehumanise those with different political views, not a suggestion that anyone was about to be rounded up and gassed. Regardless, she almost immediately lost her job and was dropped by her agent, with most of the negative media reports not actually quoting what she had shared. Her right-wing credentials (therefore okay to ridicule and dismiss – which kind of demonstrated the point of the post) were only solidified when she gave interviews to conservative journalists Tucker Carlsen and Ben Shapiro and signed up for a film produced by conservative news site The Daily Wire – but then why wouldn’t she? Nobody on the left invited her to explain herself or offered her work.
133. Ronald Sullivan, a Harvard Law professor, was forced out of his role as faculty dean after student protests because he chose to join the legal team defending Harvey Weinstein in his criminal trial for sexual assault. The students argued that defending Weinstein was incompatible with promoting a safe environment for students. Rather than use the opportunity to teach the students the importance of criminal defence, the fundamental right to a fair trial regardless of what a person is accused of, and the distinction between lawyers and clients, the university decided to cave to the students.
134. Erika Lopez Prater, a teacher at Hamline University in the US, was dismissed after including a medieval painting of the Prophet Muhammed in a class discussion about Islamic Art (she had stated in the syllabus that the image would be presented and that participation in the discussion would be optional). The student newspaper then withdrew an essay defending the teacher shortly after publication – the University President later sending an email to all employees declaring that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.” A single student had complained.
135. Ben Frisch, a Jewish teacher (who had lost family members at Auschwitz) with a career spanning 34 years, was fired from a private Manhattan school after inadvertently making a Nazi salute whilst trying to demonstrate an obtuse angle in a math class and then to try and defuse the awkwardness of the moment had jokingly said “Heil Hitler”. After some students complained that they had been offended, he was immediately suspended. Despite a petition supporting him signed by 190 of the 279 students in the upper school, he was then fired.
136. The Lady of Heaven, a British film written by a Muslim about the daughter of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, had all of its screenings cancelled by Cineworld after protests from a relatively small number of Muslims who believed the film to be “blasphemous”. Despite gaining coverage in the press and the then Health Secretary Sajid Javid expressing concern, there were echoes of the Batley School controversy from the previous year as once again liberal commentators and politicians, on the whole, said nothing.
137. Meg Smaker‘s Jihad Rebab (now retitled The Unredacted), a documentary film exploring Guantanamo Bay detainees and their attempts to return to society, earned glowing pre-release reviews and managed to bag a slot at the Sundance Film Festival. After a campaign by Muslim and Arab filmmakers (who hadn’t seen it) began which criticised the film for “being yet another story about Muslims as terrorists” and for taking up space that could have gone to a film directed by a Muslim, things soon spiraled. The film’s most well-known financer, the very left-wing film producer and social activist, Abigail Disney soon repudiated it, and others who had previously praised the film spoke out in repentance. Sundance apologised for showing it, most other festivals cancelled their invitations to the film, and it was shunned by distributors – you won’t find it on any streaming service. Meg Smaker is now self-distributing the film with donations via a GoFundMe page.
138. Niel Golightly was forced to resign from his Executive role for Boeing, following an employee’s complaint over an article he had written as a military pilot 33 years prior which argued that women should not serve in combat – an opinion he had long since changed.
139. Michael Fischler, a professor at Plymouth State University in the US, was disciplined for providing a written character witness testimony for a former student in a criminal proceeding. Kristie Torbick was charged and then convicted of sexual assault on a 14-year-old child. Fischler offered no opinion on Kristie’s guilt or innocence, simply offering his impressions formed over a three-year period a decade earlier as to her performance as a graduate assistant. After pressure was put on them by those angered by the subject matter of the case, the university decided to punish him by removing his name from a counselling centre he had founded and led for 40 years and mandating him to complete anti-sexual misconduct training before resuming teaching. Another professor who provided testimony, Nancy Strapko, was fired outright – she later successfully sued the university.
140. Jason Kilborn, a law professor, was suspended and investigated by the University of Illinois after he posed a hypothetical question (which he had asked in previous years) about employment discrimination for an exam. Aware of the need to be sensitive with language, the question used the redacted slurs “n____” and “b____” as evidence of discrimination. Even this failed to save him from complaints. He was then disciplined by the university, mandating eight weeks of sensitivity training, weekly sessions with a diversity trainer, and the writing of reflection papers, before he could return to the classroom – ironically, the training materials included the same redacted slurs that Kilborn used in the test question.
141. Alexi McCammond was forced to resign from her job as editor of Teen Vogue before it had even begun after casually racist and homophobic tweets she posted a decade before at the age of 17 were unearthed (including: “Now Googling how to not wake up with swollen, Asian eyes…” and “Ha Ha, that’s so gay”…). Intense pressure from a group of staff, several advertisers, and social media meant the defence of youthful indiscretion and the opportunity for contrition was not allowed.
142. Ollie Robinson, an English cricketer, found himself in similar hot water after tweets he posted nearly 10 years prior at the age of 18 – which were arguably more obnoxious than overtly racist (such as: “My new muslim friend is the bomb #wheeyyyy” and “wonder if Asian people put smileys like this ¦)”) – were made public. Despite an apology made on live television, he found himself suspended from all international cricket for several months.
143. Hartley Sawyer was fired from his long-running breakout role in the superhero drama The Flash in 2017 after ‘racist’ and ‘misogynist’ Twitter posts made by him between 2009 and 2014 were unearthed. He was well into his 20s at the time of the tweets, so immaturity doesn’t cut it as a defence – but the tweets were clearly jokes and not meant to be taken seriously (as he later put it in his lengthy apology, he was trying to ‘get attention’). A few examples of his offending tweets: “The only thing stopping me from doing mildly racist things is the knowledge that Al Sharpton would never stop complaining about me”, “Things only women should be in: twilight screenings, gynecologists offices, and Porsches”, and “Enjoyed a secret boob viewing at an audition today”. He has not had an acting role since.
Here are a few early examples – back when it was termed ‘call out culture’
144. Justine Sacco became the quintessential example of social media shaming and cancel culture (her story featured prominently in Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed) after a single tweet in 2013. A joke tweet made to her tiny Twitter following whilst on a flight to South Africa was picked up and amplified to such an extent that by the time she landed she had already been fired from her role as a communications director in New York. What she had done was tweet, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white”. Sacco had meant to mock clueless ‘white privilege’ – I mean it’s the kind of thing you’d hear in a mild Family Guy cutaway gag – instead the joke was taken seriously and she was branded a racist. She spent the next year jobless and in hiding; what happened to her still so infamous that if you type her name into Google, it’ll take you 16 pages before you find anything unrelated to it.
145. Tim Hunt, a British biochemist and Nobel Prize winner, was forced to resign from his position at University College London in 2015 after remarks he made about women in science during a conference speech were construed as sexist. He had said: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry.” He was made the subject of an online shaming campaign and forced into a temporary withdrawal from public life and activities. As he later explained, the remarks were “intended as a light-hearted, ironic comment” but had been “interpreted deadly serious by my audience.”
146. Germaine Greer, the world-renowned feminist author, cancelled a lecture she was due to give at Cardiff University in 2015 after a petition was launched against her over her views on transgender people – essentially that trans women couldn’t ever really be women. Her planned lecture didn’t have anything to do with transgenderism. Although Cardiff University had held firm and said the lecture would go ahead, as she put it during an interview with BBC Newsnight, “I’m getting a bit old for all this. I’m 76, I don’t want to go down there and be screamed at and have things thrown at me. Bugger it.”
147. Maryam Mamazie, an Iranian-born secularist campaigner and spokesperson for Ex-Muslims of Britain, found herself de-platformed from a talk she was due to give at Warwick University in 2015 over fears she would “incite hatred” against Muslim students. A strong critic of Islamism and its treatment of women, Maryam had fled Iran with her parents after the Revolution – yet found herself labelled by the Students’ Union as “highly inflammatory”, providing an example of what is now common on the left, ie. confusing criticism of a political ideology with ‘hatred’ of a group of people. Not taking it lying down, she made her thoughts on the matter clear with a series of social media posts and press releases. She eventually received an apology. As she put it: “It’s a topsy-turvy world when “progressives” who are meant to be on our side take a stand with our oppressors and try to deny us the only tool we have to resist – our freedom of expression.”
148. Brendan Eich resigned just ten days into the job of Mozilla CEO in 2014 after an outcry over his opposition to same-sex marriage. He had donated $1000 to the 2008 campaign for the California ballot proposition intended to ban same-sex marriage in the state (which passed but was later overturned in court). He had tried to defend his position as a political view he hoped employees would tolerate, if not understand, and said: “Mozilla has always worked according to principles of inclusiveness. It may be challenging for a CEO, but everyone in our community can have different beliefs about all sorts of things that may be in conflict. They leave them at the door when they come to work on the Mozilla mission.” But this wasn’t deemed good enough. A petition with 70,000 signatures demanded he either publicly change his belief or resign and a coordinated boycott of the Mozilla Firefox web browser was mounted. Eich felt he had no option but to resign and for two years was unable to even get funding for any new project.
149. Daniel O’Reilly lost his entire career as a mainstream comedian after a single joke in 2014. Playing a risque character called Dapper Laughs, which parodied a dating expert, his TV show had already been accused of being degrading to women – but it was a joke made during a live show that made him public enemy number one in the media for a period. As part of a riposte to a Huffington Post review that had branded his show “sexist” and a “rapist’s almanac”, he had joked that a female audience member was “gagging for a rape”. In response, he was labelled ‘pro rape’ and ‘anti-women’ by the media and made the subject of a petition demanding his show’s cancellation. Dropped by his agents, venues, and brand sponsors, his TV show, tour, and book deal were all cancelled, and he ended up losing his house due to the loss of income. It took years before he could even post on social media without receiving a torrent of abuse. As he later explained, some of his jokes did cross the line and were stupid but others were taken out of context and would have been treated differently had he been an Oxbridge-educated comedian rather than a working-class lad with a cockney accent.
150. Nicholas and Erika Christakis were forced to step down from their positions as faculty-in-residence at a Yale University college in 2016 after months of protests from students. All because of a single email. After Yale administrators sent an all-students email advising them to avoid “culturally unaware or insensitive” choices when choosing their Halloween costumes, Erika responded with her own email. Whilst acknowledging genuine concerns, she also questioned what business it was of the university to control what students wore. It was this bit that drew her husband into the crosshairs: “Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.” Students responded by circulating an extremely hyperbolic petition that demanded both Erica and Nicholas apologise and admit their wrongdoing. Their refusal only made things worse (they had tried to engage in dialogue). Harassed on campus and abused online – with many news articles misrepresenting them – they eventually both resigned from their roles (Erika quit Yale completely), but not before the student’s concerns had grown to a list of grievances about race that mostly had nothing to do with them.
Democracy Coma 
Leave a comment