Although it’s been with us long enough to be the subject of multiple books, several movies and a British TV show, the phenomenon called cancel culture seems to be losing its power to strip people of their jobs and good reputations as it did just a few years ago.
In fact, 2024 might be the last year that Americans speak about cancel culture in present tense.
Speaking to NPR last month, David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at NYU School of Law, talked about how cancel culture and “excessive shaming” contributed to the backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion.
“I think one of the seeds of the backlash was planted, you know, many years ago at the peak of what, you know, some people at that time were calling cancel culture, where … a lot of people were feeling really fearful about, you know, if they make one mistake, if they use a piece of terminology that’s out of date that they didn’t realize was outdated, that they were going to get … shamed by other people in their workplaces or in their, you know, schools or what have you,” Glascow said.
Note that Glascow said people were calling excessive shaming cancel culture … “were” as in the past. And he’s right. People are still using the term but mostly in the context of history. It’s starting to have a lime green shag carpet kind of vibe, like something cringey from the 1970s. There seem to be no active cancellations in progress, or even any calls for cancellation, as the year comes to a close.
Compare that to 2020, when people angry about Gina Carano’s political views and statements were calling for her to be fired from the “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian.” Carano was let go in 2021 and later sued, saying in court filings, “A short time ago in a galaxy not so far away, Defendants made it clear that only one orthodoxy in thought, speech, or action was acceptable in their empire, and that those who dared to question or failed to fully comply would not be tolerated.” That case is still pending and scheduled to go to trial in the fall of 2025.
Some people believe the shift in the cancel culture winds culminated with President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in November. The most prominent voice making this case was Justine Bateman, the actress and former “Family Ties” star who posted on X, four days after the election, that she was “decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years.”
That post and the thread that followed it was a takedown of cancel culture that conservatives on social media cheered. Among other things, Bateman wrote that the political climate over the past four years had been “suffocating.”
“Only ‘permitted position’ behavior and speech was ‘allowed.’ Complete intolerance became almost a religion and one’s professional and social life was threatened almost constantly. Those that spoke otherwise were ruined as a warning to others,” Bateman wrote. She added that she is “neither one extreme or the other, but am one of the millions of people who believe in common sense, and that everyone should be free to live their lives however they want, unless that freedom interferes with someone else’s freedom to live their own life.”
Bateman has not said if she voted for Trump, but later told podcaster Megyn Kelly that the “mob mentality momentum” had been stopped by what happened on Election Day. And it’s not just people in the center or on the right pronouncing cancel culture dead, but also comedians like Greg Fitzsimmons and Bill Burr.
“It started off with something everyone could agree on, and then quickly it just spun out of control,” Burr told Bill Maher earlier this year. “I remember whenever that cancel culture got to the point of where it was, ‘I don’t like some of the topics in your stand up act,’ right? That’s when it got weird. Cancel culture … it’s over. No one cares anymore.”
Maher, however, disagreed, saying, “That’s so not true. Either one of us could get canceled in the next two minutes.”
To Maher’s point, perhaps it’s too early to say that cancel culture has been buried with a stake of holly through its heart, as Ebenezer Scrooge might have said. But there are signs of extinction, among them, the NFL players emboldened to do the Trump dance after scoring (with even the NFL saying it’s OK) — compare that to Tom Brady having to explain why he had a MAGA hat to people upset after it was spotted in his New England Patriots locker room in 2015.
There’s also “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, who has been battered by cancel culture throughout the past four years for her statements about gender, with some people burning her books and calling her transphobic, which Rowling denies. But in what can only be seen as a repudiation of cancel culture, HBO this fall issued a statement saying that Rowling “has a right to express her personal views” and filming on a “Harry Potter” series is to start in the summer of 2025 for release in 2026.
And there were exactly zero calls to cancel actor Chris Pratt for his religious faith in 2024, unlike the previous five years.
But perhaps the biggest reason that cancel culture appears to be over is that Americans of every political persuasion value free speech, even if the pendulum of which party champions it the most swings back and forth over time.
Dave Chappelle was at the forefront of comedians pushing back against efforts to silence comics for making jokes deemed transphobic or offensive in other ways. Elon Musk, in buying Twitter, announced that free speech would be a hallmark of the platform he rebranded as X; his first tweet after making a bid for Twitter was “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.” Musk went on to reinstate numerous accounts that had been suspended, including those of Jordan Peterson, The Babylon Bee and Trump. Both Musk and Chappelle helped to turn the conversation away from individual grievances to a foundational value of the nation.
Donald Trump’s win over Vice President Kamala Harris may have been the most publicized victory this year. But free speech’s win over cancel culture may be just as significant over time, and it’s something we all can celebrate.