When former president Donald Trump announced his lawsuit against social media companies this week,

he described his grievance using a word that's become a very familiar catchphrase.

We're demanding an end to the shadow banning, blacklisting, banishing, and cancelling that you know so well.

Cancelling. There is a national debate right now over the consequences of speech and who gets to exact them.

And it looks a lot like a debate we've seen before.

I think the panic over cancel culture is pretty much exactly the same as the panic over political correctness.

Just dialed up to 11 because of the influence of social media.

Nicole Holiday, who teaches linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, says young people more or less invented the term cancel as another way to say boycott.

It means do not support this thing. So conservatives have picked it up not to just mean boycott but rather to say our value system is under threat by these people who want to de-platform us because we have unpopular opinions.

That's the way that I think they frame it a lot these days.

But like we said, this has happened before where conservatives pick up a term from the left and weaponize it against the folks who'd been using it amongst themselves.

In 1984, Ruth Perry founded the Women's Studies Department at MIT.

She is now the Anne Friedlander Professor of Humanities at MIT, Emeritus. She just retired. Back in her early career, she ran with a crowd of lefty idealists.

We cared about the earth, we cared about sexism, we cared about white supremacy, all these things.

But they didn't take themselves too seriously. In fact, they had a term they would use to tease each other about the purity of their own activism.

So, you know, somebody would say, would it be politically correct if we had a hamburger? Somebody who was a vegetarian would say that.

Or somebody who was a feminist might say, it may not be politically correct, but I think he's really hot. Some sexist movie star or something.

Politically correct, was an in joke. It was ironic, it was arch, it was in group, and so on.

Of course, it didn't stay that way. Today, you might think of politically correct as a sneering term used to criticize the left.

That's because it was co-opted by some politicians and members of the right-wing media. They can't even invent their own epithet.

And deployed in the culture wars of the 90s. So it felt like, oh my god, they're using this against us as a way of making progressive forces seem unfair or dictatorial.

To jump ahead to the present day, how do you feel when you hear today's debates over cancel culture?

...