From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is now and then.

I'm Heather Cox Richardson.

And I'm Joanne Freeman.

Today we're going to be undertaking the third of a three-part series of episodes about free speech.

And the topic of today's episode is cancel culture.

Now I will readily admit right off the bat that when we were discussing last week this topic for today,

we spent a long time, Heather and I and the producers, trying to define what cancel culture is.

And that was tricky to do.

And as we'll see shortly, I'm going to argue, that's kind of deliberate.

But generally speaking, cancel culture is something that you hear about all the time in one way or another has to do with people being canceled, erased, silenced.

Normally people who are well-known in one way or another or people I guess who gain notoriety in one way or another,

being canceled by a large group, sometimes online, sometimes not, but really being silenced and thereby canceled.

Now the idea of cancellation apparently as a general idea goes back to roughly, well I suppose there was a film, New Jack City,

in which someone was referred to as being canceled in 1991.

But 2014 is when the phrase was being used within the black community in songs, people would talk about love being canceled.

So people that I've been talking about canceling people for a while, cancel culture I think is something different.

And I'm going to be curious Heather to hear what you have to say about this.

But just the phrase cancel culture.

If you think about culture wars also as one of these statements that seemingly describe something but actually kind of doesn't,

I would argue that cancel culture is yet another one of these kind of buzzword things like critical race theory and everything else that are being used to lump a lot of emotions and fears under a category and that by definition,

it's not supposed to be easy to define.

That it represents kind of a feeling and a response more than something that's very specific and I would argue that that's part of why you and I Heather had such an interesting time trying to pin down what it was.

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