Last month, amid the ongoing social and racial reckoning in American institutions,

Harper's Magazine ran an open letter titled,

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.

The letter decried what it claimed was a chilling effect,

that the range of public discourse is being narrowed

for fear that writers may face retaliation for

expressing unpopular views. This week's pod extra is not about the nuances of the letter, but rather

the two words left out that were undoubtedly on many people's minds. Cancel culture. Back in January, I asked Natalie Wyn,

left-wing YouTube sensation and creator of the channel ContraPoints, about that fraught phrase.

She herself has been cancelled, or if you prefer, excoriated, threatened, bullied off Twitter

by people who were once her supporters and allies,

including members of the trans and gender non-conforming community.

She herself is a trans woman, and it's left her a lot of time to reflect on the limits of how we usually talk about it.

There's a version of this conversation that's already been had to death, and it goes like this.

On the one side are a bunch of male comedians who constantly bitch about how cancel culture is out of control.

You can't joke about anything anymore without these millennial jackals trying to get you in trouble.

And the other side is mostly progressive think piece authors who argue that there's no such thing as cancel

culture. It's just that powerful people are finally being held accountable for their actions,

and they can't fucking handle it so they go around bitching about cancel culture. Now unfortunately,

that's Wynne in her video called canceling, a well-argued entertaining anatomy of cancel culture,

tracking its evolution and impact.

What you're about to hear is an extended version of our conversation in which Wynn outlines a set of principles around cancel culture.

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