Is This What Cancel Culture Achieved?

By Thomas Chatterton Williams

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

 

Over the weekend, the artist and entrepreneur Kanye West, now known as Ye, let loose a blitzkrieg of appalling screeds to his 33 million followers on X. “IM A NAZI,” he proclaimed. He reiterated his position that “SLAVERY WAS A CHOICE,” contended that “JEWS WERE BETTER AS SLAVES YOU HAVE TO PUT YOUR JEWS IN THEIR PLACE AND MAKE THEM INTO YOUR SLAVES,” implied that domestic violence is a self-sacrificing form of love, and shared a screengrab tallying the sales receipts for a White Lives Matter T-shirt sold on his Yeezy website. By Monday, the only product for sale on the site was a white T-shirt adorned with a black swastika, and his X account had been deleted.

 

Remarkably, this was not the highest-stakes or most widely discussed racist controversy on that social-media platform during the same time frame. On Friday, Vice President J. D. Vance defended Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency office, who was revealed to have posted (pseudonymously), “I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate.”

 

When Ro Khanna, the Indian American representative from California, inquired of Vance—whose wife and children are of Indian descent—whether, “for the sake of both of our kids,” he would ask Elez for an apology, Vance became apoplectic. Toward Khanna. “For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up,” he fumed on X. “Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children.”

 

Elez resigned from his post, and Musk asked his 217 million followers on X what they thought: Should he be reinstated? Almost 80 percent of those who replied said yes. Later that day, Musk confirmed that Elez would be “brought back” to DOGE. Not only was a self-professed racist like Elez not canceled—on the contrary, he was transformed overnight by some of the most powerful (and pugnacious) men in America into a national cause célèbre.

 

Incidentally, this was the same week that Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, announced that it had hired Daniel Penny as “a Deal Partner” working on its “American Dynamism team.” Penny, a former Marine, was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide after he held a mentally ill man in a choke hold on the subway, and the man died. In an internal memo reported by The New York Times, an Andreessen Horowitz partner praised him for showing “courage in a tough situation.”

 

If a vogue for virtue signaling defined the 2010s and early 2020s, peaking in 2020 during the feverish summer of protest and pandemic—a period in which pronouns in bio, land acknowledgments, black squares, diversity statements, and countless other ethical performances became a form of social capital—something like the exact photonegative of that etiquette has set in now. The reassertion of brute reactionary power in the dual ascendancy of Donald Trump and Elon Musk has brought us to a cultural tipping point. Virtue be damned: Now we are living in an era of relentless, unapologetic vice signaling. Of all of Ye’s deranged posts, one was particularly confusing. “DO YALL THINK I CAN TURN THE TIDE ON ALL THIS WOKE POLITICALLY CORRECT SHIT,” he asked. Here it seemed the infamous trendsetter was decidedly behind the times.

 

After a decade and a half of progressive dominance over America’s agenda-setting institutions—corporations, universities, media, museums—during which everyone was on the lookout for the scantest evidence of racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, and every other interpersonal and systemic ill, it is not at all frivolous to ask what has been achieved. What, to put it bluntly, was all that cancel culture for?

 

If the genuine but ill-conceived goal was to create a kinder, friendlier, more inclusive and equitable world for all (often paradoxically by means of shaming, coercion, and intimidation), the real-world effect has been an abysmal rightward overcorrection in which norms of decency have been gleefully obliterated. We have not merely been delivered back to the pre-woke era of the early 2000s. Nor is what we’re seeing some insubstantial vibe shift in manners and aesthetics, confined to the internet.

 

Consider: We had a #MeToo movement characterized by sometimes disproportionate reputational sacrifices; now we have a presidential Cabinet populated by men with credible sexual-assault accusations on their records. The stifling racist/anti-racist binary of the anti-racism movement has led to the wholesale dismantling of DEI initiatives in both the government and the private sector. The insistence that “no human is illegal” has ended with an unconstitutional attempt to retract birthright citizenship. And the push not just for tolerance but for the equivalence of trans athletes with cisgender athletes has culminated with the president banishing “gender ideology” and surrounding himself with a multiethnic crowd of beaming girls to sign the “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order. On every single issue that mattered to them, progressives now find themselves in a weaker position than before.

 

In The Opium of the Intellectuals, the French sociologist Raymond Aron observed that utopian programs are “refuted not so much by their failure as by the successes they have achieved.” In the blistering weeks since Trump’s inauguration, we can say that this has been axiomatically true of the movement we look back on now as “wokeness.”