Fundamentally, I am not in favor of discriminatory practices, but I am not sure that cancel culture is effective. Let’s imagine for a moment that cancel culture is so dissuasive that those in positions of power who believed they enjoyed impunity will no longer dare to flaunt it. However, problematic practices by those in power will not disappear; instead, they will shift to less visible spaces and become harder to expose.

When it comes to this kind of concrete action, it seems to me that cancel culture is effective, and that it’s a good thing to challenge the culture of tolerance toward everyday discrimination (I’m using the term broadly to include racist and sexual remarks, etc.). What you’re saying—that we shouldn’t make a big deal out of some youthful foolishness (racist jokes) for which the person has apologized—is an example of what I mean by tolerance of discrimination. Let’s take a story I heard on the radio yesterday. A woman in a village finds notes containing sexual threats on her doorstep. She investigates on her own (the police aren’t doing their job) and discovers it’s an 80-year-old man from the village. People tell her they aren’t surprised because he’s always been borderline (abused his wife, ogled young girls at the pool...). The woman has to force the police to act; the man receives a warning, but two years later he starts leaving the notes again. So she puts up an accusatory banner (though not naming him) in her garden. The villagers, including the mayor, think she’s overreacting. She believes that these lenient approaches fail to account for the harm done to the victim. Before she knew that this obese old man was harmless, she was afraid. Do you take into account the victims of sexist jokes? If the fear that everyday discrimination will be more severely condemned forces people to think twice before speaking out, that’s fine. Where I have doubts about cancel culture is its deterrent effect on powerful racists/sexists (like the Epstein network).

If I rephrase your position, cancel culture is problematic because it punishes a person even if they have admitted their wrongdoing, and the punishment (losing a job, etc.) is disproportionate to the harm caused. It seems to me that cancel culture aims to replace a justice system that has not proven itself. Do you agree with this rephrasing? Let me clarify what I mean by “system of justice.” In this system of justice, for example, it is considered that a teenager who participates in bullying subordinates within a boy band and who, a few years later, publicly expresses regret has paid enough of a price, and there is a certain amount of understanding toward him—he just needed to mature. This system allows the boy band as a system to persist. On this point, cancel culture targets a system. If the boy bands of “little jerks” disappear, no one is going to complain. But there are far more dangerous boy bands—and it is these ones for which I have doubts about the effectiveness of cancel culture.

Sorry, I meant to say “boys' club” instead of “boy band”.

I use the term “cancel culture” in the broad sense of publicly denouncing discriminatory practices. There’s no need for a crowd of whistleblowers; the woman with her banner already has a platform (her banner is on the side of a road used by everyone in the village). Nor is it necessary for the act being denounced to have occurred in the public sphere. I understand that some attacks on cancel culture are motivated by the fact that dominated groups, who previously had no voice in the public sphere, are now taking it and competing with the dominant groups. That isn’t directly your argument, but we can see in your two examples—the radio host and the lecturer—that they had access to the public sphere and lost it when they lost their jobs. If they had simply been reassigned to another job without access to the public sphere, would you consider the punishment more proportionate? Another point: you advocate for education and second chances, but you’re advocating for rights that are only offered to the dominant group. Isn’t this asymmetry problematic? The fact that the dominant group doesn’t have a monopoly on the public sphere seems to me to be a positive achievement of cancel culture.