The Nuclear Deterrent to Cancel Culture

Why should the Left monopolize fear?

Recently I’ve been brooding upon the attempted cancellation of my lovely podcast guest

Nina Power

, and I’ve found the more I dwell on it the more conflicted I feel.

On one hand I’m quite relieved to observe that all attempts at marginalizing her have proven laughably ineffectual and if anything suggest that Cancel Culture is long dead. Polarization has created enormous space for heterodox thinkers to find an audience receptive to their ideas, and it’s increasingly difficult to imagine any future where the Left can simply “unperson” someone as they routinely did in 2018-2020.

But on the other hand it’s not like Nina just escaped unscathed from this. These proceedings clearly injured her financially and emotionally, and the community’s mobilization on her behalf did tragically little to prevent her ultimate victimization by a cartoonishly villainous culture of elite lawfare (closely aligned ofc with the tactics deployed against Spencer after Cville by that great sapphic ogre Roberta Kaplan).

And therein lies the eternal problem with carving out free speech zones through polarization: all it encourages is a retreat to greener pastures—a sort of “intellectual white flight.” But such an approach always fails because it relieves pressure on the enemy and enhances the other guy’s morale while doing nothing to cut the libtard off in his eventual pursuit. It also fails to account for basic asymmetries between right and left.

Now, many conservatives will *think* they account for such asymmetries simply by stating them—that is, complaining very loudly to all and sundry that the courts and media and schools have a liberal bias. But how exactly do they aim to rectify this?

Invariably it’s either Project 2025 or the Benedict Option. We can “infiltrate elite institutions” and somehow displace the libtard Deep State (despite the total number of competent right wing civil servants in this country being distressingly low), OR we can reject temporal politics wholesale and simply move to Kansas or some shit.

But obviously these can’t be our only options, because they’re both retarded and bad.

Men of the Right clearly owe it to gentler girls like Nina to protect them from these Stalinist maggots while more generally ensuring our ladies needn’t fight these types of battles anymore. But that will require an entirely different approach—one that very deliberately leverages domains in which our side enjoys the asymmetric advantage!