And to repeat, nobody wants to prevent transwomen acting as women in public. We're talking about denying access to women's private safe spaces.

Wait, who is stifling Rowling's expression? She's a multimillionaire who produces Hollywood movies and has millions of followers on social media. She doesn't just have a platform, she has, like, all of the platform.

(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/08/is-free-speech-under-threat-cancel-culture-writers-respond)

Nesrine Malik: Don't confuse being told you're wrong with the baying of a mob

The idea of “cancel culture”, the obvious, albeit unnamed, target of this letter, collapses several different phenomena under one pejorative label. It's puzzling to me that a statement signed by a group of writers, thinkers and journalists, most whom have Ivy League or other prestigious credentials, would fail to at least establish a coherent definition of what it believes cancel culture is before seeming to condemn it.

The fact is that decisions made by corporate HR departments, failings in editing processes at media organisations such as the New York Times, and the demands of movements for social justice to be accorded recognition and respect do not constitute one clear trend. The new climate of “censoriousness”, if there is one, cannot be diagnosed and dispatched this easily.

In my view, the failure to make these distinctions clear is probably less an oversight and more of a convenient fudge. Because outrage about cancel culture can't be credibly sustained when you start breaking down what it actually consists of. Companies hastily sacking people who have been mobbed online is about the bottom line and fear of bad PR. It raises interesting questions, but these are more about employment rights and the encroachment by bosses into areas of private opinion and conduct. Being piled on online is nasty, but it is broadly a function of how social media in particular and the internet in general has enabled bullying for the hell of it. Sometimes human beings are unpleasant, and certain platforms are designed to bring out the worst in them. That is separate to the demands for change emerging from many marginalised groups.

In not parsing these different patterns clearly, the Harper's letter commits the same offence it accuses others of doing: indulging in “the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty”.

To those unaccustomed to being questioned, this all feels personal. They have confused a lack of reverence from people who are able to air their views for the very first time with an attack on their right to free speech. They have mistaken the new ways they can be told they are wrong or irrelevant as the baying of a mob, rather than exposure to an audience that has only recently found its voice. The world is changing. It's not “cancel culture” to point out that, in many respects, it's not changing quickly enough.

Jonathan Freedland: The reaction to the letter has shown the need for it

Any letter that carries the signatures of both the former George W Bush speechwriter David Frum - the man who coined the phrase “axis of evil” - and Noam Chomsky is bound to get attention. It takes some doing to get, say, New York Times columnist Bari Weiss and Bernie Sanders advocate Zephyr Teachout to join forces, and there are dozens of similarly unlikely ideological match-ups to be found among those who signed the letter published by Harper's Magazine.

Endorsed by a bulging list of esteemed writers, artists and public intellectuals, this letter might well come to be seen as an inflection point in an argument that has been rumbling away, much of it on social media, for months if not years. And yet, the text hardly reads like some ground-breaking, revolutionary document. Luther's 95 Theses, it ain't.

Instead, as one signatory, Anne Applebaum, conceded on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning, it consists of a series of statements that are, in themselves, quite “anodyne”. It's not disparaging to say that the document, like many open letters, represents a lowest common denominator, a bare minimum that would be acceptable - indeed, obvious - to the likes of both Frum and Chomsky. The letter declares, for example, that: “The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.” Are there many who would disagree with those words, who would want to make out loud the case for wishing away what they don't like?

And yet the statement has not been received as a boilerplate recitation of the case for free expression, but has become controversial. That's partly because of the text itself - which some have read as brimming with thin-skinned privilege, seeing it as a coded attack on marginalised minorities for having the gall to criticise people with power and platforms - but also, as happens often with open letters, because of the names at the bottom. One name in particular has provoked fury: that of JK Rowling, because of her writings on trans rights and gender. At least two signatories have distanced themselves from the letter since its publication.

It's clear that a number of people believe Rowling should not be included in such statements, that her views have placed her outside the bounds of acceptable discourse. As it happens, the letter speaks of this phenomenon when it describes “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism.” It seems the Harper's letter might be a rare example of the reaction to a text making the text's case rather better than the text itself.
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