The Real Cancel Culture

 

Here’s something ironic: lawyers have gotten this individual’s statements about his DOGE activities cancelling basically all federal grants for work in the humanities taken down from YouTube, based on claims that he is now being cancelled by people on the internet. 

We really need to talk about what it means to cancel something or someone, because those actions are not equivalent. . . 

So: here is the context. The National Endowment for the Humanities is the US federal agency tasked with funding work in the humanities—including history, literature, philosophy, linguistics, languages, law, classics, ethics, and subjects MAGA disdains like gender and women’s studies, ethnic studies, and sexuality studies. 

A year ago, in March 2025, DOGE was let loose on the NEH, and within the space of 22 days, 97% of all NEH grants had been cancelled. Basically all work in the humanities other than preserving the papers of George Washington was defunded. 

In May 2025, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association sued on behalf of their members whose work had been defunded. The law moves slowly. Long after researchers lost their jobs and museums shuttered their exhibits, the case progresses ponderously. Part of that process is called “taking depositions.” What that means is that lawyers have been interviewing the DOGE agents who compiled the lists of NEH grants to cancel. 

Some of the results were up on YouTube for a few days, and they inspired a combination of head-desking and hair-tearing. The claimed basis of cancelling 97% of all NEH grants was that they violated a Trump executive order that bans diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Who decided that? Some young white men with no background in peer review or grants or any subject matter expertise. They were untrained acolytes brought aboard by Elon Musk, power-tripping on their ability to literally cancel the work and livelihoods of thousands of experts and public servants they were confident were “woke” and worthy of destruction. 

MAGA has been gnashing and moaning for years that the most oppressed group of Americans are cis straight Christian white men. That’s an interesting claim, given the large overrepresentation of cis straight white Christian men in the halls of power—consider the US Senate, for example. Men outnumber women in the Senate today by 3 to 1. Black Americans make up 14.4% of the US population but only 5% of the Senate. Nine percent of Americans today identify themselves as LGBTQ+, but the Senate is only 1% LGBTQ+-identifying. On the other hand, while 62% of Americans today identify as Christian, 85% of US Senators are Christian. And while 58% of Americans today are white, the Senate is 86% white. 

When pressed for evidence that cis straight Christian white men are being discriminated against and everyone else unfairly advantaged, MAGA adherents don’t talk about Congress or who runs Fortune 500 companies. Instead, they talk about “DEI”. They claim that any effort to increase equity is by definition an effort to discriminate against them. They say that DEI just means “advantage mediocre women and people of color and LGBT people over straight white men who are clearly more highly qualified.” And then they complain about “cancel culture,” which they present as a pathology of the “intolerant left.”  When people post angry replies to conservative cis straight white Christian men making provocative comments on social media, they say that’s “cancel culture.” When students protest a prominent transphobe giving a speech on campus? “Cancel culture.”

Nobody is actually “cancelled” in those situations. In fact, influencers have their “brands” increase in value the more engagement they get on social media, so negative attention from progressives benefits conservative influencers' actual livelihoods. And protests are an eternal element of our guarantee of free speech in the US. Protests are not repression of our Constitutional rights—it is banning them that is repression. In fact, we can all recall back during the pandemic, when the same MAGA people who call “woke” protests today “dangerous cancel culture organized by ‘antifa domestic terrorists’ that must be stopped” were insisting on a right to show up to their own protests armed like militias with semiautomatic weapons. . .

Now, this is not to say that getting flooded with angry comments on the internet is pleasant. I myself have several times faced swarms of MAGA haters swooping into my social media to attack me for writing educational posts (usually ones about trans issues). Each time, that meant a couple of thousand people calling me names and telling me I was demonic, hideous, a danger to children, insane, deluded, and doomed to fail. Hundreds of people urged me to commit suicide, often with profiles referencing Hitler, but my reporting them led to nothing. Those swarms were organized by groups whose entire purpose is to attack members of populations they hate, aiming to hurt and threaten and demoralize the vulnerable. That’s very ugly. 

The fact that so many Americans feel like this could happen to us at any moment when we express our beliefs on the internet has turned the utopic dream of a worldwide online community sharing knowledge into the dystopic battlefield we all feel wary about today. And this affects our offline behavior. As a professor, I know that it makes students feel a lot more inhibited from speaking in class than they did at the start of this century. This applies to my students of every ideological bent—I teach in a “purple” state, and my students have long been equally likely to describe themselves as prochoice or prolife. But all over conservative talk radio and TV news and social media for years now, MAGA culture warriors have been claiming that only conservative students experience anxiety about voicing their opinions in college classrooms, described as hothouse Marxist lairs where “libs” received applause and conservative students are jeered and “cancelled” when speaking their minds. 

It’s just not true. Anxiety about how people will react to us when they find out what we think is pervasive in the culture war era, and crosses all boundaries of politics, race, gender, sexuality, ability, etc. etc.. And so I fight it. I set up and enforce clear rules for discussion in my classrooms, but more importantly, I talk about the value of community and respect, and model that—most importantly, when someone is going off the rails. So, for example, when a student comment is based on misinformation, I don’t “gotcha” and mock them. I express sympathy that they were taken in and calmly lay out the actual facts and their sources for them and the rest of the class to examine at their leisure, so that everyone has an opportunity to consider the evidence.

I can also tell you that the only times I have ever been asked by students (or unknown persons claiming to be "students" writing to me at work) to have someone silenced in the classroom because they were voicing unacceptable, biased opinions, those were attempts by MAGA-affiliates to run a sting operation to “prove” that conservative students get silenced and oppressed by “woke” professors. They were hoping to get me exposed for something I do not do, and then fired. (I have been dealing with people who really know nothing about me trying to get me fired and the LGBTQ+ Studies program I direct shut down now for a dozen years. It has been a long dozen years, but so far, I have persevered.)

And that brings us back to the definition of “cancellation.” Because to cancel something means to end it. A grant for research you dislike can be cancelled. An academic program that teaches subject matter you sneer at can be cancelled. A job doing work you disdain can be cancelled. MAGA can claim that “DEI has been cancelled!” and proceed to terminate grants, fire people from jobs, end programs, etc.. 

But you know what is not “cancellation”? People disagreeing with your opinion. Your beliefs being contradicted by empirical research. Or being held accountable to the public for work you ostensibly performed as a public servant.

There are some facts about the work of DOGE that we should be aware of. While Elon Musk promised to find hundreds of billions of dollars of “fraud and waste” to cut, saving the federal government so much money that Americans might each get a $5000 check, it did not do that. Nobody on Earth, from Elon Musk down, really knows how much if anything it did save, as there was no attempt made to actually do the accounting—there was just a “Wall of Receipts” full of error after error. Programs that had reached their end and spent all their funds were listed as those spent amounts being “saved;” items were double- and triple-listed; information that would allow “receipts” to be verified were redacted so it took months and months to figure out what was being claimed and check it against (a very different) reality. Analyses indicate that DOGE likely actually “saved” less than 5% of what Musk claimed it did. 

What it did do was a great deal of damage. A bunch of “DOGE kids” were let loose,with no expertise or training but lots of ideological lust to kick “libs” in the teeth, humiliate government agency employees, and rip data about Americans out of what had been secure databases to use or sell or hand over to Palantir. They were not hired or vetted by the federal government but waltzed in as “special employees.” And they expected to do whatever they wished without having to answer to anyone but Musk.

They didn’t expect to be held accountable for their actions. 

But now some are being compelled to give statements under oath in lawsuits. And this has led to a public outcry over a bevy of egotistical culture-war-obsessed twerps being allowed to lay waste to the work and livelihoods of a nation’s worth of dedicated researchers and curators and public educators. And they did this in the lowest-effort manner possible: they handed the work over to ChatGPT. They asked ChatGPT to list any potential relationship between each NIH grant and DEI goals. People were outraged to hear one of the young DOGE agents assert that a cancelled grant for a documentary about Jewish women who were slave laborers during the Holocaust was correctly identified by ChatGPT as “DEI” and thus illegitimate: “It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture,” Mr. Fox explains. “It’s inherently related to D.E.I. for that reason.” People eyerolled to learn that the rescinding of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s grant to digitize local newspapers was “justified” by  ChatGPT outputting that this grant “seeks to enhance digital newspaper programs, making them more accessible and customizable which aligns with DEI goals of inclusivity and representation.” 

Many people made their disappointment clear in social media posts.

Musk has responded by cheering the deposition findings, calling the defendants “legendarily based💪.” But the lawyers for the defendants ran to the judge to argue that the videos must be taken down because they posed a risk to government agents and their families. And on a preliminary basis, she agreed.

I do not, for this simple reason: government agencies are supposed to operate openly in the public eye. When government employees are investigating something, they are to identify themselves and show that they have authority to do so. When an agency is developing a regulation, it must inform the public, ask for comments, respond to these, and take them into account. When a government funder cancels a grant, it is supposed to issue a letter carefully laying out the reasons, telling the recipient how to repair those, and including the signatures of the employees responsible for the decision and their contact information. 

The Trump administration hates all those rules and “red tape.” Their approach is to ignore it all and just do whatever they believe Trump wants, as if Trump were a king and America not a democracy. This upsets many, but their upset doesn’t constitute “cancellation” of administration actors. That’s evident in the fact that they continue to act with impunity.

DOGE agents thought that they could act without accountability to the American people. They worked in the same mode as all the ICE agents wearing masks but not name badges, conceiving of themselves as some sort of secret police purging scientists and poets and park rangers while ICE purged the US of “foreign blood.”

And now a small smattering of the DOGE activities are being brought to light, as in the lawsuit featuring these depositions. The lawyers representing the former DOGE employees are producing the same line that DHS has used to justify its agents going masked and unidentified: that these agents must be protected from a horde of terrible, radical, anti-American agitators who would harm them and their families were their identities known.

But that defense cannot hold water, because as long as we remain a democracy, government agents must remain accountable to the American people. Government employees are public servants, and are supposed to take pride in working for the people, and to sign their name on the bottom of reports accounting for all of their actions. We can carve out a secrecy exception for “intelligence work,” but not one based on the idea that an agency’s actions conflict with the public will.

Being a public servant means having to listen to what the public says, even when that is that they think you are a fool with malignant intent. 

Don’t get me wrong. I believe it is a bad thing that today, to be in government means you really need an entire team to deal with all the hate directed at you on social media. And those attacks are not evenly distributed. We know that, for example, that women politicians receive 3.4 times more threats than do men, and that AI-produced sexual images are used to attack women almost exclusively. Public servants like judges must regularly cope with threats made against themselves and their family members—particularly coming from MAGA.

But that doesn’t mean that judges can stop signing their decisions and issue them anonymously. It doesn’t mean that politicians can move to making their votes secret ballots. Public servants must be accountable to the public. We should do all we can to stop the use of social media to harass and threaten people, and for pity’s sake, do all we can to replace a politics of hating one’s neighbor to one of love and respect. But part of respect is being honest and open about own’s actions.

Every member of DOGE should be held responsible for their actions. That’s not “cancelling” them; that’s called “accountability.”