In the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, we’ve seen a great deal of conversation about Cancel Culture. Many who gleefully doxed Nazis for years are now whimpering piteously about freedom of speech and the evils of getting people fired just because they said something you don’t like. And while most on the Right are gleefully celebrating the turn of events, quite a few are urging their compatriots to take the high road and refrain from this unseemly behavior.
There are certainly lots of moral questions one might ask about the merits and demerits of Cancel Culture and Doxing. But before we get into that discussion, we might want to start with the most important question: can it be stopped?
On the evening of September 5, 1921 Virginia Rappe was found seriously ill in a hotel suite rented by silent film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Two days later she was taken to a hospital. There she died of peritonitis brought on by a ruptured bladder.
While she was in the hospital one of her friends, Bambina Maude Delmont, told doctors that Rappe had been raped by Arbuckle. On September 10, the day after Rappe’s death, Arbuckle was arrested and charged with murder and first degree manslaughter.
The once beloved roly-poly buffoon was now a symbol of Hollywood decadence. Newspapers churned out stories that Arbuckle had violated her with a champagne bottle or that he had raped her so forcefully that her bladder ruptured. Two trials ended in hung juries. The third not only found Roscoe Arbuckle innocent but declared:
We feel that a great injustice has been done to him. We feel also that it was only our plain duty to give him this exoneration, under the evidence, for there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime. He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story on the witness stand, which we all believed. The happening at the hotel was an unfortunate affair for which Arbuckle, so the evidence shows, was in no way responsible. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and women who have sat listening for thirty-one days to evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.
At his peak Arbuckle was earning $1 million a year. After $700,000 in legal fees (nearly $13.5 million in 2025 dollars), Arbuckle was nearly broke. No studio would touch him and most Americans believed the yellow press over the jury’s verdict. Six days after Arbuckle April 18, 1922 acquittal, William H. Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, issued a lifetime ban on Arbuckle and requested that all showings and bookings of Arbuckle’s films be canceled. While he rescinded the ban six months later, the damage was already done.
From 1922-1932 Arbuckle eked out a living as director under the pseudonym “William Goodrich.” In 1932 he starred in six shorts. The day before he was to start filming in his first feature-length movie in 12 years, Arbuckle died of a heart attack. Hays would go on to issue the notorious Hays Code in 1934.
Did Arbuckle rape Virginia Rappe? In a letter exhibited in his first trial, Delmont demanded money from Arbuckle in exchange for her silence. The doctors who treated Rappe found no evidence of violent rape. Arbuckle was exonerated by a court of law. But the American public, and American movie studios, still found him guilty.
Americans have always taken great joy in crucifying sinners. Arbuckle became the symbol of Hollywood corruption and decadence. We will never know exactly what happened in that hotel suite. But even now most who remember Fatty Arbuckle think of him as the man who raped a woman to death with a champagne bottle. We have only a spotty record of his work as the studios destroyed many of his silent reels.
The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation. It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this Nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in Government we can give.
This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been the worst....In my opinion the State Department, which is one of the most important government departments, is thoroughly infested with Communists.
Joseph R. McCarthy, February 9, 1950
After Arbuckle, movie studios worked overtime to cover up scandalous behavior in the industry via payoffs and intimidation. But as the Cold War heated up, a growing number of Americans were terrified of a Communist takeover. Russia had produced its own atomic bomb in 1946, with the help of material stolen by Julius Rosenberg. Once again Hollywood found itself in the crosshairs of American public opinion.
On November 25, 1947 ten left-wing screenwriters and directors refused to answer questions about their Communist affiliations before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The “Hollywood Ten” — Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo — were sentenced to prison and fined $1,000 ($13,500) for their refusal to testify. All were blacklisted from working in Hollywood.
The Hollywood Ten were soon joined by many other Hollywood actors, writers, and directors. Dmytryk testified before the HUAC in 1951 and went on to direct 1954’s The Caine Mutiny. The rest of the Hollywood Ten remained persona non grata in the American film industry for decades. Like Arbuckle, many supported themselves by ghostwriting for a fraction of what they had been earning.
In 1947 Joseph McCarthy was a first-term senator from Wisconsin. Most of his fellow senators disliked him for his short temper and arrogance. But after his 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia McCarthy became the point man for anti-Communism. He wasn’t afraid to point fingers and name names. To frightened Americans he appeared to be a knight in shining armor fighting against the Red Menace when his fellow congressmen were lily-livered or compromised.
But McCarthy let power go to his head. His ham-handed efforts to investigate communist infiltration in the US Army resulted in a televised series of Army-McCarthy hearings. Many viewers saw McCarthy as a reckless bully and demagogue. When Joseph Nye Welch, the Army’s legal representative asked “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” the court’s audience burst into applause.
In December the Senate censured McCarthy. He remained in the Senate, but was largely shunned and ineffective. On May 2, 1957 Joseph McCarthy died of cirrhosis caused by years of heavy drinking. Today “McCarthyism” is a synonym for fear-mongering and demagoguery. Hollywood looks upon the Hollywood Ten as heroes and martyrs and looks down on Elie Kazan, Walt Disney, Sterling Holloway, Ronald Reagan, and others who testified before the HUAC. Few remember that every member of the Hollywood Ten was or had been a Communist Party member.
Perhaps the best summation of that era comes from Edward R. Murrow of CBS news, who said in a March 9, 1947 broadcast:
The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it – and rather successfully. Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
Good night and good luck.
In March 2006 Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams launched a new SMS service to promote their podcasting tool, Oeo. Twttr used SMS messaging to communicate with the user’s friend group. Send your message to 40404, twttr’s shortcode, and twttr would send it to all your twttr friends.
By the 2007 South X Southwest conference, twttr had moved to a web-based platform and rebranded itself Twitter. Since Apple had just launched the iPhone that year, Twitter became a popular choice for smartphone users. They could watch events unfold in real time from eyewitness reporters, complete with photos and videos. South X Southwest introduced a generation of tech-savvy users to instant communication.
With newspapers and television news, the viewer is a passive observer. You could talk about political events with co-workers over the water cooler, or send letters to the editor. But you were always watching from a distance. Twitter, and other social media platforms, breached those walls. Now you could react in real time with current events and reach an audience of millions.
This immediacy meant that you could get an instant dopamine rush of approval or disapproval. But dopamine is a powerful psychoactive. The rush you get from Tweeting is fueled by the same chemical that makes crack and gambling so addictive. But while smoking crack or gambling away your mortgage payment carries some social stigma, social media brings you nothing but affirmation.
Social media played an important role in the 2010-11 Arab Spring color revolutions. It also helped fuel the Occupy Wall Street movement. Governments and NGOs became increasingly aware that social media might dethrone them, and how it might help them hold onto power.
Another Twitter watershed came in December 2018. The visual microblogging site Tumblr had been facing ongoing complaints concerning child sexual abuse material and pornography. After Apple removed its app from the App Store, Tumblr banned nudity and explicit drawings. The Tumblr audience, which had a large number of LGBTQAI+ activists and “shippers” sharing dirty stories and pictures, lost 30% of its readers. Many of those readers found a more tolerant home on Twitter.
Tumblr had also been a hotbed of cancel culture, with frequent angry postings railing about the awful behavior of individuals who were racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, biphobic, furryphobic, queerphobic, or fascist Nazi Trump supporters. They made Twitter a more strident place and users who complained found their accounts suspended after waves of complaints.
Then in 2020 we had the dual whammies of COVID and George Floyd. The American government encouraged social media companies to censor wrongthink of all flavors. This led to increasing crackdowns on right-leaning political dissidents, and an increased tolerance for doxing. People were no longer just complaining to Twitter’s support team, they were sending messages to employers. As they smugly noted, freedom of speech did not mean freedom from consequences.
Those who didn’t trust the science, stand with Ukraine, or cheer enthusiastically for Drag Queen Story Hour moved to spaces like Gab and Telegram. Going on social media could mean losing a job over liking the wrong Tweet or friending a canceled Facebooker. But then, as they always do, things changed.
On October 7, 2022 Elon Musk completed his $22 billion acquisition of Twitter. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, not to mention hundreds of vandalized Teslas. The whimpering got worse as Musk reinstated many suspended accounts and cast his lot in with the Bad Orange Man. But it was all for naught as Twitter became X and Trump returned to office for a second term.
Many who had left Tumblr for Twitter now departed from X for Jack Dorsey’s new endeavor, Bluesky. But in doing so they went from a large and varied audience to a small and homogenous selection of true believers. There was little chance to recruit new members or to intimidate badthinkers. People bragged of their extensive blocklists, but more often than not they were blocking fellow travelers.
X broke the illusion of consensus that they had crafted for years. Complaints to X Support were ignored or dismissed. Critics became emboldened and people who were once frightened into silence were no longer afraid to speak. This didn’t lead to the Nazi fascist takeover that we were promised. But many ideas that seemed inevitable were now forcefully returned to the fringes from whence they came.
The Charlie Kirk assassination marked the rise of right-wing online cancel culture. Those who cheered Kirk’s death found themselves facing unsmiling bosses and public humiliation. The Left was shocked to discover that their enemies were now using their playbook. No longer could they post outrageous material and expect nothing but upvotes and likes.
Cancellation didn’t begin with social media, and it won’t end with social media. It will only go away when your employers, friends, and neighbors no longer care about what you think. Which is a long-winded way of saying it will never go away. We’re pack primates, and that means we’re hard-wired to distinguish between our pack and those outside our pack. Packs, like Carl Schmitt, view the world through the lens of friend and enemy.
Once upon a time we went to public executions and threw offal at people in the pillory. Now we execute people in private and pillory them online. Going forward, we can expect more of the same. Smart people will avoid attracting negative attention from people who can get them fired or arrested. Those who aren’t smart will have only themselves to blame. Whatever disagreements I may have with the radical Left, I can’t deny that freedom of speech has never meant freedom from consequences.
Doxing is here to stay for one simple reason: it works. The Right has taken to calling it “accountability culture” and is proud that they’re only going after immediate wrongdoing, not combing through 10-year-old Tweets for bad taste. But that will come soon enough. Once the powerless get a taste of power, they always want more.
Does this mean I approve of this behavior? As someone who has been both doxer and doxed, I can say that I don’t like it. I also think it could turn into a time-wasting ritual that lets people think they’re actually doing something when they get a mechanic, bartender, or Home Depot employee fired for offensive speech. But I know that the genie was out of Fatty Arbuckle’s bottle long before Arbuckle’s crucifixion, and there’s no putting him back now.
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