Cancel culture comes for the cops

Human nature makes it tempting to put others’ actions in the worst possible light. Social media has made it commonplace. Woke cancel culture has made it almost a virtue.

This is how we get what we got Tuesday and Wednesday in the aftermath of a police shooting in Columbus: Celebrities, journalists, and Democrats raced to be the first to get it the most wrong. Liberals signaled their virtue and won woke points by stripping as much context as possible out of these tragedies. The difficulty in fitting the facts into the narrative simply made these contortions that much more admirable.

Being uncharitable to the unworthy, favoring politically correct narratives over facts, and stirring up mobs whenever possible are the pillars of cancel culture. “Accountability” has long been a euphemism cancelers hide behind in order to claim there is no such thing as cancel culture. Digging up old tweets to get someone fired, objecting to allowing a conservative to write for a major publication's op-ed page, demanding the ability to police private conversations — that's not authoritarian, censorious behavior; it's simply “accountability.”