Stanford Mob’s Attempt To Cancel Hoover Institution Scholars Fails

Cancel culture is successful because of two basic assumptions. One is that all enlightened people within a certain community believe in the same things and that anyone who disagrees with any of the current leftist orthodoxies about politics, race, or sex is a heretic who must be shunned, shamed, and driven out of polite society. The other is that the cultural consensus is so strong that no individual or group of individuals can resist it.

Armed with these factors, outrage mobs — particularly on college campuses — are generally able to overwhelm their victims without too much trouble. All it usually takes is an accusation, a circulated letter, or a demonstration of some sort, and the woke usually get their way. Fearful lest they become the next targets to be labeled as racists, transphobes (or, even worse, Trump supporters), most university administrators obey the cancel mob and punish whoever has been deemed to have stepped out of line.

That’s not the way it went at Stanford University last month, however. There, a recent virtual meeting of the Faculty Senate devoted to an auto-da-fe of three prominent conservatives and the Hoover Institution that shelters them did not produce the desired results. Despite a months-long campaign of demonization directed at Victor Davis Hanson, Niall Ferguson, and Scott Atlas — amplified with support from The Stanford Daily — the assault ended without condemnation of the trio or Hoover.