To the backdrop of nationwide campus demonstrations in support of Hamas and its cause, National Review writer Madeleine Kearns said on Thursday’s edition of The Editors that those protesters seeing job offers rescinded over their stance aren’t necessarily victims of “cancel culture.”
“I think that if you align yourself with terrorists, if you suggest that those killed by terrorists were deserving of it because they happened to be Jews or they happened to be Israeli citizens, then that is not worthy of respect in a democratic society,” Kearns said.
She said that the job-offer withdrawals do point to a complicated debate surrounding cancel culture — and that these firms should not be applying collective punishment, either. There’s “a public misunderstanding for what was meant by cancel culture,” Kearns said. “Most people can agree that one can hold opinions that alienate them from polite society. But with cancel culture, there’s been a disagreement about what those opinions are and how they are evaluated.”
Kearns referred to a U.K. case that utilized a test for this evaluation that considers whether the beliefs in question are those “worthy of respect in a democratic society.”
“Typically, cancel culture has been people being condemned or ostracized, typically without due process, and that’s an important part of it. . . . So for example, the woman in the U.K. who lost her job for tweeting, in quite a respectful way . . . her belief in biological sex and saying that men can’t be women. . . . Eventually she won, and the judge used a test” considering that standard. Kearns said that “in my view, that’s kind of the test that we should apply in this idea of whether somebody should lose their job or whether they should be publicly shamed for having said something.”
She stressed the due-process aspect in these cases considering employment: “I do think that there is a temptation for people to sort of skip over due process. I’m very interested in who actually wrote the letters, who actually signed the letters. It’s not fair just to sort of collectively dismiss everybody who’s ever been associated with one of these groups. But I think you have, in fairness . . . actually seen law firms take this seriously.”
Kearns argued that one firm was justified in the case of an NYU law student “who did actually write the letter.” In it, Kearns said, this young woman “asserted that the regime of state-sanctioned violence ‘created the conditions that made resistance necessary.’ So she’s not only saying it’s justified what Hamas does, she’s saying they were compelled to do it. And like I say, I just don’t think that’s worthy of respect in a democratic society, not least because it’s antithetical to it.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.