“Cancel culture” is a virtually meaningless phrase at this point. Mostly it is bullshit, but sometimes it is not. Cancellation is absolutely a real thing. It happens often. It’s ugly, and awful, and shredding.
By cancellation, I don’t mean suffering negative repercussions for being an asshole. I’m talking about a thing that happens with stunning regularity in leftist circles where the majority of people in your community decide you are a bad person who should not exist in public. Once they have reaches this decision, they attack you, relentlessly, no matter what you say, with the goal of driving you out of public life entirely. No internet presence. No showing up in person. They want you to disappear.
This kind of attack has happened to me, and, in a life that has included plenty of bad things it is still one of the most horrific things I’ve ever been through. There is simply no way to explain it to someone who hasn’t gone through it. Everyone who isn’t attacking you is telling you that you’re being a giant baby. It’s an impossibly lonely situation.
You are not being a giant baby. You are an animal that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to survive by forming social groups. Now you are being driven out of your social group, which your brainstem know means death. You are also discovering that people cannot be trusted — people you thought were going to be your friends forever, people you’ve personally helped, people you admire. You are what no human being can bear to be for long: alone and helpless.
But you aren’t actually alone, and you aren’t helpless either. There are things that you can do to minimize the damage and the pain. I learned these things the hard way. I now bequeath them unto you.
I’ve wanted to write a How To Survive Cancellation guide for a while. There’s no particular reason for me to do it now — with social media crumbling before our eyes it makes less sense than ever. I’m just doing it because I want to, and because I should be working on other things that I don’t want to do at all.
This guide assumes that you are being cancelled for something where the punishment emphatically does not fit the crime: a dumb mistake, or something you phrased poorly, or someone twisting your words, or maybe an accusation with no basis in reality whatsoever. If you’re Colleen Bollinger, this guide is not for you. It’s for people who are getting run out of town for something that makes no sense.
1. Do Not Apologize
As the cancellation gets underway, the first thing people are going to do is demand an apology. Your enemies will say that the reason they’re so upset is that you haven’t apologized, haven’t made amends, haven’t shown that you want to do better.
This is, unambiguously, a lie.
If you are being dogpiled, I mean really dogpiled by hundreds of people, there is no apology that will assuage them. Whatever you say, it won’t be enough. Whatever you do, it won’t be enough. Your apology will not be accepted. What you have actually done by apologizing is admit that you deserve to be punished, and people who might otherwise be sympathetic will see your apology and figure that if even you think you’re a piece of shit, you probably are one. Your enemies are sharks who frenzy at the faintest smell of blood, and apologizing in that situation chums the water.
It is possible that your friends will ask you — even beg you — to apologize. It’s very hard to risk a friendship when you’re already losing so many people you trust, but do not listen to them. If they’re suggesting apologies that means they’ve never been cancelled and have no idea what you’re going through. I do. Say no.
2. DO NOT APOLOGIZE
Really can’t emphasize this enough. Don’t care if you wish you’d done something a little different. Don’t care if you agree with part of what they’re saying. Doesn’t matter. Don’t.
You’re welcome.
3. Lock Down Your Circle
You’re going to have a ton of feelings and almost every step of this guide involves not expressing those feelings to the public. You are going to need to express those feelings somewhere, though, and you are going to need people around you to remind you that not every single person on earth hates you and thinks your soul is bad. So you are going to assemble your team. Your circle. Friends that you can trust.
This may be hard. You are probably hemmorhaging friends right now. Look to offline friends. Family. Online friends that you’ve known for a very long time, ideally years, whose lives are not inextricably intertwined with the community that’s coming for you and are sticking with you through this storm. Sit down and really think about who you can trust. Make a list.
This would also be a great time to get a therapist if you can afford one and don’t have one already.
As I said earlier, unless your friends have been through actual full-scale cancellation (and CLING TO THOSE PEOPLE IF YOU HAVE THEM), they will not fully understand what you are going through. That’s OK. What matters is that they love you and they think all of this is very silly. Hang out with them. Do activities with them. Have long phone conversations about whatever, anything at all. This is how you remind yourself, every day, that the ostracism is an illusion. This is how you tell yourself you’re good.
4. Never Surrender
One of the things that separates a cancellation from a normal Internet fight is that your community has decided that you, as a person, are bad. Not that you did a bad thing, or that you’re wrong about something, but that your very soul is rotten and cannot be redeemed. Whatever you said or did to kick off this cancellation — or whatever someone accused you of — is more than a mistake to them; it’s a sign of your secret sin.
Most of us carry around a lot of self-hatred. Perhaps, like me, you fight every day against dark and poisonous whispers that agree with your attackers about the state of your soul. If you’re lucky enough not to feel this way, odds are you’ve still done something you’re ashamed of. You have personality traits you wish you didn’t. Habits you wish you could break.
As these people attack you, you are going to start to feel like you deserve it (and we’ll talk about that more later). This is especially true if your cancellation involves some aspect of yourself that you are ashamed of, which they often do. The urge to give in becomes stronger and stronger: to accept your punishment, to simply melt away.
Do not melt away. Your disappearance is their vindication. It reads as an admission of guilt. Any support you might have had will evaporate and a return to social media will become nearly impossible. Why should anyone fight for you if you won’t fight for yourself?
You’re not going to go out like that. You’re going to fight this, and you’re going to do it smart.
By all means take breaks from online when you need them. When you do, though, announce that you are taking one and announce when you’ll be back. Make it clear that you are the person who decides where you go and where you stay. You, and no one else.
5. Post One (1) Explanation
As you are quickly finding out, truth doesn’t really matter anymore. You can explain the real story until you’re blue in the face to your new army of committed haters and it will do you no good.
But you do want an explanation out there, for people who are genuinely curious, and because writing an explanation will help you regain a modicum of control of the narrative. So write one, and put it on the Internet.
The length of your explanation will depend on what you’ve been accused of. Because I was accused of secret fascism stemming all the way back into a secret fascist childhood, I ended up writing an entire biographical article (which I’ve since expanded into the present day). Your explanation might be much shorter. Make it as long as it needs to be.
I’m a writer, so I had a ready-made platform: my website and, later, this substack. If you don’t have a platform, no worries: it is free to make a Medium account and free to post. Takes like 5 minutes to set up. This can be the only thing you ever publish on there.
A good explanation will not directly reference the cancellation itself — you don’t want to bring more attention to the accusations against you.
