How cancel culture came to define 2021 – and the casualties it left behind
When asked if cancel culture really exists on BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show last week, Jon Snow answered: “I really am not conscious of it at all.” The Channel 4 News veteran said that “people exaggerate the extent to which there is some sort of a battle going on, I don’t really think there is.” If the number of high-profile rows over cultural cancellations have slipped under Snow’s radar, perhaps his days on the desk really are over. Or perhaps his assertion that cancel culture is really just a big fuss about nothing is a sign of how contested the issue of free speech remains.
After all, former president Barack Obama described the “dangers of cancel culture” in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper in August. “That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change,” he said. “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.” For many of us, it feels as if a great many stones have been cast this year.
On the other hand, censorship is a force as old as time. Despite Pericles’s speech defending the need for free speech not as a “stumbling-block in the way of action”, but an “indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all” in ancient Athens, the ruling powers of Church, monarch and state have all sought to control what citizens can talk about. Ever since the printing press was invented, allegations of heresy and misinformation have been levelled at those seeking to challenge the status quo.
In the 1660s, pamphleteers such as William Prynne had their ears cut off and cheeks branded for seditious libel against the King. The difference between then and now is that the power of cancellation has expanded. It is no longer priests and offended members of the aristocracy who point the finger but politicians and touchy Twitter mobs. The ruling class still holds some sway, of course – but when Piers Morgan criticised the Duchess of Sussex’s comments to Oprah Winfrey, it wasn’t the Crown flanked by Beefeaters that came after him but Ofcom, ITV bosses and even charities.
Why, then, does cancel culture seem to have gained such speed in 2021, and become so frightening? One undeniable accelerant has been the gender wars, both for raising the awareness of the trend to censor and for causing further cancellations. Kathleen Stock became the first UK academic to be run out of her institution for daring to do her job as a philosopher and write a book asking questions about the prevalence of gender ideology.
Stock is not alone, from less well-known figures such as German embroidery artist Jess de Wahls having her textiles removed from the shelves of the RA gift shop (since reinstated after a backlash) to a star like JK Rowling being iced out of the 20th anniversary of her own franchise, women who hold gender-critical views have propelled cancel culture into the spotlight.
Even blokes are now being threatened with cancellation for defending the shocking idea that biological sex difference might exist. After decades of making controversial jokes at the expense of just about every group in society, it was cracking wise about transgender people that got Dave Chappelle in hot water. Despite being un-cancellable (as a millionaire and a famous celebrity) Chappelle faced calls to have his show removed from Netflix by workers who labelled his views dangerous and offensive. Terry Gilliam wasn’t so lucky – the former Monty Python star had his show dropped by the Old Vic after he encouraged his Facebook friends to watch Chappelle’s latest show.
Saying the wrong words in the right context can get you cancelled – blacklisted, even. When art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon attempted to make an anti-racist point by mimicking Hitler, he was not only criticised in the media but banned from returning to the Cambridge Union (although this 'blacklisting' was later dropped). The inability to consider context and meaning is lost in the pursuit of cancel culture, as the Tate proved by crucifying both William Hogarth and Auguste Rodin in recent exhibitions of their work with grovelling plaques highlighting the artists’ views on gender and race. We have forgotten that society evolves – that the values people held 20 or 200 or 2,000 years ago might not be the same as the ones we hold today.
There are those like Snow who still refuse cancel culture’s existence. They believe it only happens online, and point to the book deals, TV specials, and column inches that cancelled people often receive after their ordeal as proof that no cancellation has taken place. Louis CK has released a new comedy special despite being cancelled for allegedly masturbating in front of colleagues, while Marilyn Manson was nominated for a Grammy this year despite facing four allegations of sexual assault.
But what these critics don’t understand is that the most important word in cancel culture is “culture” – the feeling of self-censorship and fear of punishment that such a censorious climate creates. It isn’t the names making headlines that matter, but what’s going on behind the scenes.
In the arts, and wider society, pushing boundaries, speaking openly and thinking spontaneously has become a dangerous thing to do. Not all who are cancelled are famous – such as Kevin Price, a porter at Clare College in Cambridge who was hounded out of his job by the students he helps protect after who opposed his gender-critical views – but all of us should be concerned with those who are cancelled.
This is why you should care about cancel culture – because it threatens the Pericles of the future. Perhaps the reason why the virus of censorship has spread like wildfire is because after almost two years of social isolation during a global pandemic, our ability to socially interact, deliberate and discuss has been severely diminished. We’re less likely to mull over ideas and understand each other’s intentions when faced with a word-limited discussion on a toxic platform like Twitter.
Under these circumstances, it’s no wonder that 2021 has been the worst year for cancel culture yet. Offence is no longer a subjective feeling but a weapon to be used against those we disagree with. We might be able to inoculate ourselves against coronavirus with a jab in the arm, but the scourge of cancel culture will take a lot more effort to combat. Like a virus, it spreads from the high-profile to the day-to-day – it hampers us at work, makes us look over our shoulder in the pub and infects our sense of social solidarity. We must first acknowledge its existence, and then, with words, we can begin to fight back.
Who was cancelled in 2021? The casualties
Sia
The famously reclusive Australian pop star found herself in an unwelcome critical glare in 2020 with the release of her directorial feature debut Music. It drew an onslaught of accusations: of ableism, for the decision to cast neurotypical teenage dance sensation Maddie Ziegler as the autistic lead (as well as for the caricatures employed in her performance and in the dance-pop segments intended to express the experience of being neurodivergent); and of blackface, since in one scene Ziegler appears to be wearing skin-darkening makeup and a hairstyle featuring kinky, cornrow extensions.
However, the film was still nominated for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical at the Golden Globes and this month she released a new single, a cover version of Fly Me To The Moon. It has so far had over half a million views on YouTube.
Lin Manuel-Miranda
Once the progressive voice of American theatre, the creator of groundbreaking musical Hamilton, which retells the story of the founding fathers through hip-hop and multiracial casting, found himself at the sharp end of the culture wars over the last two years. In July 2020, when a filmed production of the show was made available on Disney+, Miranda was criticised for not doing enough to highlight the founding fathers’ participation in the slave trade.
Then in June of this year, Miranda was again heavily criticised on social media for a perceived lack of Afro-Latino representation in the film adaptation of his musical, In the Heights. He apologised for the “hurt and frustration” he had caused. He also spoke out in defence of his critics, saying: “It’s not cancellation, [it's] having opinions,” he added. “So I try to take it in that spirit.” Since then, his latest musical film Tick, Tick, Boom... has been released on Netflix, to critical accolades and (it would appear) whopping viewing figures.
Jess de Wahls
The artist, known for her feminist textile work, found herself at the centre of a media storm when the Royal Academy dropped her work from its gift shop after she wrote in a 2019 blog post that she “can not accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such.” Wahls, who was branded a “trans exclusionary radical feminist” (Terf) on Twitter, found out about the decision on social media, an experience, she told The Telegraph, which made her “feel sick to her stomach”.
A few days later, the RA published a statement saying the decision was a “betrayal [of] our commitment to freedom of expression and to addressing complex issues through engagement and debate.” It also agreed to restock her work. Since then, de Wahls has continued to sell her work through her website and vociferously supported others on social media, such as JK Rowling, who have been accused of being Terfs.
Kate Clanchy
The poet and author of the bestselling Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me – a book about her experience working as an English teacher to refugee children – brought the cancel culture ceiling down on herself. In August, she pointed Twitter followers towards reviews of the book on Goodreads which took issue with its use of “racist and ableist tropes”. But when prominent people in the book world on Twitter amplified those criticisms, Picador promised to reissue an updated version of the book – and Clanchy apologised. “I know I got many things wrong, and welcome the chance to write better, more lovingly,” she wrote in a Twitter post.
In December, she wrote in a piece for Prospect that “the thing that most astonished me about the experience of being cancelled was the strength, clarity and immediacy of the suicidal ideation”. Picador distanced itself from these comments. But an anthology Clanchy edited for the publisher is still set to be released next March.
Philip Gwyn Jones
Clanchy’s publisher found himself caught in the same crossfire when he gave an interview to The Telegraph in November. The Picador publisher said in the article that the current censorious climate in publishing risked sounding “the death knell to literature and literature of the imagination”.
Days later, after a predictable Twitterstorm, he seemed to regret his participation in the piece, writing on the social media site: “I now understand I must use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness to promote diversity, equity, inclusivity, as all UK publishing strives to put right decades of structural inequality. I believe in the necessity of this change.” This mea culpa, wrote The Times’s Robbie Millen, had “the energy, cadence and style of a hostage video statement”.
JK Rowling
The author of the Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike series has been in permanent hot water with some sections of the internet since an essay she published in June 2020, setting out her views on sex and gender, was branded “transphobic”. Since then, references to Rowling have been scrubbed from Harry Potter fan sites, the franchise’s leading actors have distanced themselves from her, she appears to have been sidelined from next year’s 20th anniversary celebrations.
But has this backlash made much difference to Rowling? Her name was scrubbed from the trailer for the new Fantastic Beasts trailer, but while those films were successful, they were critically panned. And she’s hardly been silenced – the latest Cormoran Strike novel, 2020’s Troubled Blood, was the bestselling book in the UK on its release; her most recent book, the children’s “fairy tale” The Christmas Pig, became her 16th book to become the UK’s bestselling book, shipping more than 60,000 copies in its first week.
Noel Clarke
The actor and director – who starred in and scripted the acclaimed Kidulthood trilogy – was accused in April of abuse of power and “serious sexual misconduct”. Twenty women came forward in a Guardian investigation to allege Clarke committed sexual assault, harassment, bullying and professional misconduct on set. The affair cast Bafta in a baleful light too. Earlier in the month, it had presented him with one of its greatest gongs, the Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema trophy. Yet it retracted this award mere minutes after the Guardian’s investigations were published. This suggested, said Telegraph film critic Robbie Collin, “[the allegations] had not come as a bolt from the blue for the charity in the same way as it had for the vast majority of those reading it.” Which poses the question: did Bafta know? Could they have acted sooner?
Since the accusations, Clarke has kept a low profile. His social media posts have dried up – and one of his few public appearances was to meet a “human performance coach” Rayan Wilson in the summer. But he rebranded his TV company to Iconoclast Entertainment Limited, starting rumours that he was poised to make a comeback. And one of the few times he has broken cover on Twitter was to like a post which said: “Most people don't really want the truth. They just want constant reassurance that what they believe is the truth.”
John Barrowman
There have been reports of the Doctor Who and Torchwood star exposing himself on set for more than a decade. In 2008, he admitted on Loose Women that he had flashed his penis during a Radio 1 interview with Annie Mac and Nick Grimshaw. Meanwhile, a 2018 Playbill article alleged he had been reprimanded by Andrew Lloyd-Webber for playing the piano with his penis in a production of Sunset Boulevard.
In November, he claimed on Lorraine that these incidents “absolutely” did not constitute sexual harassment. He continued: “I think that if it was now, it would be crossing the line. I think that something that happened 15 years ago, it was bawdy behaviour, silly behaviour.” Nonetheless, don't bet on him getting a call from Russell T Davies to reprise his role as Captain Jack Harkness in the new series of Doctor Who. But that won't stop him taking his I Am What I Am concert on tour next year; dates have been announced for a UK-wide tour, starting in Southend in April.
Dave Chappelle
The Teflon-coated comedian continued to generate controversy – and rake in millions – during 2021 when he performed eight shows at the Apollo in October. Despite winning the 2019 Mark Twain Prize for American Humour, his two Netflix specials (which have netted him $120m) prompted a backlash for their “transphobic” content. The master provocateur’s relish for a fight was undimmed, though. “You have a responsibility to speak recklessly,” he said. “Otherwise my kids might not know what reckless talk sounds like.” And on the basis of his most recent sets, with gags about visiting a trans party in North Carolina, he remains determined to poke the culture war hornet’s nest.
Two Netflix trans employees, Terra Field and B Pagels-Minor, who complained about Chappelle’s special The Closer, have left the company. Field took voluntary redundancy after dropping her labour complaint against Netflix; Pagels-Minor, meanwhile, was fired for alleging leaking confidential financial information to Bloomberg reporters. For his part, Chappelle has reportedly been tapped to headline the Netflix Is A Joke festival, which is run by the streamer, and starts next April in LA.
Terry Gilliam
Chappelle’s influence is so toxic, it seems, that even showing appreciation for his shows can get you cancelled. That, at least, is what the Brazil director and ex-Python, Gilliam found when his Old Vic production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods was nixed after Gilliam recommended his Facebook followers watch Chappelle show The Closer, which he described as “brilliant and provocative”.
Following pressure for a group called the Old Vic 12, which was set up in response to sexual assault allegations against the Old Vic’s previous artistic director, Kevin Spacey, the incumbent Kate Varah decided to drop Gilliam’s production. Gilliam blasted the Old Vic 12 as “a small group of closed-minded, humour-averse ideologues”. One of Sondheim’s final communiques was to express support for Gilliam following the Old Vic’s decision. The Theatre Royal Bath has now expressed an interest in staging Gilliam’s Into the Woods.
Blake Bailey
The name might be unfamiliar to many, but the subject of the critic’s biography -- Philip Roth -- is anything but. As notable for his state-of-America fiction as he was for his enthusiastically onanistic protagonists, Roth was a landmark in American literature. Yet after allegations of sexual misconduct and “grooming” were made on a literary blog, Bailey’s acclaimed, 880-page biography of the writer was pulled from publication by W. W. Norton, his publisher, and he was dropped by his agent. Through his attorney, Bailey called the allegations “totally false”, saying “they were posted last weekend on the website of a notorious internet troll”.
Bill Cosby
Proof that in show business – and especially for rich, powerful men – “cancellation” is an ever-flexible term, the comedian once known as “America’s Dad” was cancelled, then uncancelled in 2021. Cosby had been one of the most prominent #MeToo scalps: he was serving a 10-year sentence for multiple rape and sexual assault charges. Yet, only three years in, he was released in July on a legal technicality. He declared it was “justice for black America” – and announced a comeback stand-up tour, which two months later, he then postponed.
Kathleen Stock
Outside of publishing and Harry Potter fan forums, the culture wars have been waged most fiercely on university campuses this year. “No-platforming” remains a Damocles sword above speakers with whom students disagree. But the case of Stock, a philosopher who writes about aesthetics and sexual orientation, was a particularly chilling example. Students at the University of Sussex mounted a year-long campaign to get Stock sacked for her “trans-exclusionary” views. Images circulated of protestors holding banners and flares. Colleagues shunned Stock, she installed extra security in her home, and in October she resigned from Sussex University. Stock now has a new job at the “anti-cancel culture” university of Austin.
Andrew Graham-Dixon
Perhaps the art historian should have watched Netflix’s campus comedy series The Chair. Because in a striking case of life imitating art, both Graham-Dixon and one of The Chair’s characters found themselves cancelled for the same thing – a jocular impression of Adolf Hitler during a lecture. In The Chair, Jay Duplass’s professor is forced to resign when he sieg heils in an English literature talk; in November, Graham-Dixon gave a speech to the Cambridge Union in which he impersonated Hitler to “paraphrase his crass and insensitive comments about art and race”. Those watching didn't get the joke, and Graham-Dixon was blacklisted from the Union.
John Cleese
The star and co-creator of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers' first brush with cancel culture came in 2020, when the BBC removed one famous Fawlty Towers episode, The Germans, from its streaming service UKTV, due to racist slurs used by one of the characters about the West Indian cricket team (the slurs had been regularly edited out by broadcasters for a nearly decade). Cleese spoke out against the decision on social media, saying: “BBC decisions are made by persons whose main concern is not losing their jobs. That’s why they’re so cowardly and gutless and contemptible.”
A day later, the episode was restored, with the offending scene edited out. But Cleese also declined to appear at the Cambridge Union last month, in response to the student organisation’s rumoured plans to "blacklist" certain speakers following the Andrew Graham-Dixon incident. Cleese announced that he would be “blacklisting” himself “before someone else does” by pulling out of his own Cambridge Union engagement.
Hogarth
Can an artist who died more than 250 years ago be cancelled? Tate Britain took an energetic stab at it with their exhibition Hogarth and Europe. It purported to place the cartoonist – long seen as the chronicler of the British soul in its mucky, grubby glory – in the context of his relationships with European artists. Instead, the curators delivered a lengthy ticking-off, denouncing the artist’s “explicitly racist” prints and his links to the trans-atlantic slave trade. The effect, wrote The Telegraph’s art critic Alastair Sooke, was “the equivalent of a Twitter pile-on”.
Rodin
Another revered artist to get a retrospective roughing-up, the Tate Modern’s The Making of Rodin showcased the French sculptor’s glorious and innovative approach to the human form. But it also dedicated plenty of space to pedantically listing his assistants, models and collaborators. His “appropriation” of antiques was also placed under scrutiny, and the curators were very sniffy about his attitudes to women. As with Hogarth, the effect was to diminish the exhibition as a whole. “We arrive expecting Rodin to be the exhibition’s hero,” wrote Alastair Sooke. “By the end, he’s the villain of the piece.”
Billie Eilish
The Gen Z pop icon found out what a bloodsport social media can be when, in June, an old TikTok video surfaced of her mouthing along to the lyrics to Tyler the Creator’s hit song Fish. These included the Asian slur “ch-nk”, and appear to show Eilish impersonating a stereotypical Asian accent.
Eilish, now 19, was only 13 at the time. Nonetheless, she issued a grovelling apology on Instagram. “I mouthed a word from a song that at the time I didn’t know was a derogatory term. I am appalled and embarrassed and I want to barf that I ever mouthed along to that word. This song was the only time I ever heard that word.” Some of Eilish’s fans took to social media to post images of themselves destroying her merchandise. However, it doesn’t appear to have affected her reputation – she was nominated for seven Grammys in November, and two Brit Awards this month.
Chris McGlade
The self-described “anti-PC, pro-free speech, working-class comedian” had his show banned from the Soho Theatre because the venue objected to its use of racist and anti-semitic tropes. McGlade had previously performed the ironically-titled Forgiveness – which is partially about forgiving the man who murdered his father – at the Edinburugh Fringe and the Soho Theatre. But the venue took issue with his defence of racist slurs, depending on how they are used, and a poem, The Right to Hate, which references anti-semitic conspiracies. “‘The show is all about tolerance and forgiveness and light and love, there’s no hate in it all,” said McGlade. “But because it doesn’t use the right PC language, it has been banned.”
Ellen DeGeneres
The talk show host, whose titular programme ran for 19 years, sold herself on her whimsical humour and softly-softly interview manner with celebrities. But after a string of behind-the-scenes bullying and racism allegations, she announced this season would be her last. According to a former producer, though, it wasn’t really her choice. “She is not really, by the way, stepping down, the viewers fired her,” Hedda Muskat said. “I feel that the viewers feel duped, in a way, that she’s not this nice person.” But has DeGeneres been “cancelled”? It’s unlikely the claims will have entirely kiboshed her career – last month she even hosted an interview with the Duchess of Sussex. But in today’s show business environment, such allegations tend to prove sticky.
Johnny Depp
Few stars exemplify this shift quite like Depp. Once, he was the incarnation of bad-boy cool, trading on his tattoos and guy-liner to prop up franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean. Now, he cuts a lonely and isolated figure in the film industry. After losing a libel case against the Sun in 2020, in which the judge found allegations that he was a “wifebeater” in his marriage to Amber Heard to be “substantially true”, he claims to have faced a Hollywood “boycott”. His latest film Minamata, a biopic of the photographer Eugene Smith, has been “buried” because of its association with Depp, according to its director. And he has been replaced with Mads Mikkelsen as Grindelwald in the Fantastic Beasts franchise.
R Kelly
While Bill Cosby has demonstrated how accommodating “cancellation” can be, it is unlikely that we will hear from the R&B singer any time soon. Rumours of Kelly’s predatory sexual behaviour have circulated for more than two decades ever since he illegally married the singer Aaliyah when he was 27, and she was 15. (She lied about her age at the ceremony.) But the full, grim accounting of his abuses was laid out when he was found guilty of eight counts of sexual trafficking and one of racketing in September this year.
Among the allegations was the suggestion that Kelly ran a “sex cult” where he controlled the lives of six young women, dictating “what they eat, how they dress, when they bathe, when they sleep, and how they engage in sexual encounters that he record[ed]." He is due to be sentenced in May 2022. Yet while 48 per cent of US adults would like his music removed from streaming services, and it no longer appears on Spotify’s curated playlists, his full discography is still available and has nearly five million monthly listens.
Marilyn Manson
In another long-delayed reckoning for the music industry, in November a Rolling Stone investigation published allegations that the goth rock provocateur had abused multiple partners – allegations which he denies. According to some of those interviewed, Manson (whose real name is Brian Warner) had a “Bad Girls Room” in which he would lock girlfriends for perceived transgressions. In addition, documents from a custody battle with his ex-partner Evan Rachel Wood reveal she claimed in court that Manson had threatened to “f-ck” her eight-year-old son, and she strengthened security around her LA home. Manson is currently under investigation for sexual-abuse and human-trafficking allegations.
Despite this, in an extraordinary move, he was nominated for both Album of the Year and Best Rap Song at the 2022 Grammy’ Awards for his contribution to Kanye West’s album Donda and its single, Jail. The Grammys subsequently withdrew these nominations following a backlash.
Piers Morgan
A broadcaster who can’t resist dipping his toes into controversy, Morgan stumbled into full-blown cancellation in March when he stormed off the set of Good Morning Britain after an on-air falling out with fellow anchor Alex Beresford. Morgan had rubbished Meghan Markle’s claims in her Oprah interview that being in the spotlight had damaged her mental health. For this, he received 41,000 complaints to Ofcom and a furious open letter from the charity Mind.
After he walked off during a live broadcast, ITV announced he had left with immediate effect. Replying to a Twitter follower who asked “Can we just cancel Piers Morgan?” He wrote: “Yes.” Ofcom subsequently ruled, though, that Morgan didn’t breach any broadcasting rules. Morgan then said he had not been cancelled and that he was not a victim. He has now been chosen to help launch Rupert Murdoch’s talkTV station, a rival to GB News, which is due to start airing next year.
Gina Carano
You don’t mess with Carano. The former MMA champion and erstwhile star of Disney+’s The Mandalorian was already known for her outspoken right-wing views. Last year, she mocked mask wearing on social media and suggested that voter fraud might have occurred during the 2020 Presidential election. But it was an Instagram post she published in February, which compared being a Republican today was akin to being a jew during the Holocaust, that finally snapped Disney’s patience.
After #FireGinaCarano trended, Lucas Film confirmed she had been fired from The Mandalorian and would not return to the Star Wars extended universe. It seems, though, that Carano’s fiery politics are unquenched. She recently shared a George Orwell quote on Twitter which read “all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force”.