Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.BZ

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.BZ

[soft music]

♪ ♪♪

[clicking]

[upbeat music]

- Cancel culture-- - Yeah.

- What does that mean to you?

- It’s such a broad term.

- Nobody knows what the standards are.

- Cancel culture is a form of protest.

- People being able to voice their opinions

who weren’t heard before.

- Some call it cancel culture.

I call it, that’s what your ass gets.

- It’s based on a false binary system.

I’m good. You’re bad.

I’m right. You’re wrong.

- Did you hear what he said in that interview

in "Playboy" in 1970?

- Everything’s funny till it happens to you.

- I am a person who doesn’t really

believe in cancel culture.

I believe in canceling as a process.

- I believe you can call people out on their shit

and not cancel them.

- There’s no trying to understand what you did

or give you a chance to change that.

It’s like, no, you did something rotten.

That’s it.

- In the old days, you’d go and you tar and feather people.

- I went too far. I’m a comic.

I crossed the line.

I went way too far.

- If your actual goal is to disappear ideas,

yes, at a certain point,

that looks like the definition of censorship.

- Dr. Seuss went from being a beloved childhood

author to worse than Hitler.

- The right tries to use the bogeyman of cancel culture

as this great threat.

- It’s a witch hunt. It’s a sham.

It’s a hoax.

- This is the vantage point

you’re supposed to have.

If you deviate from our worldview,

then you are un-American.

[gunfire]

- I’m not just talking about the hateful rhetoric

of the right.

I’m also talking about the oversensitivity

and crybaby-ness of the left.

- I better not say what I’m actually thinking because then

I will definitely be canceled.

[laughs]

- Man, you see how woke I was?

I called you out.

- Jesus had points of view, and the Romans did not like this,

and they crucified him publicly,

literally canceled Jesus.

And even he came back.

Who’s getting canceled?

[upbeat music]

♪ ♪♪

[door rattling]

[tense music]

♪ ♪♪

- If there were anyone you could uncancel,

who would it be?

- I think I’d uncancel Will Smith.

- Well, I’m glad this is a safe space.

I would uncancel Michael Jackson.

I know, I know it’s so bad.

- Annie Hall used to be one of my favorite movies.

And it’s really hard to watch now because Woody Allen--

- I still listen to Louis CK.

- I think people might judge me for still

listening to Kanye West.

- I’d like to uncancel Morrissey,

but he hasn’t really been canceled.

But he deserves to be canceled.

So I think he should be canceled,

and then I would uncancel him.

♪ ♪♪

- How would I define cancel culture?

♪ ♪♪

- Um...

♪ ♪♪

- Sorry, I need a second.

- When people talk about canceling and cancel culture,

I don’t hear a clear, understood, or shared meaning.

- Well, there’s 20 different definitions, right?

That’s part of the problem we’re talking about this.

- If I had to define it, I would say,

it’s people publicly stating

that they don’t like what you do

and they want you to stop doing it.

- A cancellation is when you want to get them real good.

You want to punish them, exile them, silence them,

and disappear them.

- You have to ask yourself whether that works.

- It doesn’t work.

- Somebody decides they’ve crossed some kind of line,

and this person no longer becomes

fit for polite company.

- When someone like Harvey Weinstein

is convicted of sexual assault,

that’s not cancellation.

That’s the criminal justice process in action.

- Yes, there are people who should shut the fuck up.

But one person or a small group decides

this is how we all think, this is what is appropriate for us.

No.

- The Chicks’ hit "Travelin’ Soldier" went

from number one to oblivion in two weeks.

- We’re living in this culture now

where you say the wrong thing,

and you’re canceled, and that was 17 years ago.

- I think we were one of the first to feel

that cancel culture.

- The big lie is, well, if you have a right to say something,

then I have the right to be offended.

- Just because you’re offended, it doesn’t mean you’re right.

- People complaining about things they don’t like,

people offended by things, that has always been the case.

People were offended by Elvis gyrating on "Ed Sullivan."

- ♪ You ain’t nothing but-- ♪♪

- Canceled, the Beatles were canceled in about 1965.

- John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.

- I’m not saying that we’re better or greater or comparing

us with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing

or whatever it is, you know.

I just said what I said,

and it was wrong or was taken wrong.

- As a result of this offhand comment,

people across the South start burning Beatles records.

They get death threats.

- But that was crazy Southerners.

That was crazy religious people.

- Ku Klux Klan, being a religious order,

is going to come out here.

We’re known as a terror organization.

I think we have-- - A terror organization?

- We have ways and means to stop this.

- Canceling has long been a part of our history.

- Shame on you, shame! - Shame on you!

- You are hereby sentenced to be canceled.

- We called it public shaming.

We called it rejection.

We called it ostracizing people.

- We don’t have a scarlet letter

that we can affix on people whenever

we want to call them out.

We didn’t have a problem with cancel culture

when it was only the powerful people

canceling the powerless.

It’s only when the people who used to be punched down

upon start punching back, all of us think,

ahh, there’s a cancel culture!

This is awful. This is awful.

- What’s the issue here?

Is the issue when people of color start talking back?

When women start talking back?

And that’s cancel culture?

No, that’s free speech.

That’s actually the freest kind of speech.

You’re actually getting a back and forth.

- This country stands for freedom,

liberty, justice for all.

And it’s not happening for all right now.

♪ ♪♪

- Is that Colin Kaepernick injecting

politics into the NFL?

No, that’s the NFL

injecting politics.

- The advent of social media has

taken this idea of cancel culture and created a monster.

- Is it actually good to have massively

important communications platforms that, in some ways,

really are like a digital town square in the hands

of whatever billionaire happens to have

the funds to purchase them?

- So social media allows everybody to chime in

and spreads it to the entire world.

♪ ♪♪

And I face it.

Anybody who’s been on the receiving end of a dozen

tweets, I’m telling you,

you think the entire world is against you.

- Outrage on Twitter is a very scary thing.

- Outrage is good for clicks.

Outrage is good for business.

- Social media companies realized

that anger and contention gets people more engaged.

The algorithm has pushed people towards contentious issues

and towards getting riled up.

- You have the temptation to quote

tweet to dunk on someone.

- Would you classify that as a death threat?

- There’s all these incentives anyway for you to play Twitter

like this competitive game.

- Thank you for your rage.

- When you talk about examples of people being canceled,

for most people who are paying attention to the internet in--

I don’t know-- 2012, 2013, it’s Justine Sacco.

- Was it, like, a joke about Africa and AIDS

as she was on a plane to the continent of Africa?

- Justine Sacco is somebody who is only

famous for being canceled.

- So she had a job when she got on the plane,

and she didn’t when she landed.

- She tweeted right before she got on a 16-hour

flight to South Africa.

- What is it?

- How do you look at that and go, like,

this will be received well?

- I remember thinking, your job is public relations.

It’s a forward-facing position.

And you had no understanding of how the internet worked.

- She turned her phone off. And that’s a long flight.

- This is before Wi-Fi was readily available on planes.

- People started tracking how long it

was going to take for Justine’s flight

to land in South Africa.

- It became basically revelry

on Twitter as people realized,

like, how much trouble can we get this woman in

before the plane lands?

[upbeat music]

It turns out a lot.

- By the time she landed, this was the number one

hashtag on Twitter, #HasJustineLandedYet.

- She was canceled.

- She definitely lost her job.

- She works for a corporation.

The powers that be have a right to say, you know what?

That was inappropriate.

- If somebody’s done misconduct,

maybe they shouldn’t have a job.

You don’t have a right to a job

or a TV show or anything else.

- It showed this sort of crossover

from canceling being something that happened within Black

Twitter with other Black people

to something that happened

to this powerful white woman

who no one outside of her world,

outside of her business really knew before.

- Whenever something big happens on Twitter,

Black Twitter always has a reaction.

- Black Twitter is the water cooler.

It is the stoop.

It is the hair salon and the barber salon

all sort of rolled in one.

- Man, shut your ass up.

- People love to say, oh, if Dr. King had Twitter,

he would have got more accomplished.

Would he?

How you know he wouldn’t have just been up all night

arguing with trolls?

- Martin, come to bed.

- Coretta, I can’t.

Malcolm X still popping off at the mouth.

I’ll snatch the bow tie off his ass.

- In Black culture, before we even had computers,

we had these ways of correcting folks and putting them

in their place, or at least letting

them know that they had offended or slighted someone.

- You better think about what you’re saying.

You better think about the consequences of your actions.

- One of those ways was "reading" someone,

and that is pronouncing things that they don’t necessarily

want known about them.

And I’m going to tell you exactly how it’s wrong

and where you should get it together.

- What exactly is it that you’re trying to say?

- I know a man pretending to be a woman when I see one.

This is not that kind of establishment.

- God may have blessed you with Barbies

and a boyfriend named Jake and an unwanted pregnancy

that your father paid to terminate

so you could go to college and major in being a basic bitch.

None of these things make you a woman.

- We also have "dragging."

You’ve got that reading, but it’s done publicly,

and it’s done in a way that other people jump on.

- What did you think about Nicki and Cardi’s altercation?

You were at that party.

- No, it was called the Icon Party,

but there were no icons there.

- Oh.

- We’re not just calling you out.

We’re canceling you.

You’re no longer allowed to sit with us.

You can’t vibe with us.

We don’t rock with you.

That is where you started to see canceling become

part of this Black vernacular English

as it was performed online.

- Pepsi is in damage control after being

accused of exploiting racial protests to sell soda.

- Maybe it means people of color

are starting a hashtag saying, this person’s racist.

If that counts as cancel culture, that’s good.

Those are good things.

- Even Martin Luther King Jr’s daughter

Bernice sarcastically tweeted, if only her father had known

about the power of Pepsi.

♪ ♪♪

- Before, if you were a person of color or a woman

and you heard something and you responded,

one, it won’t be taken very well.

And two, you might lose your job.

You might be attacked.

You might be lynched.

- The powerless do need a voice.

But who makes the decision of whose voice that is?

- If you’re using free speech to try to prevent

someone else from speaking--

- Shh.

- I don’t believe you can really say

you support free speech.

- You can still say whatever you want.

You can get called out for it and there

can be some fairly frightening overreaction

that could lead to compromising your ability to get work.

No one’s saying you can’t say it,

but you better make sure you’re up for the ride.

- And as George Carlin famously said,

I like to find out where the line is,

cross it deliberately,

and make the audience happy that I did.

And we don’t know where that line is.

You tell us.

And then you’re going to turn on us?

ink c culture is mostly just

people facing consequences.

Then the question becomes, are the consequences

in line with what they did?

- There’s no reason to cancel Kathy Griffin for having

sharp takes on our leaders.

- I would definitely uncancel Dave Chappelle.

I think that it’s very important that comedians

can say whatever they want to.

- Oftentimes, comedians feel that they are able

to speak truth to power in a way

that many other people cannot.

- Police choke niggas to death.

I mean, you’ll be dead when they through.

Yeah, two grab your legs, one grab your head.

It’ll snap. Oh, shit, he broke.

- People have to be less sensitive to comedy.

Comedy is supposed to make you wince and laugh at yourself

and say unmentionable things.

- One person does something, they get canceled.

Somebody else does the exact same thing, nothing.

You know, like the kind of people

that play Michael Jackson songs but won’t play R. Kelly.

Same crime, one of them just got better songs.

- Cancel culture sucks for comedians

because you worry about someone taking something

you said the wrong way.

- It’s dark and it’s late and you’re drinking,

and a lot of moments are naughty

and there’s nobody around.

And you watch the same moment, like, on your little phone

over morning coffee, you’re like,

what’s the matter with these people?

How can they-- how can they laugh?

Who can say such things, you know?

- Tonight’s show contains jokes about terrible things.

But these are just jokes.

They’re not the terrible things.

[laughter]

There’s a huge difference between doing

a joke about a rape--

- We all get it, you’re saying something horrible,

but nobody means it.

Nobody’s really laughing at the child

that got eaten by the alligator.

- So I talk about this Hasidic woman

who was walking down the street

in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

Another woman comes over to her

and pulls off her wig.

And I say, that is something I’ve always wanted to do.

That joke was put on the internet.

All of a sudden, I’m getting

attacked by my community.

They come after me.

So I decided to take it down, but they didn’t stop.

That’s what cancel culture is.

You’re not taking a look at the whole person.

You’re taking one thing that came out of their mouth

that you took a certain way, and you decide, that’s it.

- Cancel culture is real, it’s insane,

and it’s coming to a neighborhood near you.

- Every time I watch comedians complain about people

canceling them, I think, man, you’re

so much funnier than this.

Just move on.

Learn to find some sort of inner peace about this.

- All you have to do is not be racist and not be

sexist and not discriminate.

That’s not a tall order.

So everyone complaining about that is so annoying.

- There’s a lot of words we don’t say anymore.

There’s a lot of ways that we don’t talk

about marginalized people.

It has evolved through the democratic process.

- Apu, a cartoon character voiced by Hank Azaria,

a white guy,

a white guy doing an impression of a white guy

making fun of my father.

- There have been very few depictions of Indian-Americans

at all on TV.

- There was no Aziz, no Mindy, no Khal,

no that dude who was on "Lost" and that other dude

from "Heroes."

- So a lot of kids, their only understanding

of an Indian-American person was Apu.

- Attendant, I’d like some gas.

- Yes, I’m sorry, I do not speak English, OK.

- But you were just talking-- - Yes, yes.

- I made a documentary that was funny

and thoughtful and critical of popular culture

and of "The Simpsons."

And where did I learn how to do this?

From watching "The Simpsons."

I questioned this idea of representation

and the history of minstrelsy in this country.

You know that a white guy does the voice?

- Huh?

- That’s what you do as a comedian,

you tackle free speech with free speech.

- How do you feel about that?

- Oh, I’m making a movie about how much I dislike it.

- Do you understand why some Indian-American actors

are offended by that character?

- Yeah, not just actors.

- I don’t think Hank had any, you know,

evil intent or even necessarily insensitivity.

I mean, you’re coming out of a tradition

that needs to be corrected.

- People in the South Asian community

have been fairly upset by the voice and characterization.

- Did that surprise you?

- Not over time.

It did when I first heard about it, absolutely.

- It was like hate and death threats and the claim

that I was canceling a character

and that was part of this cancel culture.

- Something that started decades ago

and was applauded and inoffensive

is now politically incorrect.

What can you do?

- Is "The Simpsons" cancelled?

No, they’re still on the air throughout the world.

Was Hank Azaria canceled who did the voice?

No, Hank is still working, and he should.

Is Apu canceled?

No, Apu is not canceled.

They didn’t kill off the character.

The show just stopped using him because they’re afraid to now.

- Some things will be dealt with at a later date.

- If at all.

- Comedians talk about timing in their jokes

and their delivery and their punch line,

but there’s also something to say about timing in terms of,

when does it resonate and when does it not?

What we call today cancel culture was the same thing

that was happening in the 1890s when Irish immigrants,

Jewish immigrants, Black Americans were saying,

we don’t like to be the targets of your racist humor.

If we had Twitter in the 1840s, you know, Frederick Douglass

would have been trending with his critiques

of blackface minstrelsy.

[soft music]

The folks who begin to raise questions and concerns

are often the folks who are thinking

through the consequences.

Is our status and the way we’re treated

in this society connected with how we’re talked about,

how we’re ridiculed?

- I think we got something there.

- ♪ Fields of cotton just die with blight ♪

♪ And my pappy reads "Esquire" with delight ♪

♪ while my Alabama mammy plays bridge all night ♪

- The main punchline of the joke

is Black folks are not like white folks.

So you white folks in the audience,

you have something in common that you don’t share in common

with the buffoon on the stage.

And what you share in common is your whiteness.

- [vocalizing]

- Comedy has this historical legacy until Ferguson,

until Black Lives Matter,

until 2020, until George Floyd,

until you begin to see, because of social media,

the visibility of racial violence.

- OK, I’ll just rip the Band-Aid

off right now and say it.

I did an episode where I wore blackface.

The context was, well, irrelevant because it’s

not OK to do blackface, ever.

- These white comedians are kind of realizing, oh, shit,

culture is shifting.

I got this blackface sketch that I did a while back.

Now people on Twitter are sort of sharing it again.

Oh, crap, I’m being canceled.

- I played an ignorant woman in a liberal bubble

who thought she was illuminating

racism by wearing blackface.

What I didn’t realize then is that, in reality,

I was an ignorant woman in a liberal bubble

who thought I was illuminating racism by wearing blackface.

- So here’s where you begin to see this kind of anxiety

over, quote unquote, "cancel culture."

- A nigga came up to me on the street the other day.

He said, careful, Dave, they after you.

I said, what?

[laughter]

One they or many theys?

- Chappelle’s criticism is definitely from the left

because he’s delivered a string of transphobic

stand-up bits over multiple stand-up sets

across the country.

- I am not saying that to say that trans women aren’t women.

I am just saying that those pussies that they got--

You know what I mean?

- Dave Chappelle, in my mind, was

very vulnerable in displaying, on a stage, his ignorance.

He even talked about having a trans friend

that he was very much admired in conversation

with, kind of like the racist white people

who have a Black friend.

♪ ♪♪

- People’s sensibilities have shifted over time.

The stuff that was funny 20 years ago doesn’t work now.

And I don’t think that’s the fault of cancel culture.

I think that it’s just part of the reality of being

a comedian that if you want to be a famous comedian,

you just have to deal with.

- Netflix employees staging a walkout

in protest of the streamer’s latest Dave Chappelle

special in which the comedian mocks transgender people.

- If your satire is punching down, you are being a bully.

♪ ♪♪

- When you speak your mind like that,

there’s a lot more simple-minded,

hateful people that are going to cause real problems if not

death to these people that are just

trying to find a way to exist.

And is it your responsibility to be sensitive to that?

I would say yes.

♪ ♪♪

- A lot of people who believe that cancel culture is

a threat will bring up Chappelle.

Look what they’re doing to the best comic alive.

Look how they’re pushing him down.

Look how they’re silencing him.

- We have now had in this country

more controversy over Dave Chappelle making jokes

about transness than we had over Joe Biden

completely surrendering an entire country

to the Taliban, which shows you where our priorities are.

So good for him for saying no.

- It shouldn’t be this scary to talk about anything.

- In First Amendment law, we talk about a chilling effect,

we talk about the idea that if you see someone who

has way more resources than you or has more power than you go

through a really tough thing, and they survive it

but you know you couldn’t, that’s going

to have a chilling effect.

- Dave Chappelle wasn’t canceled.

He was criticized for his trans material.

Then he got more Netflix specials.

[soft music]

- I think when it comes to politics,

cancel culture can be super toxic.

It’s like both sides just want to cancel the other side.

- I think that Al Franken should be uncancelled.

I think he was unfairly and politically run out of office.

- Nobody’s going to agree on everything.

Sometimes I think people are really quick to cancel people.

- To the right, cancel culture has

unfolded in a way that is uncontrollable

and coming for you.

- Do you get the feeling that the lunatics

are running the asylum?

- [kissing]

- Pepé Le Pew was accused of promoting rape culture.

- When you say that there is a process

or a thing called cancel culture, what you’re saying

is that these people who are attempting to hold others

accountable and responsible for their actions

are actually somewhat debased in their approach.

- The seductress green M&M will now wear sneakers.

- The term cancel culture is chiefly

used now by its critics.

They’re just using that language

selectively to kind of troll.

- I do not like green eggs and ham.

I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.

- When the right weaponizes cancel culture,

what they really mean is progressives.

They don’t mind the right wingers canceling

people for right wing reasons.

They’re fine with that.

- Target customers reportedly knocked down pride displays

and posted threatening videos on social media over some

of its LGBTQ+ merchandise.

- What they really object to is people

who disagree with their politics

or disagree with their cultural values.

- This month, I celebrated my day 365 of womanhood.

And Bud Light sent me possibly the best gift ever,

a can with my face on it.

[gunfire]

- [bleep] Anheuser-Busch

♪ ♪♪

- So now you’re going to not drink

Bud Light, your favorite beer, because a trans

person drinks it?

It’s hate.

- For the first time in a long time,

Bud Light was dethroned as the number one beer in America.

People were voting with their wallets

against a sort of woke agenda.

- Large corporations have calculations

about the bottom line.

That might be affected.

But both the right wing versions and the left wing

versions isn’t going to be a very effective strategy

for social change because all you’re ever doing

is just buying the product that will enrich

one set of corporate overlords rather

than the product that will enrich a competing

set of corporate overlords.

And yeah, that is just capitalism,

and I think that’s the problem.

- The goal of cancel culture is to make

decent Americans live in fear of being fired,

expelled, shamed--

- Conservatives have created a moral panic

out of what is called cancel culture into civil society

more broadly.

And they’re saying this is an out-of-control problem.

- Would you mind defining woke?

Because it’s come up a couple times,

and I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.

- So I mean, woke is sort of the idea that--

this-- this is going to be one of those moments

that goes viral.

- It’s creating this idea that America has lost its way.

And why?

Because we’ve given too much ground

to all these complaints and demands

of the Civil Rights Movement.

- Florida is where woke goes to die.

- Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill would ban

classroom instruction on sexual orientation

or gender identity.

- Grievance is what drives almost all of this,

people that see themselves

as victims because their entitlement has

been infringed upon.

- I have been blacklisted for exercising

the right of a mother to defend her children and all children

against their being recruited by homosexuals.

- And what they barter in is that,

like, how dare these people publicly live this life

when there’s children around.

- We tried to avoid it and every--

- These are the same people who talk about canceling

as some phantom menace for their issues

while they are the ones trying to cancel the culture,

trying to take control of it, and abusing government power

with attacks on free speech.

[cheers and applause]

- Texas banning books, but we’re protecting the kids.

Until a drag queen walks into a school

and beats eight kids to death with a copy

of "To Kill a Mockingbird," I think you’re

focusing on the wrong shit.

- The same folks that are complaining

about cancel culture and how it’s uprooting

American society are the same folks

who are now banning affirmative action

or banning ethnic studies.

- It’s really hypocritical for the party that freaks out

about faux censorship and cancel culture

to cancel an idea that they just don’t like.

- The right has been masterful in taking on this language

of cancellation.

- They know that if they can force

you to watch as they topple your heroes, they have won.

- One of the places where the left loses ground

is in this idea of absolutism and purity

because it doesn’t leave any room for failure,

moral or otherwise.

♪ ♪♪

- A few months ago, there was this comedian that

got kicked off stage at Columbia University

for telling a joke that was deemed racist and homophobic.

The comedian was me.

This is how the joke goes.

This is how you know that being gay cannot be a choice,

because no one would choose to be

gay if they’re already Black.

[laughter]

- It’s a good joke, but it takes it right to the edge.

- No Black person ever wakes up and thinks, you know what?

This Black shit-- too easy.

[laughter]

- That joke prompted three of the show’s producers

who were also students to cut his mic off.

- From a cancel culture perspective, I said some shit,

and they thought I was saying something

wrong that they didn’t like.

And so they came on stage, like, all right, you got to go.

That shouldn’t happen, but, you know, it did.

Two days later, I was trending on Yahoo.

Three days later, I got an email from Tucker Carlson.

- This is Columbia.

Like, these are supposed to be the smartest,

most sophisticated young people in America, certainly the ones

with the highest SAT scores.

- Two emails from Tucker Carlson.

Hey, Nimesh, come talk about this on the show.

I was like, nah, Tuck, you’re too thirsty for this.

- Comics, regardless of their politics,

find themselves becoming the heroes of a right wing who

is always searching desperately for signs of the left

eating their own.

- I was featured on Breitbart.

Me, a hero on Breitbart.

That’s how you find out who your Republican friends are.

Hey, man, I just saw you on Breitbart.

You read Breitbart?

I thought I knew you, Jared.

What the fuck?

But that didn’t really bother me.

That’s the right wing has an agenda.

But that goes back to the left wing shit

I’m talking because then I got called racist and homophobic.

If I were more willing to play that, yes, I am a victim,

this is crazy, sure, I think my bullhorn

would have been louder, but I didn’t feel that way.

I didn’t feel a victim of anything.

If this comedy shit don’t go the way I need it to,

my sex tape will be me fucking a gay Black man

wearing a Columbia University sweatshirt.

[laughter]

I’m Nimesh.

Thank you so much for coming out.

- Yes, there are appropriate times to call people out--

when they’re abusing power over each other

or they’re continuing to do that intentional harm

or when the people who are getting most harm are silenced

or the harm is invisible.

There’s a good reason for using call out,

but it’s an overused tool.

Just because you’re a hammer, everything ain’t a nail.

- So where do we go from here?

- I’ve been doing the work. [laughter]

- How?

- Pepé love women, but what Pepé needs to do now

is listen to women.

And of course, I am in treatment for sex addiction.

- Those people who are celebrities or who are really

prominent people, they have a different lived experience

than someone who is being canceled

perhaps in their high school.

That’s a completely different thing.

[soft music]

- When you feel safe, when you can just

be who you are and not have to worry about being

canceled but also being called out,

I think that’s a safe space.

♪ ♪♪

- There are a lot of people who get

canceled for bullying somebody in middle school or, like,

saying one wrong thing.

And I’m like, 10 years later, and they’re

losing their whole careers over saying

one thing that could be a lie.

I don’t know about that.

- I was involved in a situation where I was told

I caused harm to someone else.

I still don’t know exactly how they felt hurt.

We never spoke.

I’ve done all that I can to hold myself accountable,

to learn and grow in a healthy way.

It took me a long time to, like, convince myself

that I was worthy of that, that I was worthy of growth,

yeah, just worthy to exist.

- I ran into the call-out culture a lot as a professor

because I’m in classrooms with all these young people,

walking around on eggshells.

They’re used to those gotcha moments.

- A battle over free speech, academic freedom, and claims

of Islamophobia at Hamline University

is getting national attention.

- In an online lecture during a global art history class,

an adjunct professor showed an image of the prophet Muhammad.

- Within the scope of the course,

one of the things that we study is world religions

and their visual cultures, images of Holy figures,

of Buddha, Jesus Christ, and the prophet Muhammad.

- She told "The New York Times" she

took precautions before showing her students

a depiction of the prophet.

She put a warning in her syllabus,

asked students to contact her with any problems,

and also told the class right before the painting

would be shown in case they wanted to leave.

- The image that I showed is frequently taught

in art history classrooms.

I have colleagues who are both scholars of Islamic art

history, some of whom are Muslim themselves,

who show this image regularly.

- But a student complained to university administrators.

- I am 23 years old.

I’ve never seen a picture of the prophet.

♪ ♪♪

- I never felt that she didn’t have the right

to feel what she did.

- Today, the Council on American Islamic Relations

said that the professor’s warnings weren’t enough.

- Islamophobia can manifest in a variety of ways.

The reality is that trigger warning

is actually an indication that you’re going to cause harm.

- The situation had escalated so quickly

over the space of a weekend, that anything that I

could say or do was moot.

- As a result Dr. López Prater will no longer teach there.

- There was this campaign of vilification.

I did not feel safe on campus.

- The American Association of University Professors

is adamant the University is in the wrong

in dismissing the instructor.

- Now, whenever she applies for a tenure track position

and they Google her name, it’s inextricably

intertwined with this allegation of Islamophobia.

- Cancel culture just seems like

a rather expedient and tawdry way

of getting rid of a problem.

- If you are a teacher that completely messes up

a depiction of a person or a group, in some cases,

people should absolutely lose their jobs

because they are harmful.

But in many cases, there are opportunities

to educate, there are opportunities to point out

what’s wrong within the systems that we have built.

Unfortunately, that’s hard work.

- As a high schooler, there definitely needs

to be more space to grow.

Schools are students’ whole world.

And you’re expected to already know who you are.

I think that that’s an issue in not letting people

grow when they make mistakes.

Kids are mean.

And I think kids will always bully.

And cancel culture is just the new guise that bullies

will take to inflict harm upon someone.

- There is this sense sometimes of the way

of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible

about other people.

- 27-year-old journalist Alexi McCammon out

as "Teen Vogue’s" editor in chief before she even started

after anti-Asian and homophobic screenshots

of tweets of hers from 10 years ago

resurfaced this month.

Even after publicly and privately

showing remorse multiple times, the backlash continued.

- The whole point of being a teenager

is that you make the worst mistakes of your life.

Maybe there needs to be some mechanism of forgiveness,

some mechanism of redemption.

- That’s not activism.

That’s not bringing about change.

- We haven’t thought through what it means to be restored

after you’ve been canceled.

For those people who are willing to accept

the idea of personal evolution, there has to be room for them

to be able to come back.

- 18.

- If people are genuinely willing

to learn from their mistakes, then I think

we should maybe reconsider the degree to which

we’re willing to cancel them.

- I think it’s just complicated and there

needs to be more conversation, and empathy, and sympathy

and not so much shame.

- I just don’t believe in canceling people.

- If we give people the room to grow and learn and breathe

through their mistakes, we might have a more loving,

better society where we didn’t have

as huge of a cancel culture or maybe not one at all.

♪ ♪♪

- ♪ Sometimes people make mistakes ♪

- I am so sad.

- ♪ Simply because they made a mistake ♪

- What occurred was unintentional.

- She is apologizing for what’s being called the tweet

heard around the world.

- I’m truly sorry that Pistol and Boo were not declared.

♪ ♪♪

- Love will make you do crazy things.

- I do hope that this can be a teachable moment.

- Oh, I’m sorry, Michael, for racism.

- Teigen is the Susan B. Anthony of cancel culture.

- I think about how much I’ve changed

and how much I’ve grown and learned.

- Comedian Shane Gillis is out of a job.

I’m a comedian who was funny enough to get SNL.

That can’t be taken away.

- These stories are true-- the power I had over these

women is that they admired me.

And I wielded that power irresponsibly.

- I feel horrible.

- I should have never posted the video.

I should have put the cameras down.

- Y’all killing me with this [bleep]!

I gave you 30 years of my [bleep] career!

- Robert--

[laughter]

- I have sinned against you, my Lord.

♪ ♪♪

- OK, let’s get started.

I’ve been canceled so many times, I don’t count them.

One thing that’s helpful is once you kind of get a feel

for how the dynamic works,

it does start to bother you less because

you’re like, oh, I know what this is.

You just don’t look at Twitter for three days.

If you want to be a public figure, if you want

to be a comedian, if you want to be a YouTuber,

you’re going to get canceled at some point.

And you need to start practicing,

imagining how that’s going to feel

and deciding how you want to react.

♪ ♪♪

We’ll call this a bad tweet.

I apologize for tweeting it,

and I apologize to any non-binary people

who felt trivialized by it.

We should try to keep in mind when we’re watching

someone go through that that, like, yeah,

they’re going to handle it badly because everyone does.

But I also don’t really see an alternative.

Like, what, we’re going to stop using social media?

No.

- Wait! Don’t I get a trial?

- No, this is a canceling.

No due process.

- If you want to showcase and demonstrate how to be better

together, you try to make sure that there’s a healing

space for both the person who got harmed

but also the person who did the harm.

And that’s what calling in is, just simply asking,

what were you thinking when you did that?

Do you think what you did back then did any harm?

And if you could do something different in the future,

what would it be?

Restorative justice, though, only works when both parties

agree to participate in it.

- I would definitely gear the restorative justice

program at my school towards making connections.

I think that’s definitely the most important piece

because when people feel disconnected,

they feel ostracized.

- I believe that restorative justice

is one of many paths towards healing our society

and healing our world.

I don’t think it’s the only path.

I mean, I believe that there are

many paths to the mountaintop.

- She been canceled yet?

- Shh.

- How about, instead, we have a dialogue,

we have discourse?

And then you can make a decision

about what you’re going to do with that information.

- We’re crafty people with crafty skills

trying to do the right thing without any lessons on how.

And if you can just remember that when you’re thinking

you need to argue with somebody else,

they got the same bad skill sets you’ve got.

[upbeat music]

♪ ♪♪

- This is all natural progress that should be happening.

- Hey. How are you feeling, Ed?

- All right.

- We all have to grow, and we all

have to listen to when people say the things we’re doing

are harming other people.

- Being thoughtful is not cancel culture.

That’s part of a good society.

We’re supposed to be questioning what we say

and what we hear.

- In free speech, voice is voice.

Voice is not extinguishing others’ voices.

- My biggest fear is that we who believe in human rights

will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

with our call-out culture.

♪ ♪♪

With truth, time, evidence, and history on our side,

we’ve got the winning hand, if we don’t blow it.

[upbeat percussive music]

♪ ♪♪