Australian commentator Kurt Mahlburg considers what’s next at MercatorNet, heeding the warnings of Seth Dillon, the owner of the satire site Babylon Bee:

The left moved quickly from embracing cancel culture (“Speak freely but expect consequences”) to explicitly calling for unconstitutional censorship (“It’s too dangerous to let you speak freely”). https://t.co/7sebEyjYQZ

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) October 7, 2024

Mahlburg responds,

Could it be true that cancel culture has run its course? Having failed to adequately stamp out dissent, has cancel culture been replaced by full-throated calls for censorship under the now ubiquitous (and dystopian) language of “misinformation” and “disinformation”?

Dillon cites an article by author and journalist Michael Shellenberger, who could hardly be accused of being a conservative. Shellenberger writes:

“Clinton, Gates, Kerry, UN, WEF, et al. say we must let them censor the Internet to save democracy. We must not. Their demands are totalitarian and Orwellian. Deep state leaders are turning regime change tactics developed abroad against the American people.” …

The sudden explosion of efforts across the Western world to stamp out “misinformation”, he argues, are only the latest development on this front.

“Has cancel culture been replaced by something even more sinister?,” October 17, 2024

Two things we can be fairly sure of…

First, as long as Cancel Culture has been around — destroying the careers of academics, doctors, nurses, and teachers who insisted on the primacy of inconvenient facts — we have also been hearing that it has “run its course.” A reasonable assessment would be that people who are afraid to speak up when their colleagues are unjustly attacked soothe themselves by suggesting that it isn’t coming for them too after all. And in truth, it isn’t — as long as they always toe the line by having no ideas worth mentioning.

For many, perhaps that is not a huge sacrifice.

Second, Cancel Culture’s influence is spreading widely in law. Mahlburg again, quoting Shellenberger:

In truth, governments are waging war on free speech. Australia is at risk of passing sweeping censorship legislation in November. The Irish government has abandoned its hate speech legislation for this term, but governing parties are promising to bring it back. And the European Union is well on its way to implementing the most aggressive censorship agenda in the West.

And, over the last three weeks, one of the world’s most influential and largest billionaires and philanthropists, Bill Gates, and two recent Secretaries of State, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, have all made strong calls to censor the Internet of wrongthink.

“Even more sinister?”

What’s really happened, Mahlburg says, is that Cancel Culture has broadened, so that talk of “misinformation” and “disinformation” is everywhere. And, inimitably, he writes, “To repurpose a popular analogy, not only is the emperor naked — he’s self-consciously streaking around the town square.”

Of course, it is hardly necessary to point out that a good deal of misinformation and disinformation comes from government itself. That is inevitable in a world where no one is omniscient. It is why fighting censorship is important.

At Unherd, comedian Andrew Doyle offers a piece worth reading on the way that much of the social elite is doubling down against the U.S. First Amendment, which was designed to protect against government censorship “for our own good”:

The signs are not promising. This week, Hillary Clinton weighed into the debate during an interview with CNN. “We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230,” she argued, referring to the section of the Communications Decency Act introduced in 1996 that protects online platforms from liability for comments posted by users. Without these protections, big tech would have little choice but to implement draconian censorship measures. The consequences for free speech, in the de facto public square of our digital age, would be catastrophic.

Clinton stopped short of a call for a ban on “hate speech”, but how long before other mainstream politicians are echoing Kerry’s assessment of the First Amendment as a “major block”? There was a telling moment in the recent vice-presidential debate, in which Tim Walz interjected to claim that “hate speech” is excluded from First Amendment protections. The remark was so fleeting that it was not even included in the official CBS News transcript, but it was perhaps the most significant moment of the evening. If the Democrats are triumphant in the election, Americans will be governed by an administration that does not believe the First Amendment is fit for purpose.

“The Democrat plan to “censor America,” October 22, 2024

If anything like that happens, the United States government will be joining other governments in an effort to control the internet. Will they succeed? Or will it be yet another effort to control the wind and the waves?

Some of us think there will always be a “last photocopier in the woods…” But this is not what the Information Age was supposed to be.

You may also wish to read: Cancel Culture dissected by one of its victims Researchers are beginning to study the sociology of Woke mobs demanding the firing or silencing of whoever vexes them — with some interesting results. Canadian lawyer Collin May looked at recent research on Cancel mobs and found that the witnesses in an institution tend to go along with the cancellation.