Twitter has given birth to a form of moral superiority that can be used to cancel people

Ricky Gervais gave the Hollywood woke crowd a much-needed tongue lashing.

Chat to the President at your peril! Philip Bump, The Washington Post, January 15:

Donald Trump attended a college football championship on Monday night and briefly chatted with actor Vince Vaughn.

Tongue firmly planted in his cheek, Washington Examiner’s Siraj Hashmi tweets, January 14:

Ladies & gentlemen, I regret to inform you Vince Vaughn is CANCELLED.

The Washington Post continues:

That tweet uses the term cancelled, the verb form of the slang term cancel culture — a descriptor used for occasions in which toxic behaviour leads to the ostracising of a public figure. The idea is that Vaughn crossed one of the hyperventilating left’s lines and, therefore, will be set adrift on a cultural ice floe, never to be heard from again. So you get segments like this … Fox News teases: liberal cancel culture run amok!

Elizabeth Colman, Vogue Australia, January 15:

Everyone’s talking about cancel culture nowadays. The term was coined around the time Kevin Hart was sacked from hosting the Oscars, and Saturday Night Live cancelled its contract with Shane Gillis on the grounds he’d once used racist and homophobic language in a podcast. That incident divided US comedians into those who championed Gillis’s right to bad comedy and those who believed he should be deplatformed.

Peter Wood, The Wall Street Journal, January 12:

An unhappy side effect of the digital age is “cancel culture”. Anyone with an attitude of moral superiority and a Twitter account can try to shut down an event where opinions he dislikes are likely to be spoken.

Aja Romano, Vox, December 30:

One of the odder ideas to snowball its way into the zeitgeist during the decade’s turbulent second half is the idea that a person can be “cancelled” — in other words, culturally blocked from having a prominent public platform or career … A familiar pattern has emerged: a celebrity does or says something offensive. A public backlash, often fuelled by politically progressive social media, ensues. Then come the calls to cancel the person — that is, to effectively end their career or revoke their cultural cachet.

Roger Simon, The Epoch Times, January 15:

In case you missed it, “cancel culture” is the term used by the self-anointed “woke” for boycotting — essentially turning into non-persons and erasing from public life — people (usually celebrities, but plebs aren’t exempt) who have exhibited what they deem questionable behaviour or written something untoward on social media. It’s our version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Being blocked on Twitter is the equivalent of being marched around on a stool while wearing a dunce cap.

Liberty Nation, Eurasia Review, January 13:

When Ricky Gervais gave the Hollywood woke crowd a much-needed tongue lashing, he received applause from conservatives and sane liberals … it was what they deserved given that … they had tried to cancel him for poking fun at the transgender activist crowd. But Gervais isn’t the only comedian pushing back. Last year, Dave Chappelle … began his set by mocking the woke for their embrace of cancel culture. He did an impersonation of the perpetually offended: “Uh, duh. Hey! Durr! If you do anything wrong in your life, duh! and I find out about it, I’m gonna try to take everything away from you!”