July 15th, 2020

The authorities who killed Jesus were a Cancel Culture.
Don’t believe me? Watch this.
In Matthew 9 they discovered he had been hanging out with people who were part of the systemic oppression in the government... i.e., “tax collectors”. Because they felt he was showing support for injustice, they made a huge deal of it, hoping people would stop following him.
It didn’t work, but it’s scary how little has changed since then.
So they tried to find ways to make it look like he was doing something illegal in Matthew 12; they accused him of “breaking the Sabbath”.
That didn’t work either.
As the tension grew and Jesus gathered more followers, the Pharisees got their feelings hurt. I’m not making this up; read Matthew 15.12: “...the disciples came and said to him, ‘Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?’” As it turns out, Jesus was exercising a right to freely speak his mind, which hurt their fragile feelings, which motivated them to try to stop him.
The story devolves from there. His opponents set up deliberate traps to see if they could get him to say something unpopular – or illegal – to cost him followers and cancel his influence (Mt. 19.3, 22.15) and when that didn’t work, they organized themselves with other groups who had also been offended by Jesus (Mt. 22.34). Together, they thought they might be able to find a way to shut him up forever – however violent they would have to get.
If you believe that people should be truly free, then you won’t engage in canceling anyone for anything. So if you want freedom, you should – ironically – cancel “Cancel Culture”. But those who truly believe in freedom don’t want to just cancel the people in our society who are canceling others. For the good of society, Cancel Culture should be cancelled – but ethically, the only ones who can cancel it are the ones who are doing it. If I try to cancel Cancel Culture, then I’m doing the thing which I believe is wrong. My only choice is to use arguments to persuade.
Those who are Canceling businesses and individuals are not using arguments to make their case; they are pronouncing certain things as either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ according to their own, internal standards. This results in self-righteously calling down active wrath and judgment on anyone whom they find ‘offensive’. Meanwhile, the other side is appealing to ideals and abstract concepts of social cooperation. The feeling which I get from this lopsided action is that people who truly believe in individual freedom have armed themselves with pillows to fight the zombie apocalypse.
Some people, of course, will object to this. If I have communicated clearly, the activists who want to go around canceling people will understand that I’m comparing them to the opponents of Jesus, and they’ll be offended. It’s sad, but it’s also the only way to measure whether or not I’m actually getting the idea across. Some people may even assume that by casting the offended ones as the bad guys, I’m comparing myself to Jesus. Not at all! The frequent victims of mass public outrage and hurt feelings are not Jesus. But of course, there were three crosses raised on the hill that day, proving that you don’t have to be Jesus to get crucified.