The sadistic rewards of cancel culture

The bias most intelligent people possess is a bias towards believing rational explanations. Confronted with witch hunts and the heresy hunts of the past, or the persecutions of today, they seek the comfort of the understandable.

Steven Pinker is a robust fighter for free thought. It is a minor miracle that he has kept his place at Harvard, which, disgracefully for a once great institution, has one of the worst records on freedom of speech of any American university—and that is saying something.

In his latest book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, Pinker offers a rational account of apparently maniacal left-wing censorship.

Pinker of all people does not want to excuse modern inquisitors. But he does try to explain them.

Any competent academic knows deep down that awkward ideas and questions may be true. Indigenous people may have engaged in genocide. On average, women and men may have different aptitudes. It is impossible to change your sex. Racial preferences may do more harm than good. If people can change gender, why can’t they change race? Conventional sexual morality could help lift people out of poverty.

These arguments may be irrelevant—averages tell you nothing about the aptitude of an individual woman or man, for example. But Pinker says the reason why we have seen an attack on academic freedom in the US that has, astonishingly, claimed more victims than McCarthyism is that persecutors dare not allow dangerous ideas to be debated.

They fear reactionaries will abuse and distort them for their own wicked ends.

They persecute, says Pinker, because they ‘are convinced that they are safeguarding the moral order, especially the prevention of harm against the historically marginalised’.

Pinker is clearly right in part. But his rational explanation is too kind. It ignores the sadism of today’s heretic hunters: their preening self-regard and their lust for power.

Pinker’s book is part of a wider reaction against censorship—a reckoning with cancel culture’s reckonings, if you will.

In a rebuke to those who consider it a nest of wokists, the BBC is running a series on the destruction of the Orwell Prize winner Kate Clanchy. She was targeted by online enemies in 2021 and abandoned by her own publisher, Picador, for the flimsiest of heresies against leftish orthodoxy.

(A few weeks ago, Pan MacMillan, Picador’s owners, apologised to her via the BBC. But I would say to writers looking for a deal that they should still think hard before signing with a publisher that left an author to swing in the wind.)

Meanwhile, Rachel Hewitt has written an essential commentary on the psychopathology of cancellation that goes to darker places than Pinker dares visit.

For liberals the argument is of the utmost importance. Nothing has done their cause as much damage in the last decade as the embrace of the politics of personal destruction.

Rachel Hewitt knows it all too well. She has the ‘lived experience’ of witch hunts, to use the cumbersome jargon, and the experience of death, too.

She and her partner Pete Newbon were cut off by many of their friends after she criticised gender ideology in the 2010s. Activists tried to get her fired by telling her university that ‘trans students would be unsafe in my classes’.

Then Newbon was caught up in the arguments about left-wing antisemitism when Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour Party. An online campaign against him resulted in 4,000 complaints to his employers at Northumbria University.

He committed suicide in 2022.

Neither his family nor the coroner believe that he killed himself because of the cancel campaign against him. Suicide and simple explanations rarely mix.

But anyone who has watched a cancel campaign in full cry knows that its supporters would not care if their targets did kill themselves.

The mass hate, the exaggerated accusations, and the McCarthyite tactic of driving heretics from their jobs show that, at the very least, they want to obliterate all traces of their enemies from public life. Either that or they want to force an abject confession from their victims that their old life was so sinful that only its obliteration can lead to acceptance in the society of the virtuous.

When Kate Clanchy’s publishers abandoned her, she fell apart.

She lost work, was ostracised by her peers, and even considered suicide.

She told the BBC: ‘I really wanted to die for a very long time’.

Normally, it is drunks in pubs who fly off at the smallest provocation, and respectable society condemns them.

But as Hewitt writes, activists who ‘unleash cruelty onto a victim’ are ‘adored and put on a pedestal, in return’.

She does not believe that a genuine desire to improve the world motivates them. ‘Most cancellations are driven by something far less rational and far more pathological: namely, the narcissistic rage associated with a messiah complex.’

Look at the tormentors of Kate Clanchy. In 2021, they went for her book on teaching young migrants, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. They claimed that the work of the (white) writer was racist and contemptuous of people with disabilities.

Among her linguistic crimes was describing one of her Afghan pupils, Shukria Rezaei, as having ‘almond eyes’.

Monisha Rajesh, a travel journalist, claimed that Clancy’s work was ‘riddled with racist and ableist tropes throughout’ and ‘rooted in eugenics and phrenology’. She called Clanchy ‘KKKlanchy’—and imagine the effort it took to come up with that slur. But I suppose if you are ready to call a teacher a eugenicist, it isn’t much of a reach.

Clanchy fought an inept counterattack. She denied writing what she had written and falsely accused her critics of inventing quotes.

But that was that. The worst the Guardian could say was that Clanchy’s persecutors became in turn the targets of racist abuse online—but obviously not from Clanchy. It added that Clancy was ‘prickly’, when famously my colleagues at the Guardian are sweet-natured at all times, and that publishing employed too many white ‘people like Clanchy, but few who resemble her pupils’—which is true but hardly Clanchy’s fault.

No one in the leftish world of publishing bothered to say that the Ku Klux Klan castrated and lynched its victims and eugenicists sterilised theirs.

No one thought it was grotesquely offensive to the victims of actual race hatred and murder to say that it was morally equivalent to describing a woman’s eyes as ‘almond’.

And no one bothered to talk to her pupils. If they had, they would have been ashamed of themselves.

In a letter to the Bookseller, 25 of her students spoke for themselves and said that far from being outraged by Clanchy’s work, they applauded her ‘unequivocal care and support’ for them.

Shukria Rezaei told the Times that ‘almond eyes is a term that I have often used in my own poems. My almond-shaped eyes are at the core of my Hazara identity’.

The people who shouted the loudest about ignoring marginalised lives did not trouble to seek the views of a Hazara woman from Afghanistan’s most persecuted minority.

Pinker’s explanation is fine insofar as it goes, but he is overly rational and misses the appeals of malice and the mob mentality.

Rachel Hewitt’s emphasis on the rewards witch hunters receive strikes me as equally important.

People who instigate pile-ons exaggerate their victims’ crimes to justify ostracism and enhance their own saintliness, she writes. They also exaggerate their own disadvantage, while sharing a ‘thin-skinned allergy to any personal criticism, however minor’.

I know at least 20 people like that

Aldous Huxley described the frenzy best when he wrote:

The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

This is a reworked version of a piece originally published by Nick Cohen for his Substack newsletter on 24 November 2025, which can be found here.