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David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. We've heard a lot of competing ideas about the state of free speech. To help me make some sense of it all, I reached out to Jay Caspian Kang, author of The Loneliest Americans, and a columnist for The New York Times. Jay often writes about issues of identity and the culture wars. In a time where things are way too often made out to be cut and dried, Jay lives in a world of nuance, even when the issues affect him personally.

Jay Caspian Kang: Right. When my book came out, there's a group of Asian American Studies academics, who all said, "We refuse to read this book." Now, their reasons were, in my opinion, a little bit bizarre.

David Remnick: Why did they refuse?

Jay Caspian Kang: Well, they said that like, because part of my argument is that like, well, Asian American is a pretty fraught term and it's not really a political identity. There's a group of people, including Asian American Studies professors, who believe that this is a real term, but in reality, most people don't think it's a real term. They said, "We refuse to read this book." It's maybe like five different people. Then it got amplified to a point where everyone thought there's this huge backlash against this book.

David Remnick: Right, and it's five people.

Jay Caspian Kang: Yes, and every interview that I did about this book for the first month was about this backlash to the book. Each time I would explain, "Look, I don't think this is a real backlash to the book. It's just Twitter." There's no way for me to express this in any way outside because they would say, "Okay, but what about the backlash," would be their next question. [chuckles] Right?

David Remnick: Jay, we heard earlier in the program from Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, and she pretty strongly made the argument that cancel culture is just an idea puffed up by powerful elements on the right to create a sense of grievance in their base, that in some sense, the threat is just cooked up by reactionaries. What do you say to that?

Jay Caspian Kang: Well, I think that she is describing something that is real, that there is a way in which these crises do get weaponized to create a sense of grievance. What I don't understand is, even if that is true, why that means that the only other option is for everybody to shut up about it and to just pretend like there isn't some weight or some pressure on people to not say the wrong things.

I think that by saying that there's no cancel culture, what you've actually done is you've made it impossible to talk about those people that you're concerned about on the left, who are also being canceled. Then, what happens is that nobody cares about the people who on the left are being canceled. Everyone who's on the right or center that's being canceled is then just told, "Well, we can't talk about it at all." Then, in the end, you just have a bunch of people who are not talking about something. [chuckles]

David Remnick: As we speak, one of the big stories in the news, of course, is about Joe Rogan and Spotify. Several musicians yanked their music off of Spotify to protest Rogan's show, and folks on the right are calling this an affront and an effort to just cancel Rogan.

Jay Caspian Kang: I do wonder why so much of our conversations around these questions these days are centered around basically asking tech companies to do something that tech companies don't want to do. Spotify just wants to make sure that this goes away. They're just going to do whatever they can to make sure it goes away with the least amount of damage to them.

I think the tenor of the conversation is to try and have Spotify dictate what is acceptable speech and what is not acceptable speech. They're not asking the FCC to do something. They're not asking the government to do something. I think that places these tech companies in this really powerful role. They can be the people who are enacting a type of political reality, and I think that when you are going through a company that has never thought about these types of things, really, I don't know, I think that's somewhat delusional. I think that when we're just trying to push for those types of decisions from these types of companies, we're just going to get things that are in the best interests of those companies in the end.

David Remnick: Now, Jay, I think you'll agree that one of the criticisms, it's often lobbed at the idea of cancel culture, is that well, yes, a lot of people are cancelled, and they end up most of them rebuilding their careers, and they don't starve to death and they're just fine. I hear this quite a lot, and I'm a little startled by it.

Jay Caspian Kang: I don't know. I find that odd too, honestly. Justine Sacco is a woman who tweeted a bad joke and creates this joke about AIDS in Africa, and then she was hounded and she became one of the, I don't know, she's put on like the Mount Rushmore of the canceled. [chuckles] I, just by random chance, ended up doing an article about daily fantasy sports, and I reached out to the company, one of the companies, FanDuel, that is one of the big companies now in sports gambling and their PR director was Justine Sacco. In some ways, Justine Sacco is fine, because Justin Sacco now has a job at this emerging cool company.

What I found through talking to Justine Sacco on and off for like six or seven months is that she's not fine. I don't know. I was talking to her and I said, "Look, we have to mention this in the article that you're this Justine Sacco," and the terror that I could see come across her face was amazing. She's still scarred by this thing. I don't really believe the argument that everyone's fine after all these sorts of things. I certainly don't understand it in the context of the prevailing idea that online speech and online hate and online abuse leads all these bad effects. I don't think you can have those two ideas in your head at the same time.

David Remnick: How much does this permeate into life that's not the academy, that's not show business, it's not media, and so on and so forth? I talked earlier with a former college professor, who made the assertion that for every high profile cancellation, there are many, many more cancellations of people that we never hear about. You think that the average person walking down the street is affected by what's called the threat of cancel culture?

Jay Caspian Kang: I haven't seen any real examples. I'm not sure what that would be. I do think it is mostly a media phenomenon.

David Remnick: I have to say, it does, you see it, cancel culture became in the Trump rhetoric, the first arrow out of his quiver at a certain point. The same with a trans swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania. Things that are really, really tiny in numbers became an electrifying part of the Trump appeal and ashore to be again, and you saw it again in the governor's race in Virginia. Oh my God, critical race theory is infecting the school system. It wasn't even in the curriculum. It's very effective.

Jay Caspian Kang: I think that if these things were more commonplace, if they were everywhere, then those more commonplace examples would become the ones that were talked about. I don't think anyone on the right wants to use as their cost to live like something that happened at Oberlin. I think that if it was happening more in the broader public that that certainly that those would be the examples that were amplified. I think that by definition almost, it's going to always be difficult to describe this thing. It's more of a feeling that is out there amongst people than anything else.

When you try and the trick that I think a lot of progressives have figured out and the center progressives as well, is to basically just say that if it doesn't pass some legal doctrine, then it's not real. Well, if the government isn't putting you in jail, then that means that cancel culture isn't real. A lot of missing internal links and that type of argument, right?

David Remnick: Now, I understand and share some of the concerns about ideological narrowness or intolerance on campus, and yet it doesn't seem, to me, narrow the threat to democracy posed by a lack of voting rights or the influence of dark money on elections and many other things, or am I missing something?

Jay Caspian Kang: No, I think you're right. I do think that--

David Remnick: Not to dismiss the things that do happen when they're wrong, but it seems inflated.

Jay Caspian Kang: For me, as somebody who does care pretty deeply about free speech issues, the biggest threats to free speech without question is from right-wing state legislatures who are banning and making certain forms of protest illegal. Now, the question is really just like, how do you address that? How as people who are interested in free speech, how do you fight that threat to democracy?

I do think that you have to basically address speech broadly because if you basically just say free speech doesn't matter, free speech doesn't matter, free speech doesn't matter, except right here, then I don't know if you're going to really mobilize people into caring about it right here in the instances where it should matter.

I think that that problem arises from the fact that the left just doesn't want to talk about free speech generally and that they only care about these types of laws in the context of pointing out the hypocrisy of people on the right. I do think that the left should have a very robust defense of free speech and I just don't see it ever.

David Remnick: You don't see it ever?

Jay Caspian Kang: No, I don't. Do you see it?

David Remnick: Well, I consider myself somewhere in there, and free speech means the world to me, the world to me.

Jay Caspian Kang: Do you not feel lonely these days, though? Do you not feel isolated in these thoughts? [chuckles]

David Remnick: Well, let me ask you, if somebody that's very much on the left, how do we get better at talking about this stuff? How can we acknowledge on the one hand that something has changed and is changing and try to understand what it is without becoming grist for somebody's political propaganda?

Jay Caspian Kang: This might be naive, but I just think that people are freaking out too much about it right now. I don't think that somebody talking about these issues, whether professors are scared or whatever, or whether or not this particular cancellation was just or not. I think that when people just say, "Well, it's all going to lead to X world, or democracy is over if we have this conversation," I think they, as people, need to calm down a little bit.

I do think at some level, for some of those people, it is a form of bullying in a way. It's a form of bullying to say, "You don't get to talk about this, or I'm going to ascribe the worst possible consequences to what you just said." I don't know, I don't believe that. I think that we can have these conversations as adults and that most people will think about them in a thoughtful manner and that the number of people who try and actually weaponize speech in that sort of way. I don't know. It's mostly politicians and everything. Why can't we as citizens and writers and thinkers have these conversations? I think we can.

David Romnick: Jay Caspian Kang, thanks so much.

Jay Caspian Kang: Thank you.

David Romnick: You can read some of Jay Caspian Kang's reporting@newyorker.com and he's on the opinion page of The New York Times.

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