After several months out of the limelight, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo popped back in the headlines Sunday, claiming that he was a victim of “cancel culture.”
The concept of cancel culture was twisted by white conservatives to be a morally bad thing, spurring a crusade against legitimate criticism of harmful speech.
The disgraced politician resigned last August following an extensive investigation into multiple allegations of sexual harassment against female state employees. (He has denied the allegations.)
He used his first public appearance since his resignation to rip into cancel culture and defend the future of his own career. “My father used to say that government is an honorable profession, but politics can be a dirty business,” he told an East Flatbush church in Brooklyn on Sunday. “Now that is especially true today, when the politics out there is so mean and so extreme, when even the Democratic Party chooses to cancel people that they have a disagreement with.”
Much has been made over recent years about a seemingly omnipresent cancel culture that’s apparently settled over the U.S. and other English-speaking countries. The most commonly espoused theory on the phenomenon is allegedly that liberals and lefties consistently shout down all ideological opposition in an attempt to drive disagreement out of everyday discourse. This is, of course, nonsense; if anything can be classified as the free speech violations alleged in criticisms of cancel culture, it’s conservative legislators banning books and constricting classroom speech to fit their own values and sensibilities, no matter how bigoted.
But there’s another side to the cancel culture debate that needs picking apart.
The term cancel culture first emerged from Black social media culture before it was adapted more widely. To cancel someone was to stop buying their product or services because they did something harmful, like make a racist or sexist remark, or display acts that oppress or harm others. It’s become a fairly common practice since. For example, I’ve never had Chick-fil-A because the company’s owners give much of their profits to organizations and politicians devoted to taking my rights away. This is one of the beauties of a free market, for both commercial goods, and speech.
Somewhere along the line, though, the concept of cancel culture was twisted by white conservatives to be a morally bad thing, spurring a crusade against legitimate criticism of harmful speech or potential consequences for someone’s harmful actions.
This dynamic escalated in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement. We weren’t but a few months out from devastating Harvey Weinstein allegations when the opinion pages of news outlet began filling up with questions over whether professional consequences for sexual harassment or assault had gone “too far.”
Cancel culture discourse is often used by men in positions of some type of power, like Cuomo or Louis CK, who are accused of behaving in harmful or abusive ways.
Comedian Louis CK’s TV show was literally canceled after it was revealed that he had exposed his genitals and masturbated in front of female colleagues. Comedy shows of his were canceled because, you know, sexual assault and harassment are bad. But many people questioned whether Louis CK should have faced any consequences for his actions.
We saw similar questions of overreach many times over people like Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who was accused of sexual misconduct by several women over the course of his decades as a comedian. Franken has denied the allegations but resigned from office anyway, in December 2017.
Cancel culture discourse is often used by men in positions of some type of power, like Cuomo or Louis CK, who are accused of behaving in harmful or abusive ways. It’s become an increasingly common tactic to attempt to rescue the reputations that they themselves ruined via their own actions. In each of these cases, a man did something that was judged to be wrong and faced consequences for those actions, only to have a large group of critics link this to “cancel culture” in order to get the man out of those consequences.
Irish comedian Dylan Moran provided an apt anecdote about the Louis CK cancellation in a recent interview with The British Telegraph. “Let’s say we’re talking about champion knitters, and you know, for the knitter, it’s the world knitter finals coming up,” Moran told the conservative paper. “Now, he hasn’t dropped a stitch. And then, all of a sudden he takes his d— out in front of the other knitters, you know. How do you think that’s going to play out for his career?” It’s a brilliant dissection of the whole situation and it applies to varying degrees to men everywhere who have ever used the cancel culture excuse to try to weasel out of accountability. Remove all the stardom, the power, the glitz, the publicity and you’re left with a man severely violating generally accepted social norms in a way that harms others. For anyone else doing the same exact thing, there would be consequences. Which brings us back to Cuomo. That he committed numerous acts of sexual harassment is difficult to dispute at this point, despite the fact that he has constantly maintained his own innocence. His own attorney general substantiated most of the claims against him and the New York state Assembly, controlled by his own party, was about to take official action against him when he tendered his resignation from office. Yet, here Cuomo is, a 64-year-old man who asked a woman his daughter’s age whether she sleeps with older men while on official duty, saying that younger people “have a new sensitivity,” excusing his own actions because no one ever told him that they were making them uncomfortable. Cuomo can claim to be a victim of unfair cancel culture all he wants. And people are still entitled to their opinion and he still has to face the consequences of his own actions. There very well may be legitimate issues with “cancel culture run amok” in the U.S., but that should never ever excuse powerful men for sexual harassment or abuse. CORRECTION (March 10, 2022, 7:03 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated the nationality of comedian Dylan Moran. He is Irish, not British.
Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. 
