Welcome to my Substack: Twice Cancelled, Not Shy

Tales from the Slippery Slope

Hi there and welcome to my Substack! For those of you just getting to know me, I’m a writer and I believe in free speech and freedom of expression (two different things, though inextricably intertwined). Because I have a big mouth and intensely dislike being told what I can and can’t say, I’ve been cancelled twice (so far!), both times by left-wing literary activists.

Cancellation, by the way, is a loosely defined term that means different things to different people. From my perspective as a professional writer, “cancellation” occurs when a group of people collude to destroy a person’s reputation and eliminate them from public life because they don’t like their ideas. This group, usually lead by one or two passionate idealogues, determines that someone’s idea(s) are so “problematic” (to use their parlance), they should never be allowed to speak publicly or hold a public facing position again. It’s important to note that a “cancellation” doesn’t always succeed and/or isn’t always total. That’s why in rare cases and circumstances you can, like me, even manage to get “cancelled” twice!

So what I want to talk about here is how my first cancellation fed into and foreshadowed the second. The first laid the groundwork for what was to come. In fact, there was a wave of cancellations for various thought crimes around that time. For the most part, they were “successful” in that people lost their jobs, lost their friends, and were silenced. The cancellations were so successful and unchallenged within the larger culture, that today they are still a widely used tactic. In some cases, the cancellations are even more insidious then they were in their first incarnation.

So let’s get to it. My first cancellation stemmed from the issue of so-called “cultural appropriation”. I questioned the now prevalent maxim that writers must never give voice to characters or stories from cultures that are not their own. (More on how this all played out and my response here.) In other words, if you want to write about the experience of a black man who is gay and who grew up in Jamaica you can only do that if you are black and gay and grew up in Jamaica. Otherwise, you are “appropriating” the black-gay-Jamaican culture.

My modest pushback against this idea was blown up into a huge scandal (at least by Canadian standards). In official literary circles, it is now career suicide to be accused of the crime of so-called “cultural appropriation”. This has robbed the literary world not only of cancelled voices, but of the imagination that produced innumerable works. Everything from Shakespeare’s Othello to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale have been accused of “appropriation” and censored.

Which brings me, seven years later, to cancellation number two. While there has been some pushback against cancel culture, in many milieus left-wing activists preaching identity politics have gained near total control. This is certainly the case in the Canadian arts scene. I ran a magazine there for almost 30 years, which I recently, and heartbreakingly, decided to shut down. For those of you who haven’t heard the story, here’s a primer. The quick take is that people did not like my pro-Israel, anti-terror-encampments posts on X. They were not made in the name of the magazine but were my personal views on my personal social media channels.

The people who didn’t like these personal views of mine took to the public spaces of my arts magazine to demand that I be removed from my position as publisher. They harassed the magazine’s staff and readers by responding to every innocuous post announcing new content on our site or an upcoming event with demands that “genocide-denying ZioNazi Hal step down.” They bullied my staff, intimidated the magazine’s contributors, chased away sponsors, and made it impossible to continue normal operations. All because they didn’t like what I said on my personal X channel to my small number of followers.

The arc here is both interesting and appalling. In the first case, I was at least cancelled for public statements, for an article I wrote in a professional capacity. In the second case, I was cancelled for personal statements (X posts). It’s a slippery slope – and a dangerous one. If we are going to cancel people for ideas they voice publicly/professionally, why can’t we cancel them for what they state on their personal social media, completely outside their public life? Moving forward, why can’t we cancel them for what they think? Or maybe just – what we think they think?

Enforcing identity politics ideology through cancellation has been so successful that in many spaces – and particularly the arts – self censorship is now the norm, not the exception. Those who dare to speak out are attacked so viciously that they lose their jobs, their colleagues and so-called friends. In some tragic cases victims have experienced such depression and grief that they have taken their own lives. So you can see why the escalation I’m observing in my own case is extremely troubling. The thought police are extending their reach.

As we near the end of 2024, some are optimistic that we are getting to the end of reflexive censorious mobbing. But I’m not so sure. In 2017 I was not permitted to carry on with my position because of a perfectly reasonable professional opinion. In 2024, I was told to resign and hand over a business I worked thirty years to build because of perfectly reasonable personal opinions. I, personally and professionally, am now twice cancelled, but I’m not going to be shy about it. To the contrary, it has inspired me to advocate for freedom of voice and thought, and to help others do the same.

This Substack is part of that advocacy. Please share and consider subscribing and supporting. If you are experiencing cancel culture, reach out. You aren’t alone. If you feel trapped in a thought bubble ruled by identity politics, I want to hear from you and do what I can to help. If you’re afraid to speak out, now is the time! The more freethinkers find each other and work together, the greater the chance that we can beat down this latest escalation and make cancellation a thing of the past.

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