To be clear, it’s not cancel culture to impeach a president for inviting a maskless mob to Washington, D.C., during a pandemic, telling them he would lead them to the Capitol to “stop the steal” while Congress was finalizing Joe Biden’s victory, and then refusing to deploy the National Guard while said mob storms the Capitol in the hopes of executing former Vice President Mike Pence. It’s not cancel culture to call for a senator to resign after he tried to overturn an election and cheered on the mob that soon later tried to kill his colleagues. And it isn’t cancel culture for Pelosi to want to evict from the Education and Labor Committee a congresswoman who harassed school shooting survivors, especially after discovering that the congresswoman wrote that Pelosi should be executed for treason.

These aren’t cancellations; they are simply consequences.

Consider, there is an obvious difference between expelling a student for poor academic performance or threatening violence against another student versus expelling the student for something that has nothing to do with school, such as idiotic old tweets or a viral video. Cancel culture means punishing someone for wrongspeak or wrongthink or associating with someone the wokesters have deemed a Bad Person.