"Cancel culture" is a phantasm. Yes, as any true believer will insist, there have been cases where a person saw consequences — such as being suspended for a year from a plum teaching gig — for "political incorrectness. A deeper look, however, often shows that what is being sold as "free speech" is instead repeated abuse of colleagues or students. More often, it's outrage at being yelled at online, as we see with self-described cancellation victims like J.K. Rowling or Elon Musk. In many cases, the "cancellation" is pure myth, such as when a few students complained about bad food at the Oberlin cafeteria, and the press decided it was "wokeness" and not good taste driving anger that limp pork sandwiches were being passed off as "bánh mì."

In his new book "The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global," Stanford professor Adrian Daub argues that the hysterics over this alleged trend amount to a moral panic. Worse, fretting about the mythical excesses of youthful leftists has created a pretext for the right to engage in real assaults on free speech, such as banning books for being "woke" or shutting down student protests. But conservatives get away with it because so much of the press — not just in the U.S., but in Europe as well — would rather feed centrist audiences a steady diet of "cancel culture" panic.

"This problem with disproportionality is what I think characterizes stories about cancel culture."

Daub spoke with Salon about his book and whether it's "politically correct" to want your bánh mì to taste like a real bánh mì.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You describe cancel culture as a moral panic, similar to the Satanic panic of the 1980s. Why do you think this is an effective framework for understanding it?

Maybe the Satanic panic isn't even the best kind of antecedent, but rather the child abduction panic or the gang crime panic, where there is a real problem, but blown out of proportion. This problem with disproportionality is what I think characterizes stories about cancel culture. There's just a few anecdotes that this discourse is centered around, but the use of the term gets inflationary.

The people I know who are most panicked about cancel culture always do exactly that. They'll find an incident where somebody got yelled at or even fired and they'll say, "See, it's real!" But one incident is not a trend.

Yeah, exactly. You also get feedback effects, where people start paying attention to things more because they have a ready-made frame they can insert an anecdote into. With most cancel culture stories, if you dig right down to it, it's basically unpleasant disagreements. There are a few other cases where people did lose their jobs. But a lot of the stories are "this person got yelled at online or by their colleagues" or "this person didn't get a prize that they were nominated for." Without the cancel culture frame, people would say, "Well, what's the big deal?" Well, cancel culture is the reason it is a big deal.

You cover a wide range of these stories in the book: A handful of cases where somebody really did get fired for expressing an unpopular opinion. Lots of ugly disagreements. Then there is a multitude of straight-up urban legends or even........

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