What does “cancel culture” really mean, and how big a problem is it? Nick Gillespie, editor at large at Reason, has given these questions more thought than most. Nick is one of the leading lights of libertarian public intellectual life, and just wrote an essay, “Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship” that we dig into here. Nick is worried about the shift towards censorship in politics, in our organizations, including corporations, and in our own lives. We differ on whether the problem is more personal or political, but in the end we do agree that a healthy liberal culture is one that welcomes a robust exchange of diverse views. Along the way, we get into Nick’s particular beef with Facebook, some similarities in our backgrounds as journalists, and how his view of the world has some Marxist traces. 

Nick Gillespie

Nick is an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine and host of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. “Nick Gillespie is to libertarianism what Lou Reed is to rock ‘n’ roll, the quintessence of its outlaw spirit,” wrote Robert Draper in The New York Times Magazine.

A two-time finalist for digital National Magazine Awards, Nick is co-author, with Matt Welch, of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America (2012).

More Gillespie 

• “Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship” (Sep 2021)


• The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie (including his latest here with Steven Pinker)


• “A Different Approach to Anti-Racism” (Nov 2021)


• “From Russiagate to the MyPillow Guy, Let's Stop With Electoral Conspiracy Theories” (Sep 2021)

Also mentioned

• My Guardian essay, “Capitalism used to promise a better future. Can it still do that?”


• The narrator of Adam Thirlwell’s 2015 novel Lurid and Cute exclaims of capitalism: “‘Late? It had only just got started!” (I quote the line here).


• Nick’s podcast with Steven Pinker in how “Rationality Has Made Us Richer, Kinder, and More Free”


• I mentioned Abigail Shrier’s controversial 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze. (Nick’s had Abigail on his podcast).


• Nick mentioned Common Sense with Bari Weiss, on Substack


• I referred to MIT’s cancelation of University of Chicago professor Dorian Abbot who was to give the prestigious Carlson Lecture, which is devoted to 'new results in climate science'. Now Princeton is hosting it online instead. 


• I quoted John Stuart Mill from On Liberty: ““Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”” 


• Nick mentioned Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, published in 1975.


• I mentioned Bernard Williams’s last book: Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (2004); I also wrote an essay in truthfulness drawing heavily on Williams, “Lies and honest mistakes” (July 2021)

The Dialogues Team 

Creator: Richard Reeves

Research: Ashleigh Maciolek

Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas

Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves

Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)