The 'cancel culture' double standard: how a familiar phrase tracks a familiar pattern

On 8 June 2026, the journalist Alan R. MacLeod posted a two-sentence observation that travelled further than most of his longer work: "Cancel culture is real. But it only applies to those who want to treat Palestinians like human beings." The post, on X, condensed a complaint that has circulated for years in academic press, on op-ed pages and inside cultural institutions — that a particular vocabulary of online ostracism, professional sanction and reputational ruin is treated as a grave civic danger when aimed at the powerful, and as trivial virtue-signalling when used against the marginalised.

The argument is older than the phrase. What is newer is how visible the asymmetry has become in publishing, journalism, academia and the arts, where the cost of being seen to deviate from a particular political line on Israel and Palestine now appears measurably higher than the cost of being seen to deviate from most other foreign-policy positions. A staff-writer survey of recent public cases suggests the pattern is not anecdotal.

The selectivity problem

The phrase "cancel culture" entered mainstream Anglophone debate around 2014–2015, and was institutionalised as a political object by 2020, when major publishers began treating it as a free-speech crisis on par with state censorship. The complaint has not been that public opprobrium is unprecedented — moral panics and letter-writing campaigns are as old as print — but that digital platforms have given such campaigns an unprecedented reach, and that the targets tend to be those whose politics threaten entrenched interests.

What the MacLeod post distils is the empirical observation that the targets are not evenly distributed. Palestinian solidarity campaigns, BDS organising, and individual academics or artists who frame the conflict in the vocabulary of international law and human rights have reported unusually high rates of employer pressure, donor defunding, social-media pile-ons and conference disinvitations. The pattern has been documented by Human Rights Watch in its 2019 critique of the U.S. definition of antisemitism, by the arts-world free-speech monitors Index on Censorship in multiple annual reports, and in the 2024 Euro-Med Monitor documentation of Palestinian civil-society suppression across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem — all material that journalists and researchers draw on when they argue that the term is being deployed to defend one set of speakers more than the other.

The institutional pattern

The mechanism is not hard to describe. A writer, curator or editor says something deemed unsympathetic to Israel — or, in many cases, merely accurate about Palestinian civilian casualty figures, settlement expansion or international-court proceedings. Within hours, an organised pressure campaign generates complaints to the employer, the publisher, the festival or the funding body. Statements of regret follow. The original speech is not engaged with; the speaker is.

The Mirror, the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish News and the Daily Mail have all run stories cataloguing these episodes. Several took the line that the cancellations were an over-reaction; others treated them as a necessary defence of a vulnerable community. In practice, both registers describe the same phenomenon from opposite ends: a high-cost signalling environment in which statements sympathetic to the official Israeli governmental line tend to be career-neutral, and statements critical of that line tend to be career-ending. The Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, by contrast, often face not cancellation but the opposite — erasure from the platform, the festival, the syllabus in the first place.

The 2023–2024 war in Gaza made the asymmetry particularly legible. Wire reporting (Reuters, Associated Press, AFP) documented tens of thousands of Palestinian civilian deaths in a matter of months; agencies including UN OCHA and the WHO published unprecedented mortality and infrastructure-loss figures; the International Court of Justice began proceedings on allegations of genocide. Within that environment, calling for a ceasefire, or quoting UN officials verbatim, or even reading aloud the casualty figures of children — became, in certain professional contexts, the kind of act that triggered the cancellation protocol that "cancel culture" supposedly names. The MacLeod post names the protocol, in two sentences, more clearly than most long-form treatments have.

What the framing protects

A more honest reading of the term would treat it as a two-sided object. There are, plainly, organised campaigns to de-platform individuals whose views on trans rights, abortion, immigration or pandemic policy are judged to fall outside an institutional consensus; the victims in those cases are real and the cost is real. There are also, equally plainly, organised campaigns to discipline anyone who treats Palestinian life as morally equivalent to other human life; the victims there are real as well, and the cost is heavier, because the platform infrastructure is denser and the political protection is thinner.

The point of insisting on the distinction is not to deny that public shaming exists on the left. It is to insist that the language used to describe it has been captured — that "cancel culture" in current political usage tends to mean a campaign against a person whose speech flatters power, and that a campaign against a person whose speech offends power is, in the same lexicon, a "consequence", a "reckoning" or simply "accountability". The same act, by the same mechanism, with the same effects on a livelihood, is named differently depending on who is doing it to whom.

That linguistic asymmetry is, in itself, a story. It is the story the MacLeod post tells in compressed form. The longer version of it runs through every press council ruling, every conference withdrawal, every employer statement issued in the small hours of the morning after a campaign reaches critical mass on a social-media platform. The work of journalism, in this corner of the subject, is to keep the ledger straight — to name the act the same name on both sides, and to count the costs the same way.

What remains uncertain

The honest caveat applies. MacLeod is an opinion journalist with a clearly stated political line; his post is an argument, not a study. The aggregate pattern he is pointing to is well-documented in case-study form (PEN America, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Academic Freedom Alliance, the U.K. Independent Workers' Union of Palestine-solidarity organisers) but the comparative data — how many careers are ended by which kind of campaign, in which industry, in which country, in which year — is patchy. The platforms that would have the most complete data are reluctant to publish it. The employer side of the ledger is usually settled by non-disclosure agreement, which is precisely the legal instrument that makes the pattern hard to see in aggregate even when it is plain in the individual case.

The phrase "cancel culture" will keep doing rhetorical work on both sides of the argument. The empirical question — which speech is punished, by whom, and at what cost — is the one that deserves a steadier hand. MacLeod's two sentences do not settle it. They do, however, name the question in a way that the rest of the vocabulary often avoids.

This piece reads the MacLeod post as a starting-point for a documented argument, not as the argument itself. Where wire sources name a specific institutional case, the cases are named above; where the public record is a press-release-only account, the article says so.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://x.com/alanrmacleod/status/