I was surprised to see that Bret Stephens, of all people, is coming out against Cancel Culture:

“The essays in this volume aim to convince you otherwise. Cancel culture is a cancer at the heart of liberal society — and Jews, of all people, cannot safely be indifferent to the health of liberalism.” - Bret Stephens for ⁦@SapirJournal⁩ https://t.co/sKcdQMMejG

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) October 24, 2022

In Jews and Cancel Culture, Sapir Magazine, September 19, 2022, Stephens says that

It may not be obvious why Sapir should devote an issue to the theme of cancellation. Doesn’t the phenomenon already get more than enough attention elsewhere? Isn’t this a problem for liberal democracy in general, rather than for Jews in particular?

The essays in this volume aim to convince you otherwise. Cancel culture is a cancer at the heart of liberal society — and Jews, of all people, cannot safely be indifferent to the health of liberalism. Cancel culture also rests on a set of attitudes and practices that, whether from Left or Right, are uniquely anathema to Jewish culture, teachings, and habits of mind. Even statehood: Is it really such an accident that the enemies of free thought are so often the same people who want to cancel the Jewish state?

He also refers to Jews as ”the world’s most canceled people” and says that part of the problem (i.e., the danger to Jews) is that ”Jews are heavily resented in professions and institutions where cancel culture has tightened its grip: academia and teaching, publishing and journalism, the tech and entertainment industries.”

Speaking of which, Stephens tried to get a Jewish professor named David Karpf cancelled for this Tweet, issued at a time when there was a literal bedbug outbreak at the NYT building:

The metaphor is that Stephens, a nominal conservative (which in this case means neocon Never Trumper) doesn’t really belong at the leftist Times.

Stephens hit the roof.

Karpf, a professor of political communications at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., got an email from Bret Stephens, columnist for The New York Times. Stephens had found Karpf’s joking tweet suggesting that an outbreak of bed bugs in the Times newsroom was a metaphor, and that Bret Stephens was that metaphor. (Because, as Karpf explained, Stephens’ columns are bad, but they can’t seem to get rid of the guy.)

So Stephens emailed him, challenging Karpf to come to his home and call him a bed bug to his face….

Karpf says that he only shared the email in the first place because Stephens cc’d the provost of George Washington University. Karpf believes that this was a blatant attempt to land Karpf in hot water with the school administration, (Stephens has denied this) an attempt that patently failed: …

To the charge of anti-Semitism, by the way, Karpf replied, in an interview with the Forward

Karpf, who is also Jewish, said he didn’t realize that Stephens was Jewish.

“Stylistically, his work often seems very WASPy to me,” he said.

Quite reasonable. Why would a man named Karpf be expected to know that a nominally right-wing Republican named ”Bret Stephens” was Jewish? Bret Stephens is an extremely WASPy name. (Stephens’s grandfather changed his name from Ehrlich to Stephens when he moved to America. See Being Bret Stephens—Or Not, by Stephens himself, WSJ, June 26, 2009.)

I wrote this up in David Karpf Didn’t Think Bret Stephens Was A Bedbug. He Thought He Was A WASP.

Stephens is not in a good moral position to complain of cancel culture, but may have felt the heat of it when did an article on superior Jewish intelligence which quoted the deceased (and much-cancelled) scientist Henry Harpending. See here, here, and here.

My conclusion at the time was that  Stephen’s op-ed, in which he talked about Jewish IQ, is remarkable in attributing it not to heredity (which is either racist or common sense... or both) but to something he calls ”thinking different.”

What Stephens was accused of saying is that Jews are genetically superior. I’m afraid what Stephens was actually saying is that is that Jews are morally superior.

Now that’s the kind of thing that can get a man cancelled.