stop cancelling the good guys

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This is my favourite saying when it comes to talking about how we treat people on the internet. Put simply, it means that the more you do the right thing, the more we expect from you. And then once you’ve been seen to do the right thing, the more we expect you to keep showing up perfectly, forever, with no room to fumble.

The higher you go, the harder you fall.

Then there’s the people who don’t fall. The people who always stay silent and who’ve never used their voice for something bigger than themselves. The ones who take the brand deals from gambling companies and sell us dodgy peptides or supplements because they’ve never set a standard for us to expect anything more of them. They’re usually taken at face value as ‘just a guy who tells jokes.’

If you don’t go high, you don’t fall.

I am not breaking new ground when I say that while we (the left) are out here policing each other’s every move and trying to get one another into trouble, we spend less time on the real issues, or the people who are actually causing harm.

The right, on the other hand, gets stronger with every controversy the left creates, because they don’t pick each other apart. They actually don’t even require consensus among themselves - if you share just one shared (terrible) view, they’ll welcome you with open arms.

While we are drowning in discourse, they’re getting on with it (and by ‘it’ I usually mean figuring out new ways to strip people of their rights.)

It’s not fair that we treat speaking up like bait, set up so we can catch someone out, cancel them, or stitch their video while sitting on our moral high horse.

It is not fair for us to expect the people who have proven to show up for us time and time again to meet the imaginary and impossible expectation of then doing everything perfectly, forever (standards that, btw, most of us don’t even hold ourselves to irl) while the ones who’ve never said a word or done anything good for the world get to coast by.

If we continue this way, policing people out of showing up or speaking out, we will lose important voices.

We will lose momentum.

And we will lose.

[Oh, and if you are about to read this essay in the least generous way possible and not even try to understand the point you know I’m making, then thank you; you have proved my thesis.]