Maybe this topic has been parsed enough with friends, but I didn’t really read anything in this book that surprised me. If one has been witnessing the world since 2016, the polarization and extremism is fertile ground for cancel culture. We are so innately tribal creatures, so anything that threatens our tribe must be stopped. Why can’t we use the brains that elevate us to the top of the food chain to see that differences don’t have to be threatening. Thanks to NetGalley for a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

This is a book with an important, overdue message that struck me as a bit under-reasoned. The authors are committed to view point diversity, intellectual tolerance, and spirited debate on campus and in society as a whole. However, much of the book is concerned with private sector institutions like Harvard who, since they are not associated with the federal government, do not have the obligation to adhere to a 1st amendment standard of speech neutrality. Therefore the argument that needed to be made is whether or not such standards are appropriate to such institutions and that they do not conflict with competing objectives, such as creating an hospitable learning environment. This I feel they generally failed to do, instead leaning on outrageous anecdotes that don't argue the general case. In one instance, they seemed to go beyond endorsing neutrality to actually praising the homophobic and anti-feminist perspectives of a college who professor (who unfortunately died by suicide) simply because he made the right people angry. A short article by Nadine Strossen "Resisting Cancel Culture," I think makes a more compelling defense of a very liberal marketplace of ideas.

This book was incredibly interesting. I feel like I learned a lot even though I feel like this space in the book world can be pretty saturated. I loved it.

I think this is a fine introduction to the topic from some able writers. It lacks a bit of the punch that made The Coddling of the American Mind such a winning essay and then book, but it's worth the read for anyone engaged in the topic.

A timely read that succinctly diagnoses a significant issue in our present day society--cancel culture. I had some quibbles with certain points or wanted more context for certain examples, but overall I found this to be a really valuable book. Especially liked the sections on the methods the left and the right each use to avoid having to listen to their opponents. I hope more people heed this message and we can move into a place where we feel more free to debate and less afraid of ideas.

This book presents an in-depth exploration of cancel culture in its many varied manifestations, from both the left and the right of the American political spectrum. The biggest part of the discussion is with respect to the educational system, and particularly higher education. Sadly, this is because the institutions that used to be among the most formidable bulwarks of free speech, expression, and academic freedom have increasingly become untenable to multiple points of view. (The authors point out that there have been more dismissals of faculty members for cancel culture speech and expression issues than there were during the McCarthy era for political stance.)

However, the book doesn't restrict itself to education, but also investigates cancelations in journalism, publishing, the scientific community, standup comedy, and the medical and psychiatric communities. The authors also present cases of the effect that wokeness and other expression limiting activities are having in these areas. One of the most disturbing revelations to me was the role of wokeness in psychotherapy and the negative effect it may have on people getting the help they need.

The book presents a series of cases in detail to advance the discussion. It also has a couple chapters that examine the tactics that are used to apparently "win" debates by silencing / demoralizing the opposition while avoiding any actual contest of ideas. The authors go through tactics favored by the Right as well as those by the Left. (Though it's clear that, in a race to the bottom, both sides adopt the approaches of the other side that seem to be effective. e.g. the Left is getting into book banning (historically a Conservative tactic) and the Right is getting into cancelling and shout-downs (usually Progressive tactics.)) I think it was smart to have two authors, one from the left and one from the right, in order to help ensure balance in the project. That said, as the Left has been in the cancel culture vanguard, they come up more often.

Some have called this a sequel to "The Coddling of the American Mind," with which it shares a co-author, Greg Lukianoff. I don't know that I'd think of it that way. While it does address some of the same issues as background, psychology and child development are not at the fore in this book (Jonathan Haidt - the other co-author of "Coddling" is a psychologist,) but rather are the legal, cultural, and political issues.

This is probably the most important book I've read this year (and, being late November, it's likely to retain that status) and I'd highly recommend it for all readers.

In my effort to avoid doom scrolling, I’ve been reading even more than usual. I got early access to this book and have not been able to put it down (I even read it twice, after the events of Oct 7 and subsequent fallout)

I’ve long held that Coddling of the American Mind (which has been lambasted from the left) was a wake up call to the realities of what young people experience in the United States, especially at major universities. This follow up, shows how these tendencies have effectively followed themselves to their logical conclusions.

We’ve allowed people to completely reshape our society into infantile sectors that completely lack the maturity of civil conversation let alone debate. We’ve allowed bad actors to further and further segment and divide us until we’re in our own echo chambers, pushing us farther and farther on ideological terms until the chasm is insurmountable. This isn’t just damaging to our society, but damaging to our psyche and mental abilities.

I won’t say that I agree with everything in this book (I rarely do), but I can understand how they came to their conclusions, which is in essence the point of the book.

When we reduce people to meaninglessness, shun them for beliefs (usually misconstrued or misunderstood), we fail to see them as people. This is aided by social media that holds onto every move you make and every thing you say for perpetuity - allowing no room for grace or growth. Their section on what we can do for our kids to combat this is poignant, but also incredibly difficult because the truth is that we have to be what we want to see in the future, and with so many bad actors that seems wholly impossible, but nevertheless we must persist. Our society may have devolved into this rapidly, but it will not be rebuilt as quickly and the sooner the work begins, the better a world our children and grandchildren can inherit.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Greg Lukianoff, free-speech attorney, is back with a new book on the state of cancel culture. Lukianoff’s previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind (co-written with Jonathan Haidt), addressed young people’s emotional fragility and inability to handle conflict. In this new, similarly titled work, The Canceling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and coauthor Rikki Schlott turn their focus to the phenomenon of “cancellation”: its origins, its corrosive effects, and how to push back against it.

Lukianoff and Schlott begin with a survey of cancel culture. They trace its origins to the anti-bullying movement, which told children to respond to bullying by telling an adult or a teacher about the mean kids. Proponents inculcated this approach among a whole generation. Those children have since grown up, and now, in the workplace, continue to “tell an adult” (in this case, their boss or HR) when conflicts arise.....

The Canceling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott is a "I-told-you-so" sequel to Lukianoff's prior book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Despite its grudge match status, the tone is quite sunny and balanced, attempting to be steadfastly nonpartisan. Unlike the prior book, in which Jon Haidt was a co-author, The Canceling of the American Mind produces a more robust empirical record of censoriousness and illiberalism in American discourse. It also engages in a fairly detailed and comprehensive rhetorical analysis that lays bear the strategies that are used to foreclose open debate on sensitive or salient topics in elite spaces and in public discourse more broadly. The primary aim of the book is to show how the "Great Untruths" (adding a fourth to the Coddling's three untruths) are at the center of discourse derangement.

The Three (now Four) Great Untruths:
1) What doesn't kill you makes you weaker
2) Always trust your feelings
3) Life is a battle between good people and evil people
*4) Bad people only have bad opinions

To accomplish this aim, the book is divided into three main portions with specific sub-objectives: 1) define the much abused term "cancel culture;" 2) Illustrate the mechanisms of cancel culture; 3) offer strategies that may be a salve.

In part 1, Lukianoff and Schlott essentially run with a previous definition provides by a think tank scholar who also works in free speech advocacy, Jonathan Rauch. Rauch's definition of cancel culture alleges six distinguishing components to cancelation: punitiveness, deplatforming, organization, secondary boycotts, moral grandstanding, truthiness. Given the complexity of Rauch's definition, the authors also offer a simpler version:

"The uptick beginning around 2014, and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is - or would be - protected by First Amendment standards and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick"

There is a great deal of coverage of high profile cancellations and then various quantitative examinations of the phenomenon using data mostly collected by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The empirical portion is really the most compelling in terms of contextualizing how impactful this new cultural censoriousness has been. It really closes the door on attempts to dismiss the phenomenon as exaggerated. One of the wildest stats is that more professors lost their jobs due to 2010s cancel culture than in the Red Scare (1947-57) and post-9/11 combined! Plus, these figures only include actual termination not just attempts, which according to contemporary reports appear to be significantly higher now.

And the most useful part of the work is probably the second part, which examines the rhetorical approaches that have been used to foreclose debate. Greg and Rikki outline two defensive postures that destroy discourse: The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress (often deployed by left-wing censors) and The Efficient Rhetorical Fortress (often deployed by right-wing censors). Both rhetorical strategies are variants ad hominem (a basic no-no in honest discussion), where the PRF is a portfolio of deceptive practices and ERF is a blanket dismissal of political enemies. Many readers will be familiar with many of these rhetorical terms (whataboutism, straw-manning, motte and bailey, etc), but many will also noticed that these terms can themselves be used in inappropriate ways to shut down debate. In many cases, errant naming of rhetorical postures has become the latest entry among many "Thought Terminating Cliches."

In the final section, Greg and Rikki outlines a few ways that cancel culture can be mitigated. First and foremost, the argue that parents should increase the freedom and adversity that their children face. Coddling children is a route to censoriousness in their view. In this vein, they propose a number of changes to the educational system through higher ed, including banning litmus tests and encouraging political neutrality at the institutional level.

I generally agree with the diagnosis and recommendations of the authors. However, I am less sanguine that such recommendations will actually provide significant mitigation against censoriousness in the discourse and politics more broadly. I fear this is because the analysis the authors provide is somewhat blind to the factors that created the phenomenon of cancel culture in the first place. They seem to chalk it up to just bad ideas and the existence of social media. I think there are more fundamental issues about the interactions and tensions among individual and institutional incentives, intra-elite competition, technology, social stratification, and prestige scarcity. However, there are some signs that the Overton window is broadening, but this seems to mostly be a function of rapid fragmentation of discourse platforms that was catalyzed by monetary policy to curb inflation and Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter.

This is a followup to The Coddling of the American Mind, though one of the co-writers is different. For balance, one writer is right-wing and one is left-wing.

The book examines censorship and cancel culture in various fields (education, comedy, etc.), its causes, its effects, and how and why to stop it. Many specific examples (“case studies”) are looked at across the political spectrum. Cancel culture is not just debating someone on social media. It is threatening someone with physical harm (or causing actual physical harm) and working to get them fired or expelled and made a social pariah.

While reading this book, I attended the local comic con. Many celebrities were terrified of being canceled. In fact, Gina Carano was there, and she has been canceled and said very little. It was really sad that we’ve come to this.

The writers believe part of the cause is how Gen Z was raised with constant supervision. Disagreements were always settled by an adult, and today these people often look to authority to settle matters of hurt feelings in addition to actual crimes. Certain zero-tolerance bullying policies taught them that a single misjudgment warrants expulsion with no chance at redemption. Previous generations would be alone with other kids in unstructured play time and learned to settle disagreements on their own. Gen Z is much more pro-censorship than previous generations.

The writing is very engaging, not dry at all, and goes quickly. The arguments are reasonable; there’s no snarkiness or disparagement of any political side. I highlighted a lot.

My only real criticism is this: The authors are opposed laws against teaching critical race theory in schools and then go on to oppose putting kids into affinity groups and groups of victims and oppressors. This is exactly what CRT in schools looks like, so I suspect there is some misunderstanding there. I still accept their argument that laws trying to keep CRT out of schools are poorly worded.

An appendix shows the freedom of speech ratings for major universities.

Language: Some rare strong language, usually in quotes
Sexual Content: None
Violence/Gore: Mild
Harm to Animals: <spoiler>None</spoiler>
Harm to Children: <spoiler>None</spoiler>
Other (Triggers): <spoiler>Injustice (canceling), censorship</spoiler>

I disagree with many of the other reviewers. I think this is an important read. I enjoyed The Coddling of the American Mind by Lukianoff and think that this is a strong follow-up. I likely do not align politically with the authors but strongly believe that our ability to have rational discourse has been limited by polarization and fears of silencing on both sides. This book puts forth a theoretical framework for how to define "cancel culture" (I can't stand that term) and steps to combat it. I know this book will cause controversy and debate, a reason why I think this is an important addition to bookshelves.

Over twenty years ago I began following the travesty of censorship on our nation's campuses by reading "The Shadow University" which was excellent and since then several other offerings that were also very good. So, I was anxious to read "The Canceling of the American Mind " (the title is a takeoff of Alan Bloom's famous tome) and I truly enjoyed the first half of this new book, but sadly it then tailed off sharply in quality. You must read the first 50% but I would not waste my time on the remainder.

"The Canceling of the American Mind" is a lackluster attempt to address an important societal issue. While Lukianoff's previous work, "The Coddling of the American Mind" (with Jonathan Haidt), had some serious shortcomings, primarily misleading interpretations of data and being selectively ahistorical, "Canceling" magnifies those issues and adds some new ones.

Foremost, I should be the primary audience for this book. I am a professor and university administrator, and I have serious concerns about modern discourse. I am open to the idea of a cancel culture as a contemporary phenomenon, but I need to be convinced. This book did little to convince me. While I share the authors' concerns on many issues related to online discourse, their analysis falls stunningly short. After finishing the text, I possess little to no additional understanding of the topic. Instead, I believe that contemporary 'cancel culture' is nothing more than an extension of flawed discourse that has occurred for centuries, if not millennia. People do not seem to have changed, but rather the mode of communication has. The authors need to provide additional, historical evidence to justify their conclusion that discourse has fundamentally changed in the 21st century.

The authors assert that, due primarily to changes in child rearing practices and pedagogy, later generations (Millennials and Gen Z) are largely incapable of expressing reasonable disagreement without resorting to character assassination. However, they do not effectively dissuade the reader from considering the alternative explanation that this phenomenon has long existed, but now information can be shared much more rapidly through modern communication channels (i.e., social media). For example, in 1973 (50 years ago), if I disagreed politically with another person, I may very well turn to the two strategies that the authors describe: the perfect rhetorical fortress and/or the efficient rhetorical fortress. However, my reach would be rather limited. I could discuss this with known persons and perhaps write a letter to the editor (though if I were engaging in these strategies, this letter likely would not be printed). Therefore, in 2023, it may not be that people have changed, but rather that the reach of communication has. I can now turn to social media in an attempt to amplify my message and this can result in the types of effects associated with cancelling someone. The onus of the authors is then to show that people have indeed changed along with communication technology (e.g., an independent, individual-level effect).

The authors also go to great lengths to assert that they are taking a politically balanced view on the issue. They resort to the trope of describing themselves as a liberal (Lukianoff) and conservative/libertarian (Schlott) and thus any bias necessarily cancels out (pun intended). This is certainly not the case, as the authors are much more critical of the political left. This is evident almost solely by the sheer number of pages devoted to issues that they allege rise from the political left, and the authors largely characterize the political right as an injured minority. They devote little attention to the harmful effects of speech and focus much more attention to contemporary boogeymen of the right (primarily Marcuse). The authors proudly take an absolutist position without much of a rationale or a defense against commonly asserted critiques of this position. Instead, they expect the reader to have as much sympathy as they do for the victims of cancel culture (overwhelmingly conservative and white) while not giving much thought to the injury caused by such speech. Their case studies are also quite selectively chosen and interpreted to support their narrative.

Overall, like "Coddling," "Cancelling" reads as an ahistorical polemic on a topic of much societal interest. I acknowledge that this is written for a mass, rather than scholarly audience, yet I can't help but to be disappointed in the lack of rigor in their analysis of the issue. Rather than heeding the critical feedback given to "Coddling," the authors double down on their approach and the result is a text that is far less deserving of any serious attention than Lukianoff's prior work.

While the forerunner of this work, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Haidt and Lukianoff, already wasn’t fully convincing to me due to its narrow focus on elite schools and students, along with its pointed, and strangely unmotivated, mistrust in liberatory movements on the left, The Cancelling the American Mind fails as a successor. Lukianoff, supported by junior writer Rikki Schlott, appears incapable of discussing the problems surrounding speech, activism, and shifting tolerance thresholds for offensive utterances (especially in the wake of the pandemic and the political disruptions of 2020 and afterwards) outside his particular brand of legalistic free-speech absolutism which leads him to miss or elide, whether purposefully or not, lots of the context of his various case studies. He should have paired up with a media scholar or an ethicist instead. False equivalencies between speech on the left and right abound, which, granted, is Lukianoff’s hallmark, but that doesn’t make the book’s moral shallowness less grating. Many of the individual cases that make up the book’s evidentiary base have been shaped and pruned for full rhetorical effect, while factors that would reduce the reader’s willingness to countenance the “cancelled” person’s opinions have been conveniently neglected.

I agree with the authors that some people should not have been fired and/or deplatformed (nor had their college admission revoked)—and no one should ever be threatened with violence for any kind of speech—but, in other cases, accountability for violent or incendiary speech appears warranted. My main gripe is with the book’s one-size-fits-all sledgehammer approach. The world is complicated, culture and its linguistic taboos change, and some battles should not have to be refought over and over again.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with an ARC for my review.

If you are looking for more information on cancel culture, how we got to this point in our Western Discourse and the organizations fighting against it, this book is for you. One could call the majority of the book a history of The FIRE Org, and the rest well-placed outlines of strategies for identifying and understanding the tactics used by partisans to discredit the other side.

The book is organized into three sections: Part 1: What is Cancel Culture, Part 2: How it Works, and Part 3: What to Do About It. The most successful of these sections is the second. Lukianoff and Schlott spend considerable time breaking down the myriad ways individuals and organizations can engage in the cancellation of ideas and speech they find objectionable. For this reason, I think it is a useful resource for students, professors, and liberal thinkers in organizations where their opinions are "incorrect" or counter to the prevailing winds.

Where this book falls short is in the "What to Do About It" section. This portion of the book contains strategies and policy recommendations. Unfortunately, because the authors do such a good job in Part 2, explaining how cancellation can work, I envision a future where all of the suggestions and recommendations are quickly discarded or "cancelled" because they are time-consuming, costly, inconvenient, undesirable, or have already been presented by other "cancelled: authors by all partisan sides. In particular this book focuses on what parents, k12 schools, corporations and higher education should do about cancel culture.

What I would have liked to see is instead recommendations for local & state government, technology and social media companies, and media organizations. So many of our issues are perpetuated by these larger bodies rather than the organizations listed, lower on the food chain taking directives from the wider culture and political agents. As important as it is to address cancel culture individually, the only way we can create resiliency and foster tangible change is to harden our largest and most intertwined institutions as the touch all aspects of private and public life.

In summary, if you have not studied up on cancel culture, this is a great primer to understand why this country is where it is today. It is an especially good history of The FIRE Org. The case studies are interesting, but do not expect an easy solution as the book cover seems to suggest.

Thank you to #NetGalley for a copy of the ARC of The Canceling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff; Rikki Schlott.

****UPDATE: As an educator, I still am not sure about Part 3 and I have concerns about the overall generality of the recommendations in Chapter 12. BUT, I am updating my rating because I have realized that this is a book you need to sit with for a bit. In the past two weeks I have observed numerous examples from Part 2 of The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress and The Efficient Rhetorical Fortress in action. These events playing out in real-time brought the book back front and center in my mind. Given that it has stuck with me and I continue to reference it, I am updating my rating to 4-stars. Anything that sticks with me beyond my first impression should be a four-star read.

Review of Cancelling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott

Greg Lukianoff follows up his bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind with a new co-author, resident Gen-Z member Rikki Schlott, but the same issues plaguing the book, a fear-mongering look into how no one (but really people on the platform formerly known as Twitter) debates properly anymore.The argument in the book is essentially that in the past few years, there has been an age of Cancel Culture, where people across the political spectrum (mostly the left) have been trying to get people fired or removed from positions, creating a chilling effect on speech. Now, are there many anecdotes they found supporting their argument? Sure. If you want to read anecdotes about people who were cancelled over the past decade, then this really is the book for you. But the authors do not do a great job with trying to connect all of these disparate anecdotes together. Additionally there are numerous chapters where the authors clarify that what they are discussing also does not fall into their own definition of cancel culture, but the authors also acknowledge that they chose the term because of its mass identifiability, rather than its applicability to all situations. Both Greg and Rikki work for FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and if you don’t know that a few chapters in, you really aren’t reading the book. Many of the citations and survey data come from FIRE, and the authors continually mention when FIRE got involved in a cancel culture incident.

In the first section of the book, the authors walk through their history of cancel culture, from its roots in 1960s academies from unconscious Marcuseans (those who follow Herbert Marcuse's repressive tolerance doctrine, a man and term I had never heard of before even though I apparently follow it), to the political correctness era of the 1990s, to the modern age of cancel culture, which began on college campuses before spreading to mass society.  It looks at modern school campuses and how 80% of people have self-censored their beliefs (based on FIRE's own survey data [the company that Greg and Rikki are employed by] which breaks down to only 21% saying they do it often, 32% occasionally, and 30% rarely). The part ends by describing the difficulty a conservative would have in trying to get tenure, facing cancellation dangers at every step of the way (which is an extremely narrow view that in my opinion takes the approach that people with certain viewpoints are entitled to specific employment opportunities and the only thing holding them back is their viewpoint). 
The next section details how cancel culture works, which is where the authors detail the argumentation strategies used by those who cancel. Essentially, the authors believe that when people are being cancelled, it is because the people are attacking the person and not their arguments in a way that makes it seem that you cannot attack someone's viewpoint at all. According to the authors, the left relies on what they call the perfect rhetorical fortress, which is a weaponization of the speaker's identity. But the authors do not make it clear what the difference is between recognizing the speaker's identity and relating that to their arguments, and simply attacking the identity. Because it is possible to address both the argument and the identity of the person saying it (i.e. I can recognize Matt Walsh is a cis white man when he attempts to attack transgender people and that Clarence Thomas is a Black man when he strips millions of Americans of their rights and discuss how that informs their actions, but to the authors, that still falls within the traps they defined). On the right, there is what is called the Efficient Rhetorical Fortress, which is essentially that you don't have to listen to liberals, journalists, or experts if they disagree with you. The section ends with a brief look at social media and polarization, which has interesting data but is not explored in significant depth and the authors specifically avoid coming to a conclusion about its relationship to cancel culture.

The final section of the book is focused on recommendations and the authors are really taking a big swing trying to recommend structural changes to all levels of our education system, corporate workplaces, and how parents raise their children (to make sure they are “anti-cancellers”). This section was painful to read and the authority the authors relied upon really fell off. There is no data saying whether the recommendations the authors have would be effective, or if they have been tried before, or if it could lead to other consequences. Given the prior books sales, I do worry about this section being released to an audience that uncritically absorbs these recommendations and tries to implement them (and looking forward to the nightmare college alumni donations employees will have to contend with if the author's recommended list of demands to be attached to their donations starts becoming popular). Between all of these chapters are case studies of various fields (journalism, psychotherapy, stand up comedy, Yale University), which really give the authors an opportunity to kinda lump together some anecdotes about cancel culture in those fields. These chapters were not interesting to read and only forced me to look up many of the stories to see what the final outcome was (and for many nothing really happened, but the book often glosses over final consequences in favor of the fear of something happening, as described below). I didn’t hate reading this book, often it was fun being reminded of some of the stupid things people said that led to their cancellations, but overall, it is an incredibly frustrating read.

The authors mention that culture war fighters have two methods of attack: engagement and persuasion, or ad hominem attacks. To ensure the latter do not happen to them, Greg and Rikki really emphasize throughout the book that they are good people fighting the good fight. Greg even brought back his old co-author Jonathan Haidt to write the introduction essentially stating just that. I won't go into too many more details about that here, to ensure that I am not engaging in these ad hominem attacks, but I did not need to hear the story of how and why Greg hired Rikki at FIRE that many times.

The conflation of cancel culture on the Right and Left is extremely concerning. Most of the book is focused on the kind of cancel culture that makes its way to Fox News or the New York Post, where a professor, or a student, or some industry executive says something that goes against the leftist orthodoxy and then faces backlash. It continually emphasizes that this issue is on both sides, but spends a majority of its pages looking at the "social justice warrior" type of cancellation. The book does spend a chapter discussing the legislative actions Conservative governments are taking to restrict speech in classroom, and then goes right back to complaining about the left. This section gets just about as much space as the one time Kyle Duncan got yelled at when he visited Stanford Law School, the previous chapter. To be transparent there are examples and two other chapters looking at the Right, but these are still vastly outnumbered by the anecdotes criticizing the Left (I am very happy the authors called out LibsofTikTok). The authors discuss how the Right has resulted in more specific acts of threatening speech (citing a Reuters report showing that 100 threats against election workers after 2020 met the threshold for prosecution) but does not do a deep analysis over how the speech of the two sides fundamentally differs. Legislation and threats are a significantly greater threat to democracy and society than college students yelling at a speaker or someone sending a mean tweet, but the latter issues are what gets these author's attention. 

For as much as the authors criticize the use of straw man arguments, their entire book is dependent on it. Their great untruths of cancel culture are the straw man the size of the one from The Wicker Man. That is a necessary function of trying to define two rhetorical fortresses and apply them to two large groups, but also just goes to show the thin strength of the points the authors make in the book. Also, there is such a weird tendency in the book to end arguments with some variation of “while nothing actually happened, think about how scary it would be if something happened.” The authors combine this with emphasizing the chilling effect these cancellations have on speech, so that even when nothing happens, people who hear about it then don't speak because something, or nothing, may also maybe happen to them. Overall, I would not recommend reading this book because I really don't think the authors have anything new to say about cancel culture. Besides collecting a lot of anecdotes and summarizing their employer's survey data, the recommendations are barely supported and are only trying to push people to debate in a way the authors feel more comfortable with.