[cornel_io]

I'm really thinking of normal folks in normal situations (Damore, Garcia-Martinez, Wilder), not people with massive political power and partisan sway like Trump or Clinton - those figures always get passes for the horrible things they do and say even when they break their own group's rules, but normal people actually do have to color inside the lines a lot more.

I agree about your distinction between "is this behavior bad?" and "has this person done that?". The important cancel culture debate to me is over the first, where it is 100% clear who said what, the only question is whether they should be fired/silenced/banned/attacked for it. The facts about what really happened matter deeply but to take an example, the Kavanaugh situation isn't really an issue of "cancel culture" being out of control because almost everyone agrees that if he did it he should not have been appointed, it's just that most Republicans really don't think he did it and most Democrats do. Something else is going on there that is very not good, but it's not the same as James Damore being fired for statements that most people in both parties find to be within the bounds of "speech you shouldn't be shitcanned for" (https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/policy/technology/3..., surprisingly the political divide on that one is only 10% but even Ds are 50/50 on it).

Edit re: Kavanaugh: I'd also put good money that even if the accusations against him were 100% proven or disproven almost no minds on either side would actually change, despite people claiming allegiance to the truth. Instead, like Trump and his misdeeds, we'd start arguing about fake facts and then further retreating to discussions about whether his sins we're actually great enough, etc. But as things currently stand the ostensible argument is at least over the real facts.