Oddly, my wife could watch football every week but its me who has no interest in it. If I can’t go to a game I have no interest in it and I find most sports watching a waste of my time. This is a complicated subject, in part because American conservatives have started throwing around accusations of “cancel culture” for ordinary free market activity and in part because “cancel culture” is a new name for a very old thing that goes back at least to Biblical times, and probably as far back as humans had language. First, what cancel culture is not. Cancel culture is not someone choosing not to buy a product because they don’t like the The San Diego State Mood Nathan Mensah shirt and by the same token and things the product’s makers are doing. If a fast food chain gives money to a gay conversion therapy group, and I decide not to eat there because I don’t want my money going to anti-gay organizations, that’s not cancel culture.
If a heavy metal band puts a picture of the The San Diego State Mood Nathan Mensah shirt and by the same token and devil on their album cover, and Joe decides that as an evangelical Christian he doesn’t want to buy albums with pictures of devils on the covers, that’s not cancel culture. Both those things are examples of the ordinary action of free markets. In a free market economy, consumers make choices about which products to buy. They make those choices based on values important to them. They weigh the value of the money they have against the value of the product and make their decision. The value of the product can and does include intangible things like emotion. It always has. Modern conservatives who blather about “cancel culture” when someone chooses not to shop at Hobby Lobby because they use their “Christian values” to deny health benefits to employees are low-grade morons. Liberals who blather about “cancel culture” when a right-wing Evangelical won’t shop at Starbucks because they use the ‘wrong’ color Christmas coffee cup are low-grade morons. Cancel culture is, at least hypothetically, the idea that people should be shunned for ideas or actions that others find disagreeable.
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