The Trump Administration Just Canceled Cancel Culture
The passage reflects on the rise of cancel culture in America, notably from the perspective of Pax Dickinson, who served as the chief technical officer at Business Insider until his public cancellation in 2013. Dickinson recounts how in previous years, comments made online by professionals were generally not deemed relevant to their employment. However, this changed fundamentally in the wake of the “Donglegate” incident, where a female tech evangelist sought to shame male colleagues for their jokes about a tech term, leading to significant backlash and resulting firings.
After expressing his views in an essay on tech industry sexism, Dickinson faced targeted harassment as an activist uncovered old, unrelated tweets of his, which ultimately led to his dismissal and blacklisting in the tech field. He describes cancel culture as a tactic aimed at silencing opponents through professional repercussions linked to their past or irrelevant online behaviour, highlighting how many have suffered similar fates over trivial infractions.
Notably, the culture of fear surrounding public discourse has persisted over the years, impacting numerous individuals.However, Dickinson discusses a recent incident involving Marko Elez, a young employee for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, whose past controversial comments led to his resignation. The subsequent backlash from Trump supporters and prominent figures led to elez’s reinstatement, signaling a potential shift against the cancel culture narrative.
Dickinson expresses hope that this moment signifies a turning point against the pervasive fear and shaming that cancel culture has created. He advocates for a re-embrace of free speech and insists on the importance of rejecting the accountability imposed by online mobs, suggesting that cancel culture might potentially be on the decline.
Though some younger conservatives may feel as though cancel culture has existed forever, it is a fairly recent development in American life. Before my own cancellation, internet comments unrelated to one’s job were not considered relevant to keeping a position. A person posting such things might be asked to delete them, and maybe apologize, but it had never been considered an immediate firing offense. A decade ago, that all changed.
In 2013, I served as the chief technical officer of Business Insider. I had been hired as chief engineer in 2010, when the business news startup was just a 20-person operation, and I managed a tech team of three people. By late 2013, Business Insider had grown into a 200-person company with 25 people working under me on the tech team. We were flying high, and I was working long hours; our company’s success was very satisfying. The entire company depended on me and my team, and we were delivering on all our responsibilities to grow and maintain the site. I took pride in the custom content management system we had developed, which allowed quick updates and rapid publishing that gave the company an edge against entrenched competitors in the business news sector, such as Forbes and Bloomberg.
I had a Twitter account, as many media and media adjacent folks did at the time. In those days, nobody felt like Twitter was part of the real world. Twitter users posted with irreverence and just tossed off tweets to amuse their friends. I posted a mix of business content related to my job and some vaguely libertarian observations and humor. Twitter was a much smaller place then and had a more light-hearted vibe to it in general.
Fired for a Tweet
However, in 2013 a shadow fell over Twitter and shrouded that sense of innocence in a climate of fear.
“Donglegate,” as it became known, was the incident that precipitated that shadow. A female tech evangelist for Sendgrid named Adria Richards was at a conference and overheard some male tech employees joking sexually about the term “dongle” and she took offense. She took their picture and posted it to Twitter and tried to have them shamed out of their jobs and the industry as a whole. Twitter allowed everyone under the sun to weigh in on this incident, and it only became significant due to that. One of the men lost his job, but a backlash against the eavesdropping and shaming resulted in Richards being fired as well.
This incident and its ramifications caused barrels of ink to be spilled on the topic of perceived hostility to women in tech, which in those days still had a bit of an irreverent boys’ club attitude. Business Insider published several editorials by women who were demanding tech address its latent sexism. After voicing my own opposition to this narrative informally to my colleagues within the newsroom, I was asked to write an essay sharing my perspective.
I wrote that essay, and once published it caused something of a fury among the tech feminist activist contingent. A reporter for the Gawker property Valleywag invented the novel tactic of cancellation as a way to punish me; she dug through my old tweets in search of something irrelevant to the issue at hand that she could use to discredit me.
She found some long-forgotten edgy jokes I had posted three years before, in 2010, before my employment at Business Insider, and when I had fewer than 50 followers. She published an article quoting them without the context that in my opinion made them funny, labeling me in the headline as “Your New Tech Bro Nightmare.” Mainstream media outlets, eager to publish content critical of perceived sexism in the tech industry, jumped on the story, and within 24 hours I had been forced to resign from my position, eventually to be blacklisted from any further employment in the industry. The original article I wrote kicking off the scandal was scrubbed from the site.
Tactic Spreads
I became one of the first people ever fired for tweeting, and sadly, far from the last. Cancel culture had been born.
Cancellation is an insidious tactic intended to silence a political opponent by targeting their employer or professional affiliations. This shaming tactic leverages politically incorrect internet content the victim has written that is wholly unrelated to their actual job. Sometimes this content has been posted under a pseudonym. Sometimes the content was posted long ago, or while the victim was a minor, or has been since deleted but recovered from an archive. Often cancellation seizes upon messages that were sent privately, or to a limited group, and that were never intended to be made public. Cancellation often seizes upon jokes that the attackers pretend to believe were written seriously, or takes words out of context to imply they mean something they never were intended to at the time. The agitator highlights this content to whip up an internet mob, not just against the victim, but against their employer or professional affiliates, to pressure them to cut ties with the victim.
This tactic of seeking professional repercussions over conduct unrelated to the job was deployed many times over the next decade. Twitter had become a place of fear.
Just a few months after my firing, Justine Sacco, a communications director for the company owning Match.com, was fired from her job for a controversial joke. She had made the joke and then gotten on an intercontinental flight with no internet service. The Twitter public became a mob; it was a gleeful digital lynching. People were counting down the seconds until her flight landed, and others were waiting at the gate recording her reaction to the viral response.
Other examples abound. James Damore was fired by Google after his internally posted memo proposing solutions to the dearth of women in the technology industry was leaked to the mainstream media. Later, activists conspired to prevent him from gaining another job in the industry by harassing recruiters willing to work with him.
“Papa” John Schnatter was ousted from the national pizza company he founded over comments leaked from a role-playing exercise. Racist comments he quoted critically were leaked and attributed to him as if said in earnest and used against him to remove him from the company.
Bruce Levenson, the former owner of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, was forced to sell his team after an internal team email about him discussing the team’s African American fanbase was leaked to the media.
Nicholas and Erika Christakis resigned from their positions at Yale after Erika sent a mass email to students regarding politically incorrect Halloween costumes, which turned into a campus wide-controversy and major national news that resulted in Nicholas being subject to a modern struggle session before both of their resignations.
World Series-winning pitcher Curt Schilling was suspended from his ESPN analyst job after posting a Twitter meme which was labeled “anti-Muslim” and later fired entirely after sharing a Facebook post considered “anti-transgender.” There are many other examples.
Chilling Effect
A chill settled on the nation as people began to realize that their unrelated comments could be used against them by professional and personal enemies. The outrage machine rolled on and on with no end in sight, and the corporate news media reveled in each firing. The “crimes” committed were inconsequential, but lives were destroyed over these minor incidents of perceived racism or sexism.
Now, with Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration and the launch of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the stage has been set for a reversal. A progressive journalist with an activist background started digging into DOGE employees for objectionable material. She discovered a deleted Twitter account once owned by a young DOGE employee named Marko Elez that had contained comments about Indians and minorities that she considered racist. She broadcast these comments in The Wall Street Journal, and he was quickly forced to resign.
This caused a significant backlash among Trump supporters. Trump, political pundits, and Silicon Valley luminaries including Musk himself had indicated that Trump’s election victory signaled the end of wokeness and cancellation, but here it was rearing its head within that very administration. Trump’s voters had become tired of seeing political dissidents fired for having politically incorrect views and making politically incorrect jokes and they made their voices heard.
Backlash
Now the Republican outrage matched the progressive voices. It wasn’t a matter of whether Elez’s comments were true or offensive; the focus was on the issue of whether personal past comments unrelated to the job were grounds for firing an employee. Trump-supporting voices made their anger and disappointment with the decision to fire Elez known, and the uproar prompted Musk to put up a poll asking if he should reconsider the firing. Vice President J.D. Vance personally weighed in and recommended that Elez be reinstated, as did many other prominent figures in tech and politics such as Balaji Srinivasan and Christopher Rufo. Musk’s poll closed with 78 percent of the voters saying that Elez should be reinstated, and shortly thereafter he announced that Elez would be forgiven and rehired.
Cancel culture had finally failed to work on a prominent target, and it feels to many observers as though the power of cancellation and shaming has finally been broken. The sight of prominent figures like Vance and Musk standing their ground against the media cancellation industry, and Elez being rehired, is an important moment for free speech and American culture.
The media hall monitors now stand slack-jawed at the sight of their majestic cancellation machine spewing smoke, spitting gears, and shuddering to a halt. All it took was a firm “no” from those in charge of hiring and firing people. They have finally put their collective foot down and said “No more.” By themselves the activists and journalists whipping up outrage have no power; it was only fear of shaming that made some do their bidding.
It remains to be seen if cancellation will remain a force in American life, but this is the first shovelful of dirt onto its coffin, and I for one am incredibly grateful to be here to see it. Let’s hope it can be buried for good, and the climate of fear ended once and for all.
Pax Dickinson was the chief technology officer of Business Insider until 2013, when he became patient zero of cancel culture. He is a tech founder, writer, and entrepreneur who currently resides in Austin, Texas.
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