One of the strangest things about fighting cancel culture is the stubborn claim that it doesn’t even exist.

But 22 years of combatting censorship on college campuses has shown me that cancel culture is very real, and can even be deadly.

My career began shortly after 9/11, often defending professors who said controversial things about the attacks.

One of my first cases involved a conservative professor named Mike Adams.

He had been targeted by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington after he challenged a student who claimed America had the attacks coming.

My organization, the non-partisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), would be called to defend Professor Adams many times over the years for his irreverent conservative advocacy.

More than a dozen professors were targeted in the wave of punishments after 9/11, and three of them were fired.

These numbers may seem small, but even a single professor losing their job for their point of view chills speech. People want to protect their livelihoods, so once the firings start, the speaking stops.

Never mind that  Supreme Court rulings between 1957 and 1973 established strong protections for professor and university student free speech rights. 

The toll of cancel culture today, however, dwarfs anything we’ve seen over the last half century.

More than 1,000 campaigns to get professors punished for their free speech have occurred in the last decade.

About two thirds of those campaigns succeeded, and almost 200 professors ended up being fired or forced out.

And, thanks to polling, we know these statistics are a gross underestimate.

One in six professors report having been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech, and a whopping one in three report having been pressured by colleagues to avoid researching controversial topics.

As a result, 90% of surveyed professors say they have self-censored out of fear. During the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s, only 9% of professors did the same.

Cancel culture has infected every industry from journalism to publishing to K-12 to comedy.

By “cancel culture,” we mean the measurable uptick, beginning around 2014, of campaigns to get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that would be protected by the First Amendment. 

And contrary to what deniers claim, the impact of cancel culture on individuals is often profound.

Just this year Richard Bilkszto, principal of Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute and Adult Learning Centre in Canada, committed suicide after a run-in with a diversity trainer in Toronto cost him his job, his friends, and his good standing.

Then there’s Mike Adams. FIRE and I had successfully defended him over the years. But his luck ran out in June of 2020, amid a wave of campus cancellations, when students demanded he be fired for jokingly comparing the lockdowns of North Carolina to slavery. Adams ultimately reached a financial settlement with UNC, which only upset his haters more.

Mike was tough so I had assumed he would be fine. But he wasn’t.

Protesters still called him and came to his house. He had even filed a police report.

Given that he had already signed his severance agreement, however, there wasn’t much I could do.  He shot himself the following week.

This is why claims that cancel culture is about compassion seem so nonsensical. Yes, cancelers believe they are defending the marginalized, but their approaches excuse cruelty to flesh and blood people.

Another academic, who was put through the ringer at Harvard University for alleged “transphobia,” demonstrates one of the most harmful — but harder to pinpoint — casualties of cancel culture:  Public trust.

In 2022, Dr. Carole Hooven went on Fox News to talk about her book “Testosterone,” making the argument that we should be compassionate and respectful to trans people while still recognizing that biological sex is real.

She was targeted by Harvard administrators and eventually left the university.

More recently, a panel she was scheduled to appear on at the joint annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) was canceled by the presidents of each association, citing concerns of “harm.”

While the treatment of Hooven, Adams, and Bilkszto are problems in their own right, they also badly undermine American faith in our expert class.

When the public knows you can literally lose your career for expressing the “wrong” view on biological sex, DEI, or current events, why should anyone trust our “expert classes?” 

In this way, cancel culture doesn’t just cancel lives and careers, it cancels our trust in the shared facts our democracy needs to thrive.

That’s a problem we deny at our own peril.

Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the co-author of the new book Canceling of the American Mind.