The firing and quasi-cancellation of actress and podcaster Dasha Nekrasova—for hosting, on her show Red Scare, Nick Fuentes this past month—is not in itself deeply consequential news: it has almost no material effect on anybody else’s life than Dasha’s. But it is, in the wider context of late 2025, particularly relevant, because it demonstrates that the scapegoat mechanism is still very much operational in American culture—that cancel culture, or post-cancel culture, is internet culture—and that, in the wake of the firings and cancellations of progressive TikTokers and Bluesky posters following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we’re witnessing a larger series of game theory-like escalations between left and right, who have absolutely no compunction about liquidating their enemies from gainful employment and free social intercourse.
What stands out to me is not necessarily who is being canceled or why—those are essentially the same thing—but that this extra-legal or supra-legal function, which was developed during the mass hysteria of the late 2010s and early 2020s vis-à-vis MeToo, Covid, BLM, the 2020 election and more, is now embedded in the collective psyche, embedded in our social reality. The normalization of cancellation functions is far more dangerous and far more evil than anyone who was canceled or uncanceled, destroyed or resurrected.
The supra-legal function of cancelling is now embedded in the collective psyche.
Thus, even though many of the heroes of the high cancel culture era turned out to be frauds and manipulators, and even though many of the villains and monsters turned out to be largely innocent, and even though the excesses of this period have been well documented and much discussed, there seems to be something in human psychology and in the human mind that opts for this kind of mythological psychic violence—and wants to internalize it and propagate it—even long after it has proven to be unreasonable, unjudicious, and performatively cruel.
What I have yet to understand is why there’s not a larger social, cultural referendum on digital mob violence, on the self-organizing tribunals which declare people good or evil based on the perception or whiff of wrong-think, wrong-speak, vague accusations, gossipy assertions, or malignant associations. Culture and politics are increasingly driven by these counterpunches between accusers and persecutors who refuse to cooperate—indeed who have forgotten that cooperation is even possible.
What I have yet to understand is why there’s not a larger social, cultural referendum on digital mob violence.
In contrast, we might think of liberalism—or the heyday of free speech absolutist 1990s liberalism—as a period of cooperation. There was an implicit, collective agreement to be charitable in our interpretations of one another, to demand evidence when someone was accused of being bad, and to trust the legal system to prosecute in a fair way. Now we live in a period of escalation, in which we trust likes, vibes, and viral statements—essentially, rapidly forming mobs—to decide who gets to work and participate in civil society.
Of course you don’t have to like Dasha or Red Scare. You don’t have to like or listen to Nick Fuentes. You don’t have to enjoy TikTokers making weird little dances celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk. You don’t have to find any of these people right. But to join mobs seeking their destruction and to celebrate that destruction just as they were celebrating your own side’s is rotten behavior.
In the 1990s, there was an implicit, collective agreement to be charitable in our interpretations of one another, to demand evidence when someone was accused of being bad, and to trust the legal system to prosecute in a fair way.
I saw a number of people that I know personally—for instance, from literary circles in New York (and who have probably been in the same room with Dasha at some point in the last five years) decide to strategically re-embrace wokeness, performatively celebrating her firing from some movie they’d never heard of before (ironically called Iconoclast). Aside from the fact that these performances of righteousness are clearly narcissistic and self-serving, they also point to how inhuman and malignant social relations might become. You make small talk with somebody at a cocktail party for a literary magazine, or the opening of a play, or at a private event or gallery opening. But you might as well join—you may well join—the campaign against this person the next day or week or year. Maybe because you’re afraid not to join the mob, or because you actually enjoy joining the mob. But either way, you are unwilling to stand alone. Yet I believe mobs are bad even when I’m sympathetic to the direction of their anger.
The anti-Dasha cancellation mobs this past month died down quickly, after it was discovered and well reported that the primary instigator in her own “case” was actually a decade-long stalker and failed actor who had become obsessed with her public profile and visibility—clearly envious of her.
But what the Hollywood Reporter revealed, we might have assumed all along: that all sorts of ruthless animal spirits are bound up in the desire to join in the erasure of another person via the clicking of a button.
Similarly, there was something deeply perverse about individuals mocking Charlie Kirk and celebrating his death—or wishing for the death of his children—even while those individuals were participating in some kind of mass hysteria themselves. Yet I don’t take it as a positive sign that they were fired in droves, their pictures and videos posted and reposted, escalating cycles of shaming so as to, in fact, make neighborliness, tolerance, decency, and patience impossible. You might detest that someone is a groyper or sympathetic with groypers, or indeed is Antifa or sympathetic with Antifa. But the second you start to persecute them or join a prosecutorial mob, you are on the road to marking that person as pure biomatter: a non-person who does not have a soul and whose existence is a nuisance to the righteous.
The always prophetic René Girard writes, “The Gospels reveal the scapegoat mechanism everywhere, even within us. If I am right in this, then we should be able to trace in the Gospels everything that we have identified about this mechanism, especially its unconscious nature. The persecutors would not allow themselves to be imprisoned inside their persecutory narratives were it not for this unconsciousness, which is identical with their sincere belief in the culpability of their victim. It is a prison whose walls cannot be seen, a servitude the more complete because it assumes freedom, a blindness that believes its perceptiveness”.
However trivial, therefore, the vicissitudes of the very online may seem, they are symptomatic of the reoccurrence and return of a very ancient and fundamentally terrifying moral pathology. The unconsciousness, the collective unconsciousness of the persecutors, the mob, guarantees their destructiveness and insulates them from reflection and change. Material technology has abetted very deep biological and social codes. There’s nothing small or trivial about both influential accounts and anonymous individuals gleefully celebrating someone else’s, anyone else’s ruin, death, shame, or embarrassment.
