Quantifying Campus Cancel Culture
In this post, I continue the exploration of how the revolutionary Left has evolved over time, with an emphasis on what we now call “cancel culture” on university campuses in the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Opinions vary on the legitimacy of “cancel culture” as an actual social phenomenon; it’s often dismissed with remarks such as “cancel culture is just consequences for your actions”. The phrase “cancel culture” is generally synonymous with social ostracism and incorporates a wide range of “cancellation tactics”, including firing, “de-platforming”, social shunning, silencing, or coordinated online harassment.
When I use the term “cancel culture” here, I’m referring to something very specific: the moral certainty that certain information or messaging is socially harmful or offensive and must be censored, contained or quarantined by any means possible. Cancel culture has been cultivated on university campuses by both the Left and Right ends of the political spectrum, but left-wing initiated cancellations occur more frequently, and cancellation tactics on the Left are more organized, militant, and reflective of a more consistent ideology. Like many ideological features of the Woke Left, cancel culture is rooted in the New Left, particularly in the anti-war and anti-racist campus activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Examples of cancel culture in action are abundant among university campuses in the 2010s and 2020s. Successful cancellation is often achieved via coordinated disruption: a controversial speaker or visitor to a university campus is prevented from disseminating some (allegedly harmful) message by direct appeals to the administration, petitions, threats of violence, intentional noise pollution (screaming, chanting, loud music, etc.), technical sabotage (damage to sound equipment), or by otherwise making delivery of the controversial message prohibitively costly (e.g. by requiring the administration to provide a massive security presence).
Some notable examples of cancellations or attempted cancellations include:
Brown University, 2013: NYPD chief Ray Kelly was “cancelled” via disruption (screaming and chanting) while attempting to speak to an audience.1 In a statement published in the Brown Daily Herald, the group of students responsible for this “cancellation” explicitly made clear that their intention was to prevent Kelly from voicing a potentially harmful message. They viewed their actions as a form of self-defense:2
We organized because students have a right to feel safe at their university. … It is unacceptable to invite a speaker to campus who makes students feel threatened or intimidated. Our demonstration was an act of self-defense. We protected our rights to feel safe on the campus we now call home.
Oxford University (Christ Church College) 2014: In some cases, merely threatening to protest an event is sufficient to successfully cancel the event, due to the increased security concerns necessitated by a large protest. Oxford Students for Life (OSFL), a pro-life student organization, was prevented from holding a public debate about abortion after over 250 students announced they would protest the debate.3
UC Berkeley 2019: Conservative writer Anne Coulter spoke at UC Berkeley, which cost the university approximately $290,000 in security in order to manage over 1,000 protesters, many of whom explicitly announced that their goal was to prevent her from speaking. A few students in Wheeler Hall (where the speech took place) attempted to disrupt via shouting, but were successfully removed by security.4
In fact, UC Berkeley spent $3,910,259 in September of 2017 to provide security to accommodate various controversial conservative speakers on campus.5 The initial cost estimate for providing security for Ben Shapiro alone was $800,000.6
Disinvitations
The “disinvitation database” from FIRE records 477 individual university cancellation or attempted cancellation events (instances where students, faculty or other groups successfully or unsuccessfully attempted to prevent an invited speaker from speaking at a university) from 1998 through 2021. Of these, we can determine which side of the political aisle initiated the cancellation in 423 cases. By visualizing this data, we can see that the Left is responsible for most cancellations, and that the average annual number of cancellations from the Left increased significantly in 2013.
The number of annual cancellations from the Right is much more stable over the years, with a standard deviation of 3.19
. The number of annual cancellations on the Left, however, increases significantly on average towards the mid to late 2010s, with a standard deviation of 9.05
. This seems to demonstrate that very little has occurred, culturally speaking, among right-wing circles on campus, that has significantly affected the likelihood that conservative students or faculty will initiate a cancellation. Yet the chances that left-wing students or faculty will initiate a cancellation has increased substantially over time. It’s also possible that less cancellation events were reported in the early 2000s, yet the low standard deviation for right-wing cancellations seems to indicate that lack of sufficient reporting does not significantly distort the overall trend.
Additionally, from 2000 to 2013, 59.3% of cancellations were initiated by the Left, and 40.7% by the Right. From 2013 to 2020, 75.6% of cancellations were initiated by the Left, and 24.4% by the Right. This indicates that the Left became significantly more prone to initiate cancellations starting in 2013, which closely matches the previous analysis demonstrating that 2014 was a key inflection point where mainstream culture overall shifted significantly leftwards, and the Left became increasingly racially conscious (woke).
However, despite the fact that the Left initiates more cancellation attempts overall by far, the Right has a better success rate of actually cancelling speaking events. Of all cancellations initiated by the Left, 41.5% were successful. But of all cancellations initiated by the Right, 53.7% were successful. In other words, the Right seems to be better at cancelling people, but the Left tries to cancel people much more frequently.
Breaking this down by year, we get:
Possible explanations for the Right’s better success rate in actually achieving cancellation includes: (1) the Left is more likely to initiate cancellations for frivolous reasons, (2) the Right uses better tactics to cancel speakers, (3) college administrators are more likely to be persuaded by the Right for some reason.
The standard deviation for successfully cancelled speakers is 2.29
for the Right, and 5.51
for the Left, which more or less mirrors the pattern observed with total attempted cancellations. The average annual number of successful cancellations initiated by the Left increases significantly after 2014, following the overall trend.
Cancellation Tactics & Motivations (Left vs. Right)
In general, we can classify cancellation tactics as either disruptive or non-disruptive. Non-disruptive tactics include student complaints to the administration, complaints to the media, petitions, online activism via social media, peaceful organized protests (picketing) and boycotts. Disruptive tactics include threats of violence, threats to physically prevent the speaking event, spontaneous heckling or booing, and pre-planned, coordinated attempts to shout down or otherwise prevent someone from speaking via screaming, chanting, loud noises, or sabotaging sound equipment.
As we shall see, the distribution of cancellation tactics varies significantly between the Left and the Right. We can categorize cancellation tactics using 8 general categories listed here in order of severity:
Administrative decisions due to external pressure
Complaints from students, faculty or alumni (in the form of petitions such as change.org, phone calls, emails, blogs, social media, statements to the press, etc.)
Threats to stage a protest
Symbolic actions (coordinated peaceful actions of protest, such as walk outs or standing and turning away from the speaker)
Picketing
Threatening the invited speaker
Heckling or booing
Full disruptions
A full disruption means a coordinated or spontaneous attempt to shout down or disrupt a speaker using yelling, noise, sabotaging sound equipment, pulling a fire alarm, or assaulting the speaker. Many cancellation events include multiple tactic categories, in which case the event is classified using the most severe category involved.
Tactics: Right-Wing Initiated Cancellations
The following chart breaks down 134 cancellations from the “disinvitation database” initiated by the Right from 2000 to 2020 by tactic.
Clearly, a large percentage of right-wing cancellations are initiated by the university administration. This partially explains why right-wing initiated cancellation attempts have a better success rate than left-wing initiated attempts. A large number of right-wing initiated cancellations are administrative decisions made under external pressure from the media or some religious organization. Unsurprisingly, a significant percentage of right-wing initiated cancellation attempts occur at private religious universities, such as Catholic or Jewish universities. Therefore, many administrative cancellations occur when a religious group associated with the university complains about the speaker. These type of cancellations are usually not initiated by students.
Approximately 44% of right-wing initiated cancellations occur at universities affiliated with a religious organization, with Catholic universities making up the vast majority. Of the cancellations that occurred at religious universities, 54.2% were initiated by the administration, typically because a religious organization complained. This is very often the case with Catholic universities, where a local bishop pressures the university to cancel the speaker. For example, Reggie Kennedy was disinvited from speaking at Anna Maria College in 2012 at the request of Bishop Robert J. McManus, who found her positions on abortion and homosexuality incompatible with Catholic doctrine7.
Of the 44% of right-wing initiated cancellations that occurred at religious universities, 30.5% were the result of complaints from students, faculty, alumni, or some external organization. Complaints can take the form of petitions (such as change.org), direct complaints to the administration, or complaints voiced to the press or on social media. 15.3% (9 individual cases, all at Catholic or Jewish universities) of these cancellations involved picketing, heckling, or threatening to protest. No “full disruption” type cancellations initiated by the Right occurred at any religious universities.
The large percentage of right-wing initiated cancellations at religious universities demonstrates the overall character of right-wing initiated cancellation events. They are often initiated off-campus by pressure from officials or organizations. While this type of suppression of academic freedom is just as bad as the student-led cancellations on the Left, these religious universities don’t exactly hide the fact that they are bound to represent a particular dogma. We should not be particularly surprised when an explicitly Catholic university decides to cancel a pro-choice activist. There is also likely a degree of selection bias here, because pro-choice or pro-LGBT activists are probably less likely to even be invited in the first place to speak at Catholic or Evangelical universities.
Turning to the 56% of right-wing initiated cancellations that occur at secular universities, 44% were initiated by the administration. This happens for various reasons, but very often this occurs when external forces pressure the administration to cancel a speaker because the speaker made controversial statements about a recent tragedy, or engaged in criminal activity. For example, Ward Churchill, professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, was canceled by the University of Oregon8 because he compared 9/11 victims to Nazi bureaucrats.9 On another occasion, the administration at Harvard caved to political pressure (possibly from the intelligence community) and withdrew an invitation extended to Chelsea Manning to speak at Harvard as a visiting fellow.10 Again, very few of these instances were initiated by students.
Of right-wing initiated cancellations that occurred at secular universities, 33% were the result of complaints from students, faculty or alumni. Many of these were over anti-American intellectuals or former radicals, such as Bill Ayers (former member of the Weather Underground terrorist organization11), whose invitation to Pennsylvania State prompted some law students to write a letter to the administration requesting that Ayers be disinvited.12
The remaining right-wing cancellations that occurred at secular universities included 4% picketing, 2.7% heckling or booing, and in 4 individual cases (5.3%) full disruption. In one case, a few months after 9/11, Janis Besler Heaphy was heckled off the stage at California State University, Sacramento, after she (quite presciently) voiced concerns that the War on Terror would likely erode civil liberties.13 In a more recent instance, California’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra was unable to complete a speech in 2017 at Whittier College in California, because a group of pro-Trump hecklers continuously shouted insults. The hecklers were apparently upset about Becerra’s pending lawsuit against the Trump administration.14
If we break down right-wing initiated cancellations by reason for cancellation, we discover that views that are anti-Israel, pro-choice, pro-LGBT, anti-American (or simply associated with leftist politics), as well as past criminal behavior, constitute the most common reasons for right-wing initiated cancellations.
The “Anti-American” category constitutes a wide range of political beliefs, including beliefs that were not sufficiently patriotic after 9/11, criticism of American policy, criticism of capitalism, criticism of a sitting Republican president, etc.
Among right-wing initiated cancellations that occurred at religious universities, 47.5% were over abortion, 20.3% were over LGBT activism, and 11.9% were over the Israel/Palestine conflict. Unsurprisingly, abortion and LGBT issues were the most common reasons for cancellation at religious universities. However, a large percentage of these cancellations were initiated by the administration rather than by students.
At secular universities, the picture is very different. 32% of right-wing initiated cancellations were over the Israel/Palestine conflict, 28% were over “Anti-American” views, and 20% were over past criminal behavior. In contrast, abortion and LGBT issues barely show up at secular universities, with only 2.7% and 1.3% of cancellations respectively.
This demonstrates the American Right on university campuses is perhaps best described as two separate cohorts, a Religious Right and a Secular Right. They both demonstrate significantly different concerns; the largest overlap between the two occurs with the Israel/Palestine issue. Counter-intuitively, the Israel/Palestine conflict is a more common reason for right-wing initiated cancellation at secular universities, most likely because such cancellations are initiated by Jewish student groups. This also highlights some of the interesting edge cases around the left-wing/right-wing conceptual border: the concerns of an historically persecuted, minority religious group are considered right-wing, due to the left-wing commitment to viewing the Israel/Palestine conflict through the lens of colonialism and apartheid.
Left-Wing Initiated Cancellations
Cancellations initiated by the Left are really in an entirely different league than those initiated by the Right. While a large percentage of left-wing initiated cancellations take the form of student petitions, social media activism, or complaints to the administration, left-wing cancellation tactics also feature a much larger degree of organization, coordination, pre-planning, and physical disruption than right-wing initiated cancellations. The following chart breaks down 288 left-wing initiated cancellations from the “disinvitation database” from 2000 to 2020 by tactic.
Of particular significance is the much higher prevalence of full disruption events (20.1%), which range from pie throwing antics,15 to shouting the speaker down until the event cannot continue16, to violent mobs rushing the speaker17. An additional tactic category which appears to be mostly unique to the Left is the symbolic action category, which includes peaceful, mostly silent, symbolic actions, such as mass walk outs during the speaking event or coordinated turning of backs towards the speaker.18
The prevalence of picketing is also greater on the Left (13.9% on the Left vs. 7% on the Right). However, the rate of picketing is underrepresented due to the methodology used, because events that included both picketing and a full disruption are counted only as full disruptions. Additionally, picketing was often not possible throughout most of 2020 and part of 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, administration initiated cancellations are less prevalent on the Left than on the Right (12.5% vs. 48.5% respectively). The prevalence of petitions, complaints on social media or complaints to the administration is similar on the Left and the Right (38.5% vs 32.1% respectively).
Breaking down the full disruption events individually (see below for a list of all full disruption events19), we see the most common tactic by far is shouting down the speaker, followed by various “pranks” (e.g. pie throwing).
Other tactics leading to cancellation by full disruption include surrounding the speaker with a mob of protesters, occupying the speaking venue with a large group of protesters, or escalating the intensity of an external protest (located outside the speaking venue) until the event is shut down over fears of imminent violence. In some cases, external protests break out into violence between protesters and counter-protesters20, leading to event cancellation.
Unlike the Right, the preferred cancellation tactics of the Left appear to evolve significantly over time. The following chart breaks down left-wing initiated cancellations by tactic and year:
We can observe that tactics seem to have escalated over time, culminating in 2017, when 32.3% of cancellation events were full disruption events. It’s likely this escalation partially occurred in response to the election of Donald Trump, as well as various right-wing celebrities touring college campuses at the time21. In 2020 all cancellation events are administrative decisions or complaints, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the escalation in full disruption events may have been partially a reaction to Donald Trump’s election or the rising notoriety of the Alt-Right at the time, if we break down full disruption events by year we observe that the escalation was also part of a trend that significantly predates both Trump and the Alt-Right.
This data indicates that there was a shift in disruption tactics around 2007, from juvenile “prank” style disruptions (throwing pies, dousing the speaker with salad dressing, etc.) to a more militant strategy of shouting down the speaker. Note that this shift occurred well before Trump was in office - in fact, it began before Obama was in office. This lends some additional support to the hypothesis that the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s saw an overall lull in militant leftism; cancellation events mostly took the form of wacky college hijinks. But the late 2000s and 2010s saw a return to the militant tactics of the late New Left (late 1960s and 1970s), such as shout downs, occupations, and on rare occasions, violence.
Breaking down cancellation events by reason for cancellation, we see that racism or lack of racial awareness is the most prevalent reason. Cancellation events in this category range from anger towards perceived racism or white supremacy22, to lack of diversity, to anger over insufficient focus around racial issues. Examples of the latter include the cancellation of Stanley Fish, a professor at Seton Hall University, who was protested because his English Literature course curriculum did not focus on racial issues23 (it focused on normal English Lit stuff like John Milton, who had the unmitigated gall to write about Satan instead of racism).
After racial issues, LGBT issues, followed by controversies over perceived Islamophobia ranked as the second and third most prevalent reasons for cancellation respectively.24 The fourth most prevalent reason for cancellation was being perceived as associated with conservative politics or positions, such as in the case of Greta Van Susteran, whose invitation to speak at Georgetown University in 2013 resulted in push back from students.25
Breaking down cancellation events by year and reason, we see that cancellations over Islamophobia peaked in 2006 (during the height of the War on Terror), after which racism began to emerge as the leading reason for cancellation, spiking sharply in 2016, likely as a result of Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency. Apart from racism, Islamophobia, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and LGBT issues remained constant reasons for cancellation from 2004 through 2020. In 2011, cancellations over general perceptions of (neo-)conservatism peaked, likely as a result of the Occupy movement.
The increase in cancellations over racism appears to follow the rise of widely circulated videos of black victims of police or vigilante shootings, such as the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin and the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown which ignited the Ferguson riots and propelled Black Lives Matter into the national spotlight. The killing of George Floyd in 2020 likely had a subdued effect in terms of cancellations, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
OK Cancel
Cancellation in academia occurs both on the Left and the Right. However, behavioral patterns involving cancellation or ostracism on the Right appear much more consistent from 2000 to 2021, and primarily involve either administrative decisions or religious institutions enforcing traditional dogma. The Left, however, has cultivated an increasingly militant approach to cancellation, evolving from juvenile antics in the 2000s to coordinated shout-downs and occupations in the 2010s. The Left is also significantly more likely to cancel an individual speaker for a range of perceived offenses, and is more likely to use militant tactics. From 2000 to 2020, there are only 4 instances of full disruption cancellation events initiated by the Right (2 of which occurred at the height of post 9/11 national patriotic fervor), compared with 58 initiated by the Left.
Increasing militancy in left-wing cancellation tactics appears to have begun around 2007 and peaked in 2017. This period was characterized by a return to late 1960s-era New Left tactics, which involved coordinated shout downs and occupations. After 2017, there seems to have been something of a decline in left-wing militant tactics, likely as a result of the collapse of the Alt-Right as a viable political enemy, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Obviously, it’s unclear if this decline represents a brief lull or the beginning of a semi-permanent decline, similar to the decline of the New Left in the mid to late 1970s.
Regardless, the rise in left-wing militancy on college campuses from 2007 through 2019 is correlated with the overall ideological shift in society at large that occurred in 2014. More significantly, this increasing militancy predates the overall societal shift by at least 7 years, and was potentially a predictor of the shift. The mid to late 2010s parallel the late 1960s and early 1970s in terms of increased left-wing militancy on campus, but while the activism of the 2010s never reached the level of disruption achieved at Columbia University in 1968 for example, the most recent wave of Woke Left campus activism appears to have helped catalyze large-scale cultural change at a pace significantly more rapid than was ever achieved by the New Left.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/us/chelsea-manning-harvard-fellow-cia.html
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/announcements/statement-dean-elmendorf-regarding-invitation-chelsea-manning-be-visiting-fellow
Technically, Harvard did not disinvite Manning from speaking, but rather withdrew her invitation to speak as a “visiting fellow”. In response, Manning opted not to speak at Harvard.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210621170518/https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2001-12-17/article/9022?status=301
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/21/us/nation-challenged-civil-liberties-sacramento-publisher-s-questions-draw-wrath.html
https://www.chronicle.com/article/commencement-speaker-in-sacramento-cuts-her-speech-short-after-heckling/
https://web.archive.org/web/20060905200431/https://wc.arizona.edu/papers/98/44/01_1.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20150527232114/https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/11/nyregion/mideast-divide-spawns-another-schism-at-rutgers.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20100519043636/https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/david_horowitz_hit_by_pie_at_butler_lecture/
https://web.archive.org/web/20130707122244/http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/05/millersville_university_tom_co.html
The closest example of “symbolic action” protest I can find on the Right is the actions of counter-protesters at a Milo Yiannopoulos event, who handed out pacifiers to protesters to symbolically mock them for being offended.
List of full disruption events initiated by the Left:
2003 Michigan State University, Dan Flynn; Fire alarm
2003 Rutgers University, Natan Sharansky; Pie throwing antics
2004 University of Arizona, Ann Coulter; Pie throwing antics
2005 Western Michigan University, Pat Buchanan; sprayed with salad dressing
2005 Butler University, David Horowitz; Pie throwing antics
2005 Earlham College, William Kristol; Pie throwing antics
2006 Ball State University, David Horowitz; Pie throwing antics
2006 Georgetown University, Chris Simcox; Fire alarm
2006 University of Southern California, Andrew Bernstein; Condoms and raw meat
2006 Michigan State University, Tom Tancredo; Fire alarm, violence against event organizers, shout down
2006 Columbia University, Jim Gilchrist; Swarming mob of protesters; video of event
2007 UC Berkeley, Nonie Darwish; Shout down
2007 Emory University, David Horowitz; Shout down
2007 UC Irvine, Daniel Pipes; Shout down; video
2008 Smith College, Ryan Sorba; Shout down; video
2009 DePaul University, Jacob Shrybman; Shout down
2009 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tom Tancredo; Shout down, protester threw rock breaking a window
2009 University of Chicago, Ehud Olmert; Shout down; video
2009 University of Massachusetts Amherst, Don Feder; Shout down; video
2009 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Virgil Goode; Shout down; it seems most of the protesters were not students or faculty
2010 Temple University, Geert Wilders; Shout down
2010 UC Irvine, Michael Oren; Shout down
2011 University of Pennsylvania, Eric Cantor; Venue occupied by protesters
2011 University of Wisconsin, Robert Clegg; Venue occupied by protesters
2012 UC Davis, Ran Bar-Yoshafat; Shout down
2012 George Washington University, Carlos Slim; Noise disruption (vuvuzela blasts)
2013 Brown University, Ray Kelly; Shout down; video
2014 UC Berkeley, Peter Thiel; Shout down; Swarming mob of protesters
2015 UC Berkeley, Nicholas Dirks; Shout down
2015 University of Minnesota, Moshe Halbertal; Shout down
2016 University of Pennsylvania, John Brennan; Shout down
2016 San Francisco State University, Nir Barkat; Shout down
2016 California State University LA, Ben Shapiro; Fire alarm, protesters blocked access to event
2016 University of Chicago, Anita Alvarez; Shout down
2016 University of Chicago, Bassem Eid; Shout down
2016 DePaul University, Milo Yiannopolous; Shout down, protesters occupied speaking venue
2017 UC Berkeley, Milo Yiannopoulos; Outside protester vs. counter-protester violence escalation
2017 Middlebury College, Charles Murray; Shout down, protester violence escalation
2016 UC Davis, Milo Yiannopoulos; Outside (non-violent) protest escalation
2017 Bethune-Cookman University, Betsy DeVos; Shout down
2017 New York University, Gavin McInnes; Shout down, violence escalation
2017 University of Oregon, Michael Schill; Shout down
2017 Indiana University, Charles Murray; Outside noise disruption
2017 Claremont McKenna College, Heather Mac Donald; Shout down, protesters blocked access to event
2017 Texas Southern University, Briscoe Cain; Shout down
2017 Columbia University, Tommy Robinson; Shout down (organized well in advance)
2017 UC Los Angeles, Eugene Volokh; Shout down
2017 College of William & Mary, Claire Guthrie; Shout down
2018 Lewis & Clark College, Christina Hoff Sommers; Shout down
2018 University of New Hampshire, Dave Rubin; Shout down, obstructing access to event, event relocated to hockey rink; video after event was moved to hockey-rink, disruption continues anyway at 6:54, 14:28
2018 University of Southern California, Eric Garcetti; Shout down
2018 University of Chicago, Eugene Kontorovich; Shout down
2019 Georgetown University, Kevin McAleenan; Shout down
2019 University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Homan; Outside (non-violent) protest escalation
2019 Beloit College, Erik Prince; Outside (non-violent) protest escalation
2019 University of the Arts, Camille Paglia; Fire alarm
2019 University of Missouri at Kansas City, Michael Knowles; Shout down, violence escalation; Students claimed conservative group was trying to instigate disruptions
2019 Harvard University, Lawrence S. Bacow and Bridget Terry Long; Shout down
List of full disruption events initiated by the Right:
2002 CSU Sacramento, Janis Besler Heaphy; Shout down
2003 Rockford College, Chris Hedges; Shout down
2015 University of Southern California, Luis Gutierrez; Shout down
2017 Whittier College, Xavier Becerra; Shout down
In many cases, there may be multiple reasons for a particular cancellation. For example, a visit from someone like Milo Yiannopolous might be canceled for a variety of reasons ranging from racism, sexism, fat shaming, views about immigration, etc. In such cases I attempt to select the most prominent reason for cancellation expressed by available documentation on protests. There is sometimes a degree of subjectivity involved in this selection.