What? Richard Spencer, the creator of the term Alt-right, the face of the “fine people” on the white nationalist side at the Charlottesville rally in 2017 and alleged wife abuser has turned out to be a raving anti-semite and racist? My, my. Here I thought he was a “dapper white nationalist” and a posh guy with “prom-king good looks.” (Thanks, Mother Jones)

What a relief, I suppose, that I didn’t grow up in a place where I had to suffer proms or pretend a man with warts on his face was attractive. My perceptions aside, let’s go with what a friend of Spencer’s did this past weekend. Milo Yiannopoulos released an audio that he claims is Spencer speaking right after the Charlottesville rally. (As of publication time, Spencer himself hadn’t addressed the issue.)

In the audio is a male voice — screeching odious rubbish to his acolytes. “K***s,” he yells, invoking the anti-semitic slur. “Octoroons.” I had to google that one: also a slur, it means a person with one eighth Black or Aboriginal ancestry. “They get ruled by people like me.” And yelling about how his ancestors “enslaved those pieces of s***.” (An aside: Why are white nationalists so obsessed with the unscientific idea of “pure” blood? If they’re in need of blood transfusions, do they decline “mixed” blood?)

Remember Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart staffer who sang “America the Beautiful” at karaoke while his buddies in the audience including Spencer raised their arms in Nazi salutes?

All sorts of conservatives including U.S. President Donald Trump rushed to the guy’s defence after protesters shut down his appearance at the University of California, Berkeley. He showed that even the “all speech is free speech” types don’t actually believe that; he was kicked out of the conservative family for appearing to condone pedophilia in 2017.

Anyway, he’s a bad dude. And apparently $4 million in debt.

He’s the only guy I know whom “cancel culture” — calling out a public figure for wrongdoing and boycotting them — can legitimately claim as a victim.

Other recipients of social media wrath are not quite cancelled. Comedian Kevin Hart faced a backlash over past homophobic tweets and lost a chance to host the Oscars, but he has a show on Netflix and an upcoming world tour. Comedian Shane Gillis whose recent racist remarks — not even during a comedy routine — cost him a job at Saturday Night Live is back on track with live shows booked.

Recently, author Megan Murphy, banned on Twitter (Twitter! Where even Spencer continues to thrive) found a platform in the Toronto Public Library on Oct. 30. Murphy believes things like it’s not “biologically possible” for a male to transition into female, or that men will want to dress like women just to attack them in bathrooms. As if men so inclined await legislation on gender-neutral bathrooms.

We’ve been here with women’s rights and gay rights, but of course we don’t learn. I’d no sooner tolerate some “men’s rights” type telling me my place than us cis-gender folks — those who identify with the sex assigned to us at birth — telling transgender people what their place is.

Clearly the issue here is about people’s rights to exist as they are. However, framing the event around being pro free speech or anti-cancel culture allows the library and its supporters to prioritize ignorance and fear of the other over the experiences of trans people at the receiving end of social ridicule, ostracization and violence.

A Ryerson University instructor, who has been criticized for his views on gender identity, told the CBC’s Cross Country Checkup that cancel culture was preventing nuanced discussions from taking place.

It’s usually “leftists” who are blamed for cancelling others. However, Quebec’s Bill 21 literally “cancels” people wearing religious items from public jobs, yet that’s not classified as cancel culture.

People who benefit from the status quo are leaning on cancel culture, or call-out culture, to duck accountability. Those who roll their eyes and claim “cancel culture” when people protest their choice of speaker focus on the most surface aspects of social pushback — usually tone. How rude, how loud, how uncivil. But they discard the principles of social justice that underpin the pushback.

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It’s easier to dismiss others as over-sensitive than to look inward and seek accountability. Easier to deny a problem exists by labelling it fake than to address the difficult task of changing the status quo.

Spencer is an open white nationalist. And yet, CNN platformed him a few months ago.

Former U.S. vice-president and picture-perfect villain Dick Cheney, who counted homophobes among his conservative supporters, felt compelled to oppose former president George W. Bush’s ban on gay marriage, after his daughter came out as gay. “With the respect to the question of relationships, my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone,” he told a rally in Iowa in 2004.

Even Cheney shows what being able to see a variety of people as real living breathing humans can do. It breaks down walls. Platforming hate, on the other hand, builds them.