Words Build the World We Live In

Words Build the World We Live In

By Colin Smith
Attorney • Politician

Cancel culture is less a fad than a warning label: language is power.

There’s a familiar modern scene: a sentence is clipped, posted, captioned, and shared. A name is attached to a person—racist, predator, fraud, bigot, sellout. Within hours, strangers are arguing about what the person “really is,” employers are calculating risk, friends are weighing silence against disloyalty, and institutions are deciding whether a human being has become too expensive to keep.

We call this “cancel culture,” but the phrase can mislead. It makes a complex civic problem sound like a trend. What’s actually at stake is older than the internet: words don’t merely describe our world. They help make it.

Hannah Arendt put the relationship between speech and public life in plain terms. In The Human Condition, she argues that action is essentially linked to speech—that “speechless action … would no longer be action,” because without speech there is no actor who can appear, be known, and be held responsible (see an entry point via this JSTOR discussion). That’s a bracing reminder for our age: public life runs on language.

Cancel culture is a language system

A neutral way to define cancel culture is simple: a form of social ostracism—often online—where people are publicly “called out,” and that calling-out can lead to boycotts, loss of work, or loss of platform. That’s close to how Encyclopaedia Britannica frames it in its entry on “cancel culture.” Even the public can’t fully agree what the term means: a Pew Research Center report found that some Americans hear “calls for accountability,” while others hear “censorship” and “punishment.”

That disagreement matters. But it can hide the deeper point: cancel culture is not one thing; it’s a set of speech practices that try to produce real-world consequences. It’s language attempting to govern.

Three recent case studies: a Diplomat, a DIY star, and a Watchdog

If you want to see the machinery, look at three recent examples—one in government, one in entertainment, one in oversight.

1) The Diplomat (a State Department nominee):

Jeremy Carl, President Trump’s nominee to be Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, faced intense scrutiny over past remarks about Jews, Israel, race, and the Holocaust. After his hearing, Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) publicly announced he would oppose the nomination, citing Carl’s “anti-Israel views and insensitive remarks about the Jewish people,” a break that put the nomination in serious jeopardy, as reported by The Washington Post and others. See: Washington Post, Financial Times, and the nomination record on Congress.gov.

Notice what happened: this wasn’t a court ruling or even an election. It was reputational language—words about words—moving an institutional outcome.

2) The DIY star (a media personality):

HGTV pulled Rehab Addict after video surfaced showing its star, Nicole Curtis, using a racial slur during filming. HGTV said the language didn’t align with the network’s values and removed the show from its platforms; Curtis apologized. See: Entertainment Weekly and People.

Again: language becomes governance. The network’s decision is an act of institutional norm-enforcement, triggered by a clip—detached from its original context—traveling at internet speed.

3) The Watchdog (a whistleblower-office nominee):

In October 2025, Paul Ingrassia, nominated to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (the agency charged with protecting federal whistleblowers), withdrew after reports of racist and antisemitic texts damaged his confirmation prospects. See: CBS News and a segment from PBS NewsHour.

This one is especially telling: the job is literally about ethics and oversight, and the words at issue weren’t policy memos—they were private messages. The public judgment still formed, and it formed fast.

Across all three, the pattern is consistent: naming triggers coordination; coordination triggers consequences. This is why cancel culture arguments feel so heated. They aren’t really about etiquette. They are about who gets to assign moral status, how quickly, and with what safeguards.

Words don’t just express—sometimes they do

A helpful lens here comes from the philosophy of language: the idea that speech can be action. J. L. Austin argued that many utterances don’t merely describe; they perform (a clear introduction is the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on J. L. Austin). A public accusation is rarely “just an opinion.” It often functions as an attempt to do something: downgrade standing, warn others away, make association costly, pressure institutions to act.

The civic danger: consequences without standards

Here is the moral hazard: if language can move lives, then language needs standards. But the online world rewards speed over care. It compresses context into fragments and pays out social currency for certainty.

A centrist civic posture doesn’t deny harm or wave away injustice. It insists on something more basic: when we demand serious consequences for someone else, we owe serious care in how we justify them. Truth-seeking. Proportionality. Room for response. Repair where possible.

The outlier that refines the thesis

And yes, there are outliers that teach humility. Some figures violate speech norms repeatedly and still rise—because shame isn’t accepted by their coalition, because condemnation is recoded as proof of authenticity, or because they’re insulated by alternative institutions and incentives.

That doesn’t mean words don’t matter. It means words matter inside power—and audiences decide what words do.

Words matter because people matter. And because words can move lives, we should handle them the way we handle anything that carries power: with restraint, with standards, and with a commitment to something higher than the thrill of the crowd.