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Lindsay Ellis: My name is Lindsay Ellis. Oh, I don't want to identify as anything right now. I used to say video essayist because YouTuber is such a dirty word, but it's also more honest. [chuckles]

David Remnick: Lindsay Ellis was pretty early to YouTube. She started posting videos in 2008 when she was a film student and her videos are a form of pop culture criticism, commentary on everything from Marvel movies to Broadway musicals.

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Lindsay Ellis: Anyway, not every musical, even the ones with explicit revolutionary text needs to be trying to tear down the system, but what would a revolution look like if it had been included in--

David Remnick: In her online world, and it's a pretty big world, Ellis was a celebrity and she had more than a million followers on YouTube. Then suddenly, last year in a moment of real uproar and emotion, Ellis walked away from the career that she spent more than a decade building.

Lindsay Ellis: It's just such a nightmare and I'm just like, "This nightmare is never going to end. I'm leaving. I quit. I give up, you won."

David Remnick: Lindsay Ellis had been, to use the term of the moment, canceled. You know what I'm talking about? The idea that people are somehow waiting to punish anyone who says something that's deemed offensive or mistaken, justified or not. Social media in its chaotic way is the judge and jury. The refrain, "If you can't say anything," these days, has become very, very common, and particularly on the right. It's an essential slogan of cultural politics.

Speaker 3: Are we going to tear the Washington monument down? Are we going to re-rename it The Obelisk of Wokeness?

David Remnick: I'd say that among the crises facing our country, the pandemic, income inequality, the attack on voting rights, structural racism, conflict with Russia and China, cancel culture is not the most dire among them, but to look away entirely from this clash on speech, over accusation and forgiveness over social media itself as the public square, well, to ignore it all is to ignore a critical arena of public life.

What's at stake? What is cancel culture? Is it real and ruinous or is it overstated and distorted? Is it a cudgel or is it a mirage? These are some of the questions we're going to try to tackle today. It's our entire episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. Back to Lindsay Ellis, the YouTuber. The events that made Ellis walk away start with a Disney movie, Raya and the Last Dragon, which came out last year.

Lindsay Ellis: Raya and the Last Dragon is this movie which is, I guess, at least aesthetically based on south Asian cultures.

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Raya: Kumandra, this is what we used to be when our land was whole and we lived harmoniously alongside dragons, magical creatures--

Lindsay Ellis: I was thinking about how much it reminded me of most of the YA fantasy books I had read in the last couple of years. These authors are very unapologetically inspired by Avatar the Last Airbender which is a cartoon from the mid-2000s.

David Remnick: Both of those things, the new movie, and the old TV show, were influenced to some degree by Asian styles of animation and storytelling, and one night, she tweeted this.

Lindsay Ellis: Also watched Raya and the Last Dragon and I think we need to come up with a name for this genre that is basically Avatar the Last Airbender reduxes. It's like half of all YA fantasy published in the last few years anyway.

David Remnick: By the next morning, that tweet had gotten a lot of attention.

Lindsay Ellis: People were like, "You need to address this. This is really racist." I'm just very confused and I asked one of them, I was like, "Explain your rationale." They were like, "Well, it implies that all Asian-inspired properties are the same."

David Remnick: Lindsay says she only meant to make a comment about genre, but some people online felt that in comparing Raya to Avatar, she was somehow pigeonholing them based on their Asian influence.

Lindsay Ellis: I just let it go for a few hours, but it just kept building and building. I think honestly the worst part was my friends were just not on board with me. They were like, "Well, you're just not getting it. This is just a racial blind spot for you." Well, basically I got defensive and that made it worse.

Speaker 4: Honestly her follow-up threads somehow made me even angrier. Please check your quote retweets, Lindsay. Asian folks have been explaining their rationality.

Speaker 5: Lindsay Ellis is trying so hard to double down on her racist comment making her response--

Speaker 6: I've hated Lindsay Ellis for years. She's horrifically problematic, weird how Lindsay Ellis and her friends keep getting called out for racism yet every time it's canceled culture's fault.

Lindsay Ellis: I guess we have to be mindful of the fact that this was only a couple of weeks after the spa shootings in Atlanta and the conversation about what anti-Asian racism looks like and how bad it is in the US was ramping up. People were really sensitive about this movie. Then people started dragging up every remotely problematic thing I had ever said or done over a period of 13 years. I tried to unplug, but I just could not stop thinking about it. I was just so angry. I forget where I just decided, I was like, I'm going to address this.

David Remnick: In April she posted a video called Mask Off to YouTube and it addressed the allegations that were being made about her.

Lindsay Ellis: We all make mistakes. Where I feel like an amendment or an apology is warranted, I will do so, but where I feel--

David Remnick: It's more than 100 minutes long.

Lindsay Ellis: Next.

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2018 transphobia via Tarzan. I genuinely honestly really do regret this one and I have said so a few times, why do they never screen cap the retractions? Weird. When it was announced that LeFou would become the first-- None of those apologies were accepted.

Speaker 7: This was painful to watch. I actually would not have watched this if we didn't have a podcast.

Speaker 8: No, yes. I would have fully not watched if I didn't have to now talk about it for an hour. but you know what, that's what we're going to do.

Lindsay Ellis: I feel like it was honestly a mistake [chuckles] and I think it made a lot of my colleagues uncomfortable. I think that's a big reason why a lot of them just stopped talking to me.

David Remnick: On December 28th, Ellis posted a letter saying that she was walking away and she hoped that this would put an end to the entire affair.

Lindsay Ellis: Then the whole just started all over again, the whole cycle just the dragging, the thrill of humiliation, saying how weak empathetic I was, that I was like throwing my million subs away because I couldn't take a little heat on Twitter.

David Remnick: I spoke with Lindsay Ellis a few weeks after all this happened. Now, Lindsay, you're suggesting, I think that some people are insincere in their hatred and they derive some form of pleasure or entertainment from their performance of outrage.

Lindsay Ellis: Well, yes because it is personal. Basically, I have these Twitter follows that were these people that were just screen capping everything you say with the intent of bad faith reading because it is fun to take people down that you perceive as having power. I know that 1.2 million subs seems like a lot, but on YouTube, it's really not. I think I'm like number 25,000--

David Remnick: I hate to tell you, but the subscription base of the New Yorker magazine is 1.2 million exactly.

Lindsay Ellis: Oh wow.

David Remnick: Maybe several people God willing read that, but you're making a living from being on YouTube.

Lindsay Ellis: Not YouTube. Most of my money comes from Patreon and sponsorships. YouTube is more just like a platform to deliver content than it is an actual generator of money.

David Remnick: I ask you this about the economics of it because something's got to be worth it about this. In other words, you've been a target for harassment from the right before. You're not new to this and now you got really, and it seems quite upsetting, a hell of a lot of criticism and abuse from the left as you see it, why do it?

Lindsay Ellis: It was not a healthy way to live. I think some people, they don't live in constant fear, but if you are filtering everything you say through the potential for the worst bad faith interpretation, you can't create, you can't write, you can't do anything. That was why I was just like, "I'm done. Do I have anything left to say?"

David Remnick: When you say fear, were you receiving threats?

Lindsay Ellis: No.

David Remnick: Credible threats?

Lindsay Ellis: No, it wasn't threats. I think that's what's hard to get people to understand is it's not threats, it's ostracism, it's shame. There's a dampening effect where if your name is so toxic, nobody wants to associate with you. It's just so humiliating.

David Remnick: On a very large scale, we've seen performers, artists, authors, others, who have gone through these passages. Think what you will about what they said and who they are. Dave Chappelle, say, JK Rowling. Chappelle's not going to stop making comedy. Rowling will continue writing novels.

Lindsay Ellis: Here's the thing about those two, and that's why I feel like it's a really bad comparison. They are incendiary. They know what they're doing. JK Rowling wrote a 2000 word manifesto about why she opposes Scotland's gender identification law. Dave Chappelle has made two Netflix specials that are basically just fueled by his ire that trans people criticize his jokes. Both of them have very effectively weaponized the broad public sympathy for this idea of victims of cancel culture, comparing both of them and me who's just been in flailing damage control for the last year, over a misread of something so nothing, something so small and insignificant.

David Remnick: Lindsay, let me ask you what can only be a tough question but I have to ask it. How do you respond to those who would say look, all this is, Twitter, social media in general, is free speech, more speech, and if you want to enter into the public forum as a YouTuber or writing for a magazine or whatever it is and you can't take criticism, however, abusive, however nasty, then maybe you shouldn't be in the public forum. How do you respond to that and what is to be done?

Lindsay Ellis: I quit, I don't know, that's what I said like I'd be like yes, you're right. I quit. I can't take it.

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