Notes on Right-Wing Cancel Culture

This week, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo published chat logs from an internal employee messaging service at the National Security Agency. “These logs,” he wrote, “dating back two years, are lurid, featuring wide-ranging discussions of sex, kink, polyamory, and castration.” Within days, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had fired over 100 participants in the chats. The grounds for their dismissal seemed to be, first, that NSA employees sign an agreement during onboarding that “publishing non-mission related material on Intelink [the internal chat service] is a usage violation and will result in disciplinary action”; and second, that the gender doctrines espoused by participants in the chat suggest that some in the NSA are “prioritizing left-wing activism over national security.”