Cancel Culture Turning Into A Witch-Hunt Of Those Who Don't Meet Woke Standards

From Cricketers To Comedians, Many Celebs Are In Trouble For Old Social Media Posts. Is It A Sign Of A Trigger-Happy Cancel Culture?

- Rashmi Samant

As of February 2021, I was the first Indian girl to be elected president of the Oxford University Students’ Union. A mere two hours after the election, old social media posts from my teenage days, and from my parents’ profiles, were dug up, mischievously misinterpreted and weaponised to browbeat me into resigning. In the witch-hunt that ensued, both my family and I were heavily targeted online. Spearheading these attacks was an academic at the University who directly targeted and insulted my Hindu identity and upbringing. To stop these incessant attacks, I even issued a wholly unwarranted apology. Unwarranted, because I did not do anything wrong in the first place, something which has been validated by experienced lawyers and a senior Jewish rights activist.

Facts, of course, do not matter to the woke. The cyber lynching was so intense that I was bullied into resigning. I caught the first flight back home, had a nervous break-down and ended up in hospital. In a similar play of events, a British cricketer, Ollie Robinson, was suspended from international cricket for 10-year-old social media posts written in his teens. His career has been destroyed, at least for the foreseeable future, despite him offering a genuine apology for any offence that his old tweets might have caused.