When Stephen Fry describes the letter he’d like to write to Wagner—“Listen, you’re on the brink of becoming the greatest artist of the nineteenth century and future generations will forget that, simply because of this nasty little essay that you’re writing”—he’s actually describing the dynamic that we call cancel culture. The very term “cancel culture” is hopelessly non-useful, with its suggestion that the loss of status for the accused is somehow on a par with the suffering endured by the victim. Stephen Fry’s distance from the past—his assumed enlightenment—allows him to say something to a
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