From Cancel Culture to Incarceration Culture: Prosecutorial Democracy and the Future of Cancellation, by Collin May (Academica Press, 196 pp., $25)
President Trump has found plenty to dislike about Canada lately. He slapped 50 percent tariffs on Canadian goods and even renamed Lake Ontario.
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If the president is looking for another Canadian import worth taxing, he might consider the country’s particularly virulent strain of political correctness. America has certainly developed one of its own, but Canada has put the stuff on steroids: weaker protections for speech, aggressive human-rights tribunals, professional regulators eager to police opinions, and an elite culture remarkably comfortable empowering bureaucrats to enforce ideological conformity.
Collin May learned all this the hard way. A Calgary lawyer with graduate training at Harvard, May had served for three years on the Alberta Human Rights Commission when the province’s conservative government appointed him to lead it in May 2022.
Then activists discovered a book review.
Thirteen years earlier, May had reviewed Efraim Karsh’s Islamic Imperialism, a scholarly history published by Yale University Press. Critics seized on passages discussing the militaristic aspects of Islamic history and accused May of Islamophobia and hate speech. Muslim organizations demanded his resignation from the commission. Alberta’s justice minister eventually joined that call, and the government rescinded his appointment. Karsh himself, who had known nothing of the review before the controversy, later wrote that he saw nothing “Islamophobic” in it.
The episode had a certain Canadian absurdity. The Alberta commission already had a dismal free-speech record. It investigated Ezra Levant after his Western Standard published the Danish Muhammad cartoons—a complaint eventually dismissed—and its tribunal ordered Christian pastor Stephen Boissoin to apologize for publishing disparaging comments about gay people and pay damages. (A court overturned that ruling, finding the remedies unlawful.) Now the head of this dubious apparatus had himself been cancelled for an academic book review.
May used this “lived experience” to fuel his new book From Cancel Culture to Incarceration Culture. It’s part memoir, part collection of previously published essays, and part political theory. The seams occasionally show—a more diligent editor could have eliminated some repetition—but the structure also gives the book an unusual immediacy. May developed many of these ideas while lawsuits were pending and the financial and professional consequences of his firing remained painfully real.
Many readers know that I have an involuntary credential in cancellation studies myself, which I also turned into a book. My Georgetown ordeal followed the familiar sequence: online pile-on, deliberate mischaracterization, demands for punishment, institutional panic, investigation, and ultimately my resignation after a four-month process.
May describes that cursus inhonorum and is particularly perceptive about the psychology of apologizing. Drawing on research into false confessions, he explains why targets make conciliatory statements even when they believe the central accusation against them is false. They assume that demonstrating good faith will cause reasonable people to calm down. Frequently, the apology simply becomes Exhibit A for the prosecution—a dynamic that I’ve written about for City Journal.
Any cancellation, May writes, has three essential participants: the target, the cancellers, and the institutional “witness” with the power to turn denunciation into punishment. That last actor is crucial. May calls the resulting phenomenon “institutional betrayal,” a useful description of the particular sting that comes when a place you trusted joins your attackers.
His more original—and more troubling—argument concerns what comes next. May thinks cancel culture has morphed into something more pernicious. Public opinion has shifted, DEI has suffered political defeats, and denunciation mobs no longer possess quite the potency they enjoyed five years ago. But the underlying ideology has solidified into coercive power.
May calls this successor “incarceration culture.” The label is a bit of hyperbole: losing a professional license or paying an administrative fine is obviously not equivalent to sitting in a prison cell. But his larger point survives the terminological stretch. Once regulators, tribunals, and prosecutors start policing ideological deviations, the consequences become considerably more serious than social-media shaming.
May labels the broader political system “prosecutorial democracy”: government by administrators and credentialed experts who increasingly pursue “equity” through compulsory mechanisms rather than persuasion and ordinary democratic politics. Canada, with its sprawling universe of human-rights bodies and professional regulators, supplies abundant examples.
Readers of my own book, Lawless, will recognize the trajectory. I described Canada as providing “a glimpse into the future,” particularly when legal institutions abandon traditional rule-of-law norms in service of fashionable theories of oppression. May even cites Lawless in tracing how universities’ bureaucratic expansion helped spread campus ideology into corporations, government, and the professions.
May contacted me a few years ago while developing these ideas, and we wound up having terrific conversations about the response of legal institutions to what’s now called “Woke 1.0,” as well as the increasingly bizarre state of the Western world. I’m pleased that the resulting book rises well above score-settling by a man who was treated badly.
The social-media mobs may have lost their bite. May’s warning: don’t celebrate too quickly.