The Cancel-Culture Canard

Emmet Fraizer considers Adam Szetela’s “That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing.”

By Emmet FraizerOctober 26, 2025

• Cultural Studies

• Politics

MOST OF THE EARLY feedback on Amélie Wen Zhao’s 2019 debut young adult fantasy novel Blood Heir was positive. “I can’t wait for it to steal hearts all over the world!!!!” enthused a representative Goodreads reviewer. Then people started to read more closely. “Someone explain this to me. EXPLAIN IT RIGHT THE FUQ NOW,” tweeted one YA author, launching into a critique of the novel’s racial insensitivities. Other YA authors backed her up. “Anti-blackness is real in our community,” declared We Need Diverse Books founder Ellen Oh, addressing fellow Asian writers—Zhao in particular. “And if you have the luxury of getting this important criticism before your book is actually published, it is YOUR responsibility to make it right.”

While the initial kerfuffle over Blood Heir was mostly restricted to social media, the backlash to the backlash made itself known in far more prestigious spaces. “The Latest YA Twitter Pile On Forces a Rising Star to Self-Cancel,” Vulture proclaimed, with Slate, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker offering their own takes. “Teen Fiction Twitter Is Eating Its Young,” lamented cancel-culture pundit Jesse Singal. Meanwhile, Zhao apologized for her racial missteps and revised the novel. It was published later that year to middling reviews, and in the six years since, she’s put out five other books, including three New York Times bestsellers.

If Zhao has moved on, it’s clear that journalist and recent English PhD Adam Szetela has not. In That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing, he purports to document an accelerating crisis of left-wing censorship. In the 1950s, Szetela reminds us, parents and politicians were convinced that comic books would fuel juvenile delinquency. When progressives today scour literature for lapses in inclusivity, convinced that offensive books will in some way damage young people, Szetela argues that they are feeding a parallel moral panic—one that first took root in children’s and young adult literature but now threatens to spread unchecked into publishing writ large.

In some ways, it’s hard to imagine a more poorly timed book. Public schools have instituted nearly 23,000 book bans since 2021, fueled by new state laws that prohibit “inappropriate” content, which frequently target books with LGBTQ+ or racial justice themes. It’s not just kids who are affected; in April, the US Naval Academy discarded hundreds of “diverse” books, including copies of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). The Supreme Court now allows parents to forbid their kids from reading books with LGBTQ+ characters at school, and Donald Trump’s disemboweled Department of Education has dismissed the assertion that book bans can be discriminatory as a “hoax.” Rather than put up a fight, the publishing industry appears prepared to take advantage of the changing climate; last November, Hachette launched a brand-new conservative imprint.

To Szetela, however, none of this is counterevidence. Left-wing diversity excesses, he argues, have fueled the right-wing backlash, and even now, progressives are spending more time nitpicking each other than confronting the Right. “In the ashes of political defeat,” he recently told Publishers Weekly, “cancel culture flourishes.”

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That Book Is Dangerous! depicts a publishing industry in the midst of an accelerating crisis, in which writers are terrified of losing their careers on the basis of Goodreads smear campaigns, agents won’t represent books centering white characters, and editors bow to the outrageous whims of professional “sensitivity” readers. When direct pressure doesn’t work, mobs of social media extremists gang up on publishers, driving them to reject and cancel books labeled offensive. Bookstores don’t stock these titles; public libraries weed them from their collections. “In the Sensitivity Era,” Szetela writes, “a scarlet ‘R’ (for racist) never disappears.”

Moral panics—media-fueled mass hysterias over ginned-up threats—often focus on protecting innocent children from alleged harm. In this case, progressives are convinced that children need to be shielded from racism and other forms of prejudice at all costs. As a result, companies have pulled classic, long-beloved picture books from the shelves. Essentialism reigns: only Black writers are supposed to write about Black characters, and only gay people can write about gay characters. Cancelable offenses proliferate: fatphobia, ableism, cisheteronormativity. And despite progressives’ historic interest in freedom of expression, they have found themselves advocating for ever-narrower kinds of representation, staying silent or joining bandwagons in order to seem “virtuous in public,” and asking businesses and governments to crack down on objectionable speech. Things are bound to get worse, Szetela warns: “When literature is treated as an immoral disease that is spreading like the plague, censorship is the only answer.”

Worst of all, even as the Right wreaks national havoc, the Left is driving away potential allies and feeding Republicans ever-more-ridiculous examples of wokeness run amok. The dominant mood is fear—people remain too terrified to speak out, even though they mostly agree that woke has gone too far. Censors on the left may not yet act under a Congressional mandate, but they have far more insidious tools: tweets.

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That Book Is Dangerous! acknowledges the importance of making books with diverse characters available to young people. Very quickly, however, it pivots to the argument that efforts to do so have gone too far—and that much of public advocacy for diverse books is led by petty grifters pressuring well-intentioned people into joining their witch hunt. There’s even scientific evidence to back it up—the as-yet-unpublished results of Szetela’s experimental collaboration with two Cornell sociologists, which found that readers were more likely to describe unproblematic poems as homophobic, sexist, or antisemitic when asked beforehand to read criticism describing them as such.

Aside from this dubious venture into quantitative methods, Szetela spends most of his time interviewing people working within or adjacent to publishing. Anonymous executives explain that BIPOC books are what sell these days; anonymous agents complain about diversity-focused Publishers Weekly reviews. Others seem more skeptical of his premise. One novelist points out that the voices of underrepresented groups “have been left out for a century or more. They’ve been effectively canceled for a good long time.”

Without digging into the footnotes, it can be difficult to tell which interviews Szetela conducted himself and which had already made the rounds of the anti-woke media circuit. For example, an extended quote from aspiring writer Alberto Gullaba Jr.—describing how his white agent panicked when he discovered that Gullaba, whose novel featured Black characters, was Filipino—turns out to have been lifted from a 2022 episode of Jesse Singal’s podcast. If Szetela had interviewed Gullaba himself, or glanced over the Amazon sample of University Thugs, which Gullaba self-published in 2021, he might have better understood the agent’s worries: Gullaba’s Black male characters have “bullnostrils” and resemble “silverback gorillas,” an unintelligent Black student body president is elected because her voice sounds like it would be on a “Civil Rights documentary,” and the N-word appears 14 times in the first chapter alone.

Although Szetela returns again and again to the better-publicized tales of cancel culture, like the Blood Heir debacle, he doesn’t hesitate to include thinner anecdotes too. A friend of Chuck Palahniuk told him to stop using the word “faggot” in stories for their writing workshop. Crime writer Patricia Cornwell privately worried about using the non–gender neutral term “fishermen.” An Amherst College student told a pollster that he was afraid of being canceled by his liberal peers—which matters because “today’s students are tomorrow’s authors, agents, editors, and publishing executives who censor themselves.” Nothing suggests that that particular Amherst College student had publishing ambitions.

At times, Szetela even makes up his own examples for comedic effect: writers desperate for clicks are churning out articles with titles like “This Fantasy Novel Is Fatphobic”; academics desperate for tenure are coining terms like “heteromonstrification” or “transspecies-patriarchalism.” He dredges up antiquated examples of “censorship”—citing a Huckleberry Finn edition sans N-word that was released to near-universal reproof during the early Obama administration—and makes increasingly implausible claims: that Allen Ginsberg would have gotten himself canceled for being homophobic, that the hashtag #DiversityJedi is a status symbol (it is not). These hyperbolic gestures bulk out a book lacking more substantial evidence—and if readers get confused about what to take literally, so much the better.

But That Book Is Dangerous! is mostly an exhaustive catalog of a pre–blue check Twitter era. Some of the tweets Szetela cites as proof of a pervasive moral panic have received as few as three likes. In other cases, writers encountered a backlash and also a backlash to the backlash, making it unclear who canceled whom—and suggesting that the problem of online bullying might be more politically catholic than Szetela contends. Take Keira Drake, whose YA fantasy debut The Continent (2018) was the target of a particularly intense wave of criticism in 2016 after another YA author, Justina Ireland, objected to its white savior tropes and racist stereotypes of Indigenous and Japanese people. Szetela doesn’t bother to mention how Ireland herself became the target of rape threats, death threats, and mass negative reviews—all from people convinced that cancel culture had gone too far.

It’s just hard to be a convincing free speech advocate when you spend most of your time complaining about people who talk too damn much. The advent of social media platforms, Szetela complains, “has allowed anyone with an internet connection to be a public literary critic.” In his view, this democratization of criticism has antidemocratic results, because social media users “pressure authors, agents, and editors to abandon the idea that people should be allowed to write and read what they want.”

These days, he says, social media “has allowed anyone with a ‘marginalized identity’ to be a gatekeeper.” Things were so much more civil back when book reviews were written by other published authors, he says, and mutually assured destruction prevented them from trashing each other’s books. Presumably, he longs for the time when the biggest gatekeeper was Pamela Paul, who once ruled The New York Times Book Review with an iron fist, and whose subsequent work has only proven the cancel-culture axiom that pundits who claim to support free speech always want to decide who should shut up.

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Despite his soft spot for the literati, Szetela is ferocious toward another set of elites: sensitivity readers. These freelancers, who flag instances of cultural foot-in-mouth prior to publication, “earn more per hour than public school teachers, daycare workers, bus drivers, firefighters, dentists, and doctors”—up to $312,000 per year, according to his back-of-the-napkin math, although he fails to identify an actual sensitivity reader who has earned anything close to that amount. That Book Is Dangerous! is consistently alarmist about the threat posed by sensitivity readers. “[T]hey are hired by authors, agents, editors, and everyone else in the publishing industry,” Szetela warns at one point. “[T]he demand is bottomless.”

Actual sensitivity readers say otherwise—the pool of gigs has always been dominated by YA and genre fiction, and it seems to be shrinking—but portraying these readers as elites allows Szetela to distinguish between diversity-obsessed “moral entrepreneurs” and people like himself who care about what really matters: “the economic inequalities related to literary production.” Genuinely radical change, he argues, would focus on funding for public arts and schools and better working conditions within publishing, while diversity initiatives offer interventions “that fit neatly into the status quo.”

He is, of course, correct about this. It’s easy enough to find examples (especially from 2020) of people who focused too much on the minutiae of language and not enough on more material steps toward liberation. But the fact that diversity efforts tend to reflect the decidedly unradical preoccupations of publishing executives isn’t unique to this particular cause. After all, as the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò argues, elites dominate basically everything; it’s little wonder that they’ve figured out how to co-opt the language of group solidarity to further their own interests. Consider sensitivity readers: by protecting authors from controversy, one Big Five president told Szetela, they allow the company “to run a business, and make money, and sell books that are successful.” (Full disclosure: I work for Táíwò’s publisher, although I have not helped produce his books.)

Szetela acknowledges that publishing has long had a diversity problem, and that it still has “progress to make.” He supports efforts to fight class inequality through better wages and working conditions in the industry. Like Táíwò, he argues that racial justice efforts are often co-opted by class elites. But the decision-making structures of class activism, Táíwò points out, are themselves often “captured” by racial elites—that is, by white people.

However clumsy, however captured, the effort to seed a more inclusive publishing industry originated in an understandable desire for “respect, dignity, and some measure of recognition alongside policy reforms and material redistribution,” as Táíwò puts it. Szetela seems to be on board with using material redistribution to address class inequality, but when it comes to other inequalities, all material solutions go too far. Editors and writers must resign themselves to trickle-down representation.

While attacking the long-standing movement to expand the canon beyond white men, Szetela cites Toni Morrison’s respect for white writers like Shakespeare and Mark Twain. He fails to acknowledge Morrison’s work as the lone Black editor at Random House, where she fought to publish Black writers who depicted Black life in its full depth and complexity. Morrison didn’t approach representation as a box-ticking exercise; she recognized that Black literature could offer liberatory potential. And she wasn’t the only one to see it that way. Take, for example, the recent Supreme Court decision that allows parents to reject public school curricula featuring queer picture books such as Pride Puppy! (2021) and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding (2008). The ACLU’s lawyers argued pragmatically that the books represented everyday LGBTQ+ people, rather than advocating for political change. But their opponents were right about one thing: these days, a book that encourages a queer or trans kid to be happily themself imperils the status quo.

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No one believes that representation alone will fix all societal inequities. But children’s literature has always been didactic, and the idea that literature for adults can have political as well as artistic resonance isn’t controversial either. In thinking through the politics of cancel culture today, Szetela himself references Shirley Jackson’s 1948 story “The Lottery” three separate times, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953) seven times, Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) 10 times, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) an exhausting 15.

Progressives are deluded, Szetela argues, in thinking that they can “defeat racism, homophobia, and every other intolerance by turning children’s and YA literature into an instrument for their moral lessons.” Yet the question is not so much whether Szetela believes that books have political capacities but whether he agrees with their goals. He has little patience for intersectionality (“Gay black men are not bound together by a culture,” he writes, and “neither are trans black women”). He dismisses the idea that fat people might face systemic barriers in the literary world and argues at length that publishing’s fixation on “authentically” representing marginalized groups produces stereotypical representation.

But Szetela doesn’t seem anywhere near as worried about stereotypical representation resulting from ordinary prejudice. By the acknowledgments, he’s deriding the “ACLUFLO” (ACLU for Liberals Only) and joking to his friends that “if one of us ever ‘goes woke,’ and releases our Zoom conversations and texts, we will all surely be unemployed.” Beyond the bounds of peer review, he is franker still: in a recent interview with the libertarian rag Quillette, Szetela claimed that the problem with college kids today is that they’ve never been punched, and he speculates that one literary agent’s willingness to apologize was because he had low testosterone. Skyhorse Publishing, a company best known for books by conspiracy theorists and alleged sexual abusers, is Szetela’s “gold standard when it comes to supporting heterodox voices.”

“[I]t might seem strange that this book focuses on the left’s moral panic over literature,” Szetela acknowledges. Despite liberal dominance over publishing, “right-wing panic has had more influence at the legislative level.” He’s right—it is strange to depict the two movements as parallel or equivalent. The First Amendment protects people in the United States from government censorship; it has never entitled racists to a six-figure book deal. And as the Trump administration exploits the panic over “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives to crack down on dissent, that distinction has never been more apparent.

But rather than fret over the rising tide of fascism, Szetela remains fixated on the things that really matter, like whether his beloved Bret Easton Ellis would have managed to publish American Psycho today. Sure, Simon & Schuster dropped the novel, but by 1991, Ellis had a new book deal and a second advance. That’s “the difference between then and now,” Szetela told Quillette. Worry not, Adam; that sort of thing still happens: when That Book Is Dangerous! was reportedly dropped by a “major” university press somewhere between peer review and contracting, MIT stood ready to snatch it up.

Faced with such concrete evidence of the publishing industry’s indulgence toward conservative writers, I can only pray that This Book Is Dangerous! will be the last of the array of cancel-culture manifestos. Unfortunately, its late-in-the-game appearance reflects the enduring power of the cancel-culture panic—and the hardening tendency, on the left as well as the right, to blame today’s unprecedented crackdown on free speech on the incorrigible radicals who wanted too many #diversebooks. Szetela claims to be an expert on bad faith readers: people allergic to complexity, to discomfort, who are too easily offended and too fond of bandwagons. You would think that he would recognize similar tendencies in his own work.

It’s easy enough to criticize wokeness and its overenthusiasms—shooting fish in the proverbial barrel, these days—but I still remember how it felt to realize that I could make the world a less painful place with the small power I already had. Yes, there were a lot of people drunk on that modest power, some of whom were (and are) annoying on the internet. But when people like Szetela talk about free speech and cancel culture, it’s hard to take it as anything but a pretext: an attempt to preserve their right to be cruel in public without facing judgment. That should be obvious by now. The Right believes, correctly, that literature has a real political valence. It’s about time the Left published things worth being afraid of.