Cancel Culture Cuts Both Ways
On October 13, The Onion shared on X (formerly Twitter) the headline for a new satirical article: “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas.” The tweet was liked by nearly 100,000 people. Within a couple of hours, Michael Eisen, a genetics professor at UC Berkeley and the editor of eLife, an influential open-access journal for the life sciences, retweeted the post with the comment that The Onion “speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together.” As Eisen told me in a recent phone interview, he did this “on Friday the 13th—I should have known that was a bad idea.” At first, reactions to Eisen’s tweet were muted. On X, a scientist asked Eisen, who is Jewish and has relatives in Israel, whether he condemned Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack; in response to another post, Eisen wrote, “I condemn Hamas. I condemn the way Israel has treated Palestinians. I condemn the way one abhorrent act is used to justify another.” But then the …