In the first episode Bill, a onetime superstar English professor who's falling apart after the death of his wife, is giving a lecture on modernism when, drawing a connection between fascism and absurdism, he gives a mock Nazi salute.
After some students capture the gesture on their phones, a campus meltdown ensues and - spoiler alert - Bill, played by Jay Duplass, gets railroaded out of his job. Bill has a very specific sort of irony-laden aging hipster sensibility, one that is in many ways my own.
I don't think Bill's story really reflects what's happening on college campuses; few instances of real-life cancellations are so factually simple or ethically ridiculous. It is a near-perfect reflection of the generational anxiety driving much discussion about cancel culture, one that causes otherwise sensible people to make wild historical analogies between today's intellectual climate and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the U.S.S.R. or 17th-century theocracies. A number of state laws do shape what academics can say, but these laws, aimed at critical race theory, censor the left.
A real-world tenured professor like Bill would be extremely unlikely to lose his job for making fun of Nazis in the wrong way.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/opinion/generation-cancel-culture.html
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