Barack Obama Warns Of 'Dangers Of Cancel Culture'

Barack Obama has warned of the dangers of 'cancel culture' in a new interview.

The former President of the United States discussed the state of the nation in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, which aired yesterday (Monday 7 June).

It saw the 59-year-old touching on the rise of cancel culture, which he said can all too easily go 'overboard'.

PA

He said: "A lot of the dangers of cancel culture and 'we're just going to be condemning people all the time,' at least among my daughters, they'll acknowledge that among their peer group or in college campuses, you'll see people going overboard."

Of his daughters, Malia and Sasha, Obama said: "They have a pretty good sense of 'look, we don't expect everybody to be perfect, we don't expect everybody to be politically correct all the time'."

He added: "But we are going to call out institutions or individuals if they are being cruel, if they are, you know, discriminating against people."

This is not the first time Obama has commented on the subject. Speaking at the Obama Foundation summit in 2019, he told young activists that cancelling each other is not the way to make progress and bring about change.

He said: "This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're always politically 'woke' and all that stuff - you should get over that quickly.

"The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you."

He continued: "I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of 'the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people', and that's enough.

"Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn't do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, 'Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.'"

After pretending to sit back and watch the TV, he added: "That's not activism. That's not bringing about change.

"If all you're doing is casting stones, you're probably not going to get that far. That's easy to do."

You can watch him share these wise words here:

Elsewhere in his CNN interview, Obama argued the USA had become increasingly divided.

He said: "We occupy different worlds. And it becomes that much more difficult for us to hear each other, see each other.

"We have more economic stratification and segregation. You combine that with racial stratification and the siloing of the media, so you don't have just Walter Cronkite delivering the news, but you have 1,000 different venues.

"All that has contributed to that sense that we don't have anything in common."

Topics: Interesting, US News, Barack Obama

Jake Massey

Jake Massey is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from Newcastle University, where he learnt a bit about media and a lot about living without heating. After spending a few years in Australia and New Zealand, Jake secured a role at an obscure radio station in Norwich, inadvertently becoming a real-life Alan Partridge in the process. From there, Jake became a reporter at the Eastern Daily Press. Jake enjoys playing football, listening to music and writing about himself in the third person.

@jakesmassey