Cancel culture has become a media buzz word, gaining popularity in the last decade. While many people have heard this term before, it doesn’t necessarily have an established definition.

This is what the new book “The Canceling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott explores: What is cancel culture, and what are the effects it’s had on society?

Co-author Lukianoff joined “Inside the Issues” host Amrit Singh to discuss what he discovered about cancel culture while writing this book.

“[Cancel culture] is the uptick in campaigns to get people fired, de-platformed, expelled, etc,” Lukianoff said.

Lukianoff, a First Amendment attorney, says the rise in cancel culture started in 2014. The driving factor for it becoming mainstream was social media.

“The thing that social media made possible, that simply was very hard to orchestrate before, was being able to instantaneously create a feeling of a mob, demanding that you fire someone or discipline someone,” Lukianoff said.

College campuses have been in the spotlight for the rise in cancel culture. Lukianoff pointed to the generational and technological shifts that have made this a reality.

In the past few months, the Israel-Hamas War has led to rising tensions on campus and has brought more questions about cancel culture.

“We are absolutely, to be clear, seeing an uptick in attempts to get students and faculty punished for pro-Palestinian speech,” Lukianoff noted. “We’re seeing about twice as many of those cases as we saw last year.”

Lukianoff added that an unfortunate development has been a rise in acts not protected by the First Amendment across the country.

“You have a right to say, ‘From the river to the sea.’ That’s protected speech,” he said. “You don’t have a right — as happened in Cornell — to actually start issuing death threats to Jewish students.”