The Mob & the Medicine
A Ritual Take on Cancellation
March 16, 2027
12:30pm San Francisco | 3:30pm New York | 20:30 Madrid
90 minutes
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This event will be held live on Zoom, and will be recorded.
The recording is shared with registrants approximately 48 hours after the event.
This event has passed. You can watch the recording below.
“Why are you cancelled?”
“Because people decided to cancel me.”
This is how Clementine Morrigan answered the question during the early days of her cancellation in 2020. Her experience cost her a home, a community, a book deal, employment opportunities, and her mental health. She also had “literal shit poured into the air vents” of her car, all over an infraction she didn’t even commit. (She was falsely accused of not sharing online about black lives matter, and things snowballed from there.)
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On the other side of the planet, each year since 2021, our founder and director Daniel Foor makes a point of pre-cancelling himself with incoming cohorts of our year-long ancestral healing and Earth ritual trainings. After an extensive application process, once the new trainees are settled and ready to begin, Daniel includes during their first orientation call: “So. In case you missed it…” He understandably prefers to hand them the headline himself: he was once cancelled by former students. The impact of his callout has a long tail. It impacted his life and business decisions for years. He reoriented how he related to his work and especially his students. And for the rest of his career, each time he introduces himself to a new cohort, before he can dig into the substance of his life’s work, he’ll need to make space for this dialogue.
Being cancelled did rewrite parts of Clementine and Daniel’s stories, but it didn’t end their work or stop them from succeeding in their fields. Clementine is a Montréal-based essayist, author, and podcaster who rebuilt her career from a firmly anti-cancel-culture position. She’s been making zines since 2000, has written several books, and writes on culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. With Jay LeSoleil, she co-hosts Fucking Cancelled, a socialist podcast that takes on leftist cancel culture from inside the left, challenging social justice orthodoxy, and dreaming up a left grounded in freedom and responsibility rather than dysfunction and punishment.
Daniel, our founder and director, has seen his book Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing translated into 10 languages. He’s guided over 150 multi-day ancestral healing rituals in more than 10 countries. More than 5,000 people have moved through his course, Ancestral Lineage Healing. And he’s seen over 250 practitioners through their training to become practitioners of his method. They now offer his work in nearly 30 languages.
Both know what cancellation costs. Both prove it doesn’t even work. And both have kept going, with a lot to say about what they learned along the way.
In this free, 90 minute talk, Daniel and Clementine will be joined by prominent Chinese-Canadian writer and cultural worker, Kai Cheng Thom, whose offerings frequently focus on and critique cancel culture, call-out dynamics, and toxic conflict. Her books, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World (2019) and Falling Back in Love with Being Human (2023 – a series of letters addressed to outcasts, runaways, people who cause harm, and even those seemingly beyond saving) explore how communities can move away from punitive “cancellation” and toward transformative justice and compassion.
What to Expect
What’s a regular person to do with the soul annihilating destruction of a digitally fueled public takedown?
Together, Clementine, Daniel, and Kai Cheng will pull apart what’s actually happening when a mob gathers. They’ll explore the mechanics of scapegoating: what actually drives the impulse to take someone down? They’ll share about the psychic residue it leaves on the person cast out. And they’ll imagine what accountability might look like if it stops running on shame and avoidance of generative forms of conflict resolution.
Less a panel, more an autopsy: a writer from within queer and trans North American activist spaces (one of the most quick-to-cancel subcultures), a therapist/priest working in the terrain of cultural healing, and a gritty, outspoken feminist and socialist who’s lived the whole thing from inside the pile-on, come together to compare notes about metabolizing the poison instead of just surviving it.
We’ll ground our talk in ritual work for recovery. We’ll also name the care that sometimes arises around someone who’s been cancelled when the mob moves in or loses interest. Bring your popcorn for this tender and passionate discussion with three folks continuing to show up for public life despite the meanness in the world (and on the internet).
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About the Presenters
Guest Speaker
Kai Cheng is a Chinese-Canadian writer, poet, performer, and community healer based in Toronto and known for her work on queer/trans rights, mental health, and transformative justice. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Work from McGill University and has worked as a psychotherapist, somatic sex educator, clinical hypnotherapist, and mediator. She is a practitioner of “Loving Justice,” a method she developed for conflict transformation and healing within communities, and the author of Falling Back in Love With Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls (2023).
Guest Speaker
Clementine is a controversial figure, a powerhouse, a writer, and a socialist. She’s been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books that weave magic, sex positivity, leftism and solidarity, trauma healing, and kinder approaches to human culture. She’s one half of the Fucking Cancelled podcast and a vocal advocate for leftist, non-dogmatic, and Earth-honoring alternatives to cancel culture. Her work shines a light into the heart of shame, asking us to lean into our courage and our deep capacity for empathy and compassion. She believes that compassion is both more ethical and more pragmatic than shame.
Founder and DIrector of Ancestral Medicine
Daniel is a doctor of psychology, experienced ritualist, and the author of Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing. He is an initiate in the Òrìṣà tradition of Yoruba-speaking West Africa and has learned from teachers of Mahayana Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and the older ways of his English and German ancestors. Daniel is passionate about training aspiring leaders and change makers in the intersections of cultural healing, animist ethics, and applied ritual arts. He lives with his wife and two daughters near Granada, Spain in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
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