While “cancel culture” has become a go-to defense for public figures when they’re being criticized, examples of the original injustice that gave rise to the term still exist. Musician Daniel Elder is one of them.
Elder, a promising composer living in Tennessee, had his life upended in the summer of 2020 due to an innocuous Instagram post misrepresented by angry people on the internet, according to a Reason magazine report. Elder, 34, was watching a Black Lives Matter protest devolve into a riot in Nashville in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a scene common across the country throughout the summer of 2020.