On Cancelling the Cancelation of Cancel Culture:
There is war going on outside no man is safe from.
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To cancel or to cancel the cancellation, that is the question. Well here is a better question: Remember the Dixie Chicks? Speaking out against Bush and the Iraq war got them erased from the history of country music more completely than all the leftist messaging of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristopherson. Angry fans burned their CD’s, they got hate mail and death threats. They went from the top of the charts to obscure has beens. So did they get cancelled?
Over the last few years there has been a bipartisan effort to causally disregard the first amendment rights of people who want to participate in the BDS movement against the apartheid regime in Israel. College professors have lost their jobs and their chance at tenure for advocating for Palestinian rights. Were those professors cancelled? When you couldn’t show two men kissing on TV, were gay people cancelled? Back in the nineties when “tough on crime” was the politic du jour of both parties, where prison abolitionists cancelled?
How come when we talk about cancel culture, we almost always are talking about the backlash to people mis-gendering trans women or people who say something extremely ignorant about people of color or people who like to play in the grey area of consent? Why does it seem that free speech warriors seem much more concerned about preserving the right to debate the humanity of certain peoples than the right to boycott a nation enacting racist collective punishment? Why did (newly) former NYT editor Bari Weiss sign a letter decrying cancel culture when arguably her rise to prominence began when she tried to get one of her professors at Columbia fired for alleged anti-semetic remarks.
Could it be that the idea of this great sweeping societal problem of cancel culture is a tad bit bullshit? Maybe powerful people are using the rhetoric of tolerance to shield them from the consequences of their shitty views. There is no constitutional right to speak at college campuses. There is no constitutional right to debate anything you want, wherever and whenever you want to debate it. Hey, what if we already had the debate that anti-cancel culture people are trying to preserve and the cancelled people lost it. Like how we had a debate on whether Black people are humans or not and the Confederacy just didn’t present a tight enough argument to sway the audience.
You can say whatever you want. You just can’t say whatever you want without consequence.
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Part of the problem with anti-cancel culture discourse is that these arguments against twitter mobs and social justice firings never actually attempt to describe why these things are happening. Or if they do they chalk the whole thing up to tribalism or mob mentality or (gasp) THE INTERNET. But these are woefully insufficient explanations for why people seem to fervently want people who say stupid shit to get punished for it. For one thing, calling a transgender woman a man only very recently became a fireable offense. For the overwhelming majority of the history of our cultural discourse misgendering people was a punchline. You remember the halcyon days when Dave Chappell was unequivocally cool instead of problematically stealing material from Ben Shapiro. But Ben Shapiro lost the debate on whether trans people get to decide their own identity and so maybe what some people see as unthinking cancel culture is merely the violent centripetal force of a major societal course correction. Maybe trans women are being killed or disappeared at an alarming rate and no one gives a shit, so calling JK Rowling mean names on twitter for her shitty terf opinions is the most realistically attainable form of justice that people can seek.
See behind every much bemoaned cancellation facilitated by the intolerant left, is a material injustice that has been largely ignored. Believe women didn’t become a rallying cry because the left hates due process. It’s because there are hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits in the country and a woman has a better chance of getting struck by lightning and gaining super powers than seeing her rapist in prison. It's completely fair to say that the backlash can be unfair at times. I remember the woman who made a dumb tweet, got on a plane and had lost her job by the time the plane had landed. It’s also completely reasonable for leftists, who up until very recently have been firmly out of the bounds of acceptable discourse, to be wary of a culture who demands that anyone saying something controversial lose their career. But to condemn the backlash without a serious attempt to understand it’s animus is no different than demanding someone get fired for saying “all lives matter”. Social justice warriors on twitter may not be interested in a debate but then again neither are Bill Maher or Bari Wiess. They aren’t concerned with free speech, they just don’t want to face consequences for saying dumb shit. If they were really concerned with the effects of cancel culture on the discourse then they probably should be more interested in why people demand blood for thought crimes and microaggressions.
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I used to think that cancel culture wasn’t a real thing. If you go back into my timeline, you’ll find posts where I was saying that it wasn’t a real thing. I was wrong. Or at least I wasn’t completely accurate. For the rich and powerful, getting cancelled is a minor inconvenience at best. Louis C.K. is fine. Aziz Ansari is fine. Tucker Carlson (very regrettably) is fine. But another part of the problem with cancel culture discourse is that cancel culture doesn’t really have a firm definition. When people talk about it, they are usually cherry picking the story that fits their particular aggrievement or anxiety. When conservative writer Kevin D. Williamson was fired from the Atlantic for saying that women who get abortions should be hanged, the left celebrated and conservatives along with the IDW classical liberals who love them cried cancel culture into the dark unforgiving night. But what about when alt-right deformed bullfrog Mike Cernovich got James Gunn fired from directing a Marvel movie for ill-advised but obviously satirical tweets? Or when liberals derailed the congressional run of progressive firebrand Cenk Uygur with the terrible things he had written when he was a Republican. Was it liberals or conservatives that got Charlie Sheen fired from CBS? The waters, they can get pretty murky. Can anyone tell me what is the difference between cancelling Goya because the CEO endorsed Trump like an abused puppy and people burning their Nike’s because Colin Kaepernick got an ad campaign? Are boycotts just another form of cancelling? Are political campaigns against incumbents a form of cancelling? After all, what is a political campaign other than an organized and concerted effort to have someone lose their job over things they have said or done.
All cancelling is not created equal and maybe Liberals should acknowledge their role in perpetuating a deeply shallow discourse. A discourse that, when you get down to it, really doesn’t help anyone or do anything productive.
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Liberals have a disconcerting tendency to acknowledge problems as being systemic in nature and yet focus all of their solutions on the individual. When you put a Karen’s CBD for dogs store out of business because she called the cops on a Back person for Blacking while Black, you aren’t helping Black people or the Karen. Karens will continue to call the cops on Black people and cops will still beat the shit out of people for flagrant displays of melanin. The only thing achieved is the little bump of serotonin you get from schadenfreude. As I said before, it’s completely understandable that in the face of an unequal societal order so recalcitrant and resistant to change, people would take any victory they can. If you can’t change the system, you can at least hit the people who benefit from it where it hurts.
A lot of leftist ideology has become sloganeering for liberals. If you say the right thing you are a good person. If you say the wrong thing you are a bad person and thus are fair game for the collective impotent rage that marginalized classes feel. This is easy and it feels good and it largely leaves oppressive systems intact. Systems can only ever change through solidarity and the collective action of the masses. Cancelling individuals who do racisms or say sexisms does not build that solidarity. After all, if I’m going to ask the anti-cancel clique to delve deeper and acknowledge the societal fissures that push rage cancellations to the surface, I also should expect liberals to understand how a combination of constant propaganda, ignorance, and societal alienation leads average people to terrible opinions.
Of all people Nick Cannon demonstrates this perfectly. When he got cancelled both sides of the cancel culture debate rushed to their respective corners and listened for the sound of the bell. There should be no space for anti-semitism for the historical precedent is clear. But was left out of conversation was how black people who grew up in the 80’s and 90’s found their way to some particular odious ideologies surrounding the history of Judaism. Black people flocked to characters like Louis Farrakan not because of some innate hatred of Jewish people but because these messages of hate were packaged in a wrapper of Black pride. In a society where popular culture told us that being Black was an obstacle to overcome, The Nation of Islam, the Black Israelites, and other Black identitarian groups sold a message that told us that being Black was perfection and that other groups were lesser and thus jealous. This analysis doesn’t excuse or justify the hateful rhetoric that came out of these movements nor does it diminish the impact of it. But if you don’t care to understand it’s genesis and instead move to simply cancel it from your sphere of discourse then you can never truly defeat it. And the rub is that there is no genetic difference between the ignorant statements of Nick Cannon or Deshawn Jackson and the rhetoric of All Lives Matter or any working class schlub that believes the police are good guys and that Black people are criminals. In the end, hurt people hurt people. And I get that it is a pretty large ask to see the pain in those who question your humanity but cancelling people doesn’t send them to the negative zone where they can never bother us again. Demanding shame from those who have shitty ideologies only makes them seek more extreme sources of pride.
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If you know me personally, you know that I do not see patient, non-violent, petitions for justice as a serious path toward peace. Sometimes you need to burn a motherfucker to the ground. But there are levels to this shit and a serious strategy means you need to pick your targets. Yes all cops are bastards but you can’t just simply repeat that to people over and over and then brand them as non-persons when they don’t understand why. Our society was built on lies and divisions and we are all victims of it. If you truly believe in “Fuck 12” then it’s kind of your responsibility to learn the history of policing and why it is inherently racist and lead with that. Dehumanizing the people who have been completely shielded from that history is counter productive and exactly the kind of tactics that we are fighting against. As the late great Michael Brooks once said "Be ruthless to systems and be kind to people".
At the end of the day these political fights that we wage are about systems, not people. And while holding individuals to account for the awful thoughts they espouse feels good and right and just, it ultimately lets these systems off the hook. I mean we can boycott Goya and feel like we are fighting the good fight and yet I’m typing this essay on a machine made by a company that uses prison labor. I wonder if Microsoft does diversity training. There is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
More than a few leftists have made the case that cancelling is akin to calling the manager on systemic injustice. It’s an appeal to authority for making consumerism feel less yucky. And it provides these systems of injustice with an easily obtained veneer of compassion that ultimately costs them nothing. If you say the right thing then you are good. No deeper analysis necessary. Cancelling problematic folks just isn’t helping. It’s empty calories. It’s popcorn for a wounded soul.
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The simple fact is that the left has more to fear from the corporate facilitated silencing of unpopular opinions than the racist, sexist right. Long before people could become twitter famous, long before there were Karens and Beckys, Eugene Debs was cancelled. He was cancelled for speaking out against America's entrance into World War One. And his cancellation consisted of being thrown in jail. The concept of free speech is only applicable to government intervention to stifle speech. Corporations and media conglomerates have no responsibility to give everyone an equal platform. They don’t mind sacrificing a few reactionary pawns if there is profit in the false display of solidarity. But when the government gets involved, usually it means they are coming for the left.
We could be having a conversation about that. We could be talking about why people feel unsafe in the presence of reactionary or at the very least ignorant thought. We could be trying to find the synthesis between making sure the power of rhetoric isn’t used to marginalize people and ensuring that we aren’t leaving the decisions about who gets heard to the board rooms of Silicon Valley and New York media companies. But we aren't doing that. We are instead having dick measuring contests about the appropriate amount of wokeness. We are sacrificing solidarity for being right and in the process neither side of the cancel debate will achieve what they want. We need to be better than that. We need to be more serious than that. It’s going to take having some long and messy conversations about how we make the change that is so existentially needed in our country and our world. We can’t be sacrificing the alliances that can bring us into a better future at the altar of pwnage.
Solidarity Forever.
But Bari Wiess totally sucks and I’m glad she quit.
Ok you can stop reading now.