The Patriot Post® · The Cancel Culture Eats Its Own
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” —Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
The American Left has embraced a cancel culture whereby those who evince even the slightest deviation from moral perfection, no matter how long ago it occurred, is grounds for turning ordinary Americans into pariahs — and obliterating the historical contributions of prominent ones. That this moral perfection is defined by a generation of progressives with contempt for American history and culture, with no remorse for 60 million abortions, and with anarchy, looting, arson, and murder framed as “peaceful protests,” is beyond arrogant — even more so when it’s applied to historical figures who lived in wholly different times. What about progressive icons? Shouldn’t the same deficiencies precipitate the same cancellations?
We begin with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. For many Democrats, FDR remains the gold standard, finishing number one in several annual rankings of America’s greatest presidents. Yet the same FDR signed an executive order consigning more than 100,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II and appointed ex-KKK member Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. Moreover, in a series of articles FDR wrote for the Macon, GA, Daily Telegraph and for Asia magazine in the 1920s, he disdained granting citizenship to “non-assimilable immigrants” and opposed Japanese immigration because “mingling Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.” Under cancel-culture parameters, FDR’s blatant racism cannot be offset by his often Herculean efforts to shepherd our nation through the Great Depression and WWII.
Harry Truman? An admirable president by many accounts, but also one who paid dues to the KKK between 1920 and 1922. That they eventually parted ways when the Klan disapproved of Truman’s appointment of Catholics to key political positions? Atonement and/or intellectual growth and the cancel culture are mutually exclusive concepts.
JFK? Since the cancel culture embraces #MeToo, Mimi Alford’s assertion that President Kennedy bedded her when she was 19 year old, plied her with the sex drug amyl nitrate, and asked her to “take care” of some of his friends should be more than enough to eliminate him from history. Yet that wasn’t his only “sin.” Kennedy also voted against the 1957 civil-rights bill.
What about JFK’s brothers, Robert and Ted? As attorney general, RFK approved the FBI bugging of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., while Ted Kennedy, dubbed the “Lion of the Senate” by many of the same people who hold the Founding Fathers in contempt, left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in a car at Chappaquiddick. Thus, isn’t it time to rid the nation of any artifact or entity with the name Kennedy attached to it?
LBJ? Johnson referred to the 1957 Civil Rights Act as the “n—er bill” and repeatedly used the word in conversations with colleagues. He also supported Jim Crow laws in the South early in his political career and received Planned Parenthood’s 1966 Margaret Sanger Award — as in the same Margaret Sanger who called for the extermination of the “mongrel races.” According to cancel-culture dogma, those facts are more than enough to offset his war on poverty and his signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
President Jimmy Carter? Perhaps his historical legacy will remain intact, since his call for the recognition of designated terror group Hamas as an equal with Israel aligns itself with BLM’s dedication to the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, as well as its accusations that Israel has committed “genocide.”
President Bill Clinton? Like JFK, he was another serial womanizer whose pathological lying was undone by a semen-stained dress, even as many of the same progressives down with today’s purge excused the perjury and obstruction of justice he perpetrated as being “just about sex,” or insisted that his execrable behavior could be “compartmentalized.” Since compartmentalization is the antithesis of progressive demands for unadulterated purity, Clinton must also be expunged.
President Barack Obama? Despite efforts by Democrats to obscure it, and lying by Joe Biden when confronted about it, Obama did put illegal immigrant children in cages. And though Obama’s apologies for America’s shortcomings, his associations with racial arsonist Al Sharpton and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, and his insistence that racism is “still part of our DNA that’s passed on” undoubtedly warms the heart of America haters everywhere, the cancel culture’s aforementioned demand for absolute ideological purity cannot be squared with caged “children of color.”
Numerous other Democrats deserve “honorable mention,” including the scores of “Dixiecrats” who kept segregation alive through the 1960s, and “standout” West Virginia Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd, who led an 83-day filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Earlier in his career, Byrd recruited 150 KKK members — who unanimously voted him the “exalted cyclops,” the highest-ranking member of the chapter.
Martin Luther King? While King still remains an icon, his co-recipiency of the1966 Margaret Sanger Award, the unverified FBI allegations that he had numerous affairs, and the allegations that he laughed while witnessing a rape might prove to be problematic. Or ironically, in keeping with the bizarre demands of the cancel culture, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and its explicit endorsement of all lives and racial harmony that wholly undermines the concept of “white privilege” may precipitate his elimination.
Finally, the Democrat Party itself. In the effort to rebrand everything from Uncle Ben’s rice and Aunt Jemima pancakes to any number of sports teams with “offensive” Native American names, why should the party whose long, documented history of overt racism be given a pass? If cancel culture is consistent, Democrats must rename their party.
On Tuesday, Harper’s Magazine published a letter decrying the cancel culture signed by 100 leftists — who blame President Trump for the “forces of illiberalism” that “are gaining strength throughout the world.”
Utter nonsense. The Left wholly owns this contemptible agenda, and the concern reflected in these leftists’ letter is the growing realization that they themselves are no longer immune from the monster they created.
Perhaps no one is learning that lesson better than “Hamilton” creator Lin Manuel Miranda, who now realizes his “wokeness” hasn’t immunized him from a mob that wants to “cancel” his musical, despite his casting of non-whites to play historically white figures. Yet like other useful idiots, Miranda feels compelled to apologize. “That we have not yet firmly spoken the inarguable truth that Black Lives Matter and denounced systematic racism and white supremacy from our official ‘Hamilton’ channels is a moral failure on our part,” he stated.
No, the moral failure is the effort to appease a corrupt mob of wannabe totalitarians and their enablers, who will invariably demand even greater concessions that will never be met until America is a socialist/Marxist construct.
Americans have an opportunity to reject this nonsense in November, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson reminds us why it is critical to do so. “Loving the people you lead, caring deeply about them is the basic prerequisite of leadership,” he asserts. “The leaders of today’s Democratic Party do not. They despise this country. They have said so. They continue to. That is shocking, but it is also disqualifying. We cannot let them run this nation because they hate it. Imagine what they would do to it.”
Exactly.