The Patriot Post® · Cancel Culture Good? Say What?
While the practice of attempting to shame people into compliance has been around forever, a relatively recent term for it is “cancel culture.” In modern history, those looking to “cancel” are generally the ones who would have been shunned and ignored in olden days because they’re advocating for people or issues that would offend the longstanding traditional Judeo-Christian worldview.
In more recent times, though, when someone utters a statement that angers the gatekeepers of the Left, there are two ways those gatekeepers seek to “cancel” a speaker. One is deplatforming. Think of how attempts to break the Hunter Biden laptop story made the New York Post disappear from social media thanks to the collusion of Big Government and Big Tech. And deplatforming has a cousin called shadowbanning, a practice we’re all too familiar with because our humble shop has been on the receiving end for many moons.
While those deplatforming methods are bad, what’s worse is the attempt through boycotts or lawfare to ruin the reputation or finances of a speaker as a penalty for offending the oppressed. Even the threat of a boycott can often move corporate entities into line, but this side of cancel culture can be much worse for an individual. Just ask Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, who’s endured years of legal wrangling in standing up for his religious beliefs.
People seem to getting wise to the game, though. As a result, we came across this diatribe seeking to legitimize cancel culture as “good for democracy.” An excerpt from a new book called The Case for Cancel Culture: How This Democratic Tool Works to Liberate Us All was published recently in that bastion of truth, Rolling Stone. In it, author Ernest Owens argues:
Cancel culture has leveled the playing field for those who can’t always rely on the government to protect them. Right now, bigots are protected under the First Amendment to fuel disgusting rhetoric without state-sanctioned consequence. The America that tolerated white supremacy in their policies and laws is the same country that wants to remind us how such forms of hate are still legal via free speech. Cancel culture is the poison to those in power that have benefited from unchecked free speech.
Owens invokes the bogeymen of “bigots” and “disgusting rhetoric” with regard to those who oppose same-sex “marriage,” but someone on the Right could make a more logical sort of argument to a statement such as: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” The difference: conservatives vehemently disagree with that assessment, but, unlike those speech suppressors on the Left, we have no problem allowing people to postulate that argument because we know that, in the battle of ideas, the concept of equality is superior to that of equity through overt discrimination. It’s hard for the Left to cancel Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but it tries nonetheless.
“Just like how political correctness was initially an inside joke that ran rampant, so has cancel culture taken off as a phrase,” added Owens. “Once those in power got a hand of the term cancel culture, they attempted to redefine it as a pejorative phrase, stripping away its craftiness and mischaracterizing its intention. It’s like any cool phrase that gets taken too seriously and blown out of proportion by a cranky, uptight parent who isn’t hip to modernity — cancel culture was reframed and weaponized by those in power who were afraid of what it could truly represent.”
Some among us ARE cranky, uptight parents who aren’t “hip to modernity.” But we’re not about trying to eliminate the competition unfairly through the weaponization often used by the Left. It was only when the Left saw that the cancellation tactic was losing its effectiveness and people were getting wise to the scam called “equity” that this rallying of the troops came out.
After all, if there’s something people in this “look at me” culture really hate, it’s being ignored. Those who have a more temperate approach may have to look a little bit harder for the truth, but despite the best efforts of cancel culture, it’s still out there for those who are looking for it to see.