Just as some question whether we still have a government of, by, and for the people, we could also ask if we have a culture of, by, and for the people. After all, whether it’s Dr. Seuss books, Aunt Jemima, the Redskins name, or cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew, cultural elements get canceled today despite having majority-population support. Yet there is some pushback, prompting one commentator to ask if “the pendulum is starting to swing on cancel culture.”
Writing Saturday, commentator Andrea Widburg cites three examples of pushback. “The first story involves Piers Morgan, the British commentator,” she writes. “Morgan was unimpressed after listening to Meghan and Harry emote to Oprah. Indeed, not only was he unsympathetic, but he was pretty sure that Meghan was lying about her travails, and he said so out loud. When he said so during his gig on Good Morning Britain, he ended up storming off the set. He then tweeted out more statements supporting his belief that Meghan and Harry were not being honest.”
Yet while this resulted in Morgan being fired after 41,000 complaints poured in to Good Morning Britain, he didn’t back down. Instead, he tweeted the following:
Note that more than 220,000 people petitioned Good Morning Britain to reinstate Morgan. This, as Widburg correctly points out, illustrates how cancel culture is driven by a minority.
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“Another example of a pushback came from a teacher in Loudon County, Virginia, the county in which the school district was the first to ban Dr. Seuss,” Widburg also writes. “Just listen to this brave teacher not only pushing back on the unconstitutionally racist Critical Race Theory being pushed on government employees — which is a form of canceling whites” (video below).
The final example Widburg presents involves, interestingly, New York’s narcissistic governor Andrew Cuomo. While he’s guilty of instituting criminally negligent COVID-19 policies that resulted in thousands of nursing-home residents’ deaths, fellow Democrats aren’t seeking his removal from office on that basis; this could boomerang back on them and their cause, after all, as other leftists either instituted the same policies or were complicit in covering them up in the media and elsewhere.
So they’re trying to oust Cuomo on the basis of the sexual-misconduct charges leveled against him by various women. But Fredo’s older brother will have none of it. “I did not do what has been alleged. Period,” he recently said. “People know the difference between playing politics, bowing to cancel culture and the truth.”
“When you stop laughing at Cuomo’s defensive use of a Democrat stock-in-trade,” concludes Widburg, “think about the fact that, when leftists start calling out and opposing the cancel culture mob, maybe the end really is near.”
We should note, however, that Cuomo isn’t really calling out and opposing the cancel cultists. First, he’s not opposing any of the cancel-culture efforts we’re now accosted with weekly, just the effort to oust him. Second, the latter is driven by far more than the vanishingly small group of cancel-cultists.
That they are a tiny minority brings us to an important point. Saul “the Red” Alinsky’s rule one in his notorious book Rules for Radicals is, “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” The cancel-cultists are loud on GoogTwitFace and get much attention from a complicit mainstream media, but they represent almost nobody.
Yet this doesn’t mean cancel culture is easily canceled. The problem is that too often today decisions affecting culture don’t reflect the market’s (the people’s) will. This is partially because our culture shapers — the media, academia, entertainment, and Big Tech — are controlled by individuals far to the left of the general population. And this relatively small group essentially constitutes a culture-realm oligarchy.
(It also doesn’t help that GoogTwitFace and Amazon have something approaching monopoly power.)
So when the eternally unhappy cancel-cultists make a stink about something, big business complies not just because it’s afraid of bad press. It’s also that, one, being controlled by leftists who project their own mindsets onto others, they assume their passions are more widespread than they are; and, two, the activism may just serve as a pretext justifying actions these oligarchs would like to take, anyway.
So I don’t think “cancel culture” is going anywhere anytime soon. How can it be remedied? Coming to mind here is famed architect R. Buckminster Fuller’s line, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
While the Left’s cancel culture itself perhaps proves his first sentence false, we should take heed of his second one. Getting back to faith and virtue — that “set of good moral habits” — would give people an ideal yardstick for making moral decisions, one far superior to “wokism.”
If we don’t have the social-control model reflecting Truth, we’ll surely have one that reflects a lie. Ergo, 21st-century America.
