Tag: cancel culture

Defund The Speech Police

San Francisco has had enough. The city’s mayor recently declared that “the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end,” and she promised to “take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement.”

Her get-tough pledge is, of course, shameless — if only there had been a municipal leader who could have done something before now! — but when wokeness has lost the mayor of San Francisco, it has a public-relations problem.

Following electoral defeats in Virginia, and facing a likely wipeout in next year’s midterm elections, many Democrats are scrambling away from identity politics. From crime to education to the workplace, it poisons everything, and Americans are sick of it.

Thus, we may hope that Scott McConnell is correct in predicting that wokeness “will be rolled back, its practitioners and cultural preferences first widely mocked and then ignored, its victims rehabilitated and in some cases honored.” But we should not be too sure; even if wokeness is politically toxic now, it might nonetheless win in the long run.

Identity politics’ likely resilience was highlighted in a response by Ed West as well as in a Reason article by Greg Lukianoff chronicling how the first wave of political correctness in the 1990s persisted despite its unpopularity. Put simply, identity politics holds power in key institutions, especially in tech, academia, education, the media, and Big Business. While voter anger might spook politicians on issues such as crime, wokeness in all its forms will be hard to root out of its institutional fortresses.

Thus, identity politics will remain as a powerful force in American life even if Democratic politicians avoid and downplay its more unpopular ideas (and they aren’t all giving up yet). Like a weed, snicking the head off wokeness will not kill it. Unless it is actively uprooted, wokeness will continue to embed itself within powerful institutions, just as it was doing before it broke into public view over the last few years.

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Liberals 3X More Likely Than Conservatives To Report People On Social Media

Liberals are three times more likely than conservatives to report people on social media to Big Tech companies for possible terms and regulations violations, a new poll suggests.

According to the Cato 2021 Speech and Social Media National Survey, of the 2,000 people polled, liberals, even moderate ones, were far more likely to encourage Big Tech-led censorship of their peers on apps such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

“This behavior is highly tied to political ideology,” the poll notes.

While 65 percent of strong liberals, 44 percent of moderate liberals, and 32 percent of moderates testified that they reported another user for “sharing offensive content or false information,” only 21 percent of moderate conservatives and 24 percent of strong conservatives said they did the same.

In addition to reporting people to Big Tech companies, 80 percent of strong liberals and 68 percent of moderate liberals said they have blocked or unfriended someone for their posts “about politics or science.” Only 48 percent of moderates, 44 percent of moderate conservatives, and 46 percent of strong conservatives reported doing the same.

The survey also found that “altogether, conservatives are more likely than liberals to have personal or near personal experience of being penalized by social media companies for the content they’ve posted to their accounts.”

The poll reinforces an alarming trend indicating a shrinking level of tolerance and a desire for censorship among the left. In a recent poll of 850 private and public college, university, and trade school students spread across the United States, Generation Lab and Axios found “Young Dems more likely to despise the other party.”

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New York Times Thought Police Ask: Should Classic Rock Songs Be Toppled Like Confederate Statues?

Hide your classic rock LP’s. The thought police at the New York Times are coming for them.

The New York Times opinion section has run a column advocating for classic rock songs like Don McLean’s “American Pie” to be reconsidered and maybe even “toppled” like historic Confederate statues, arguing that reevaluating beloved songs will help create a world that is “inclusive and more just.”

Other rock singers ripe for cancellation include Eric Clapton, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and even Elvis Presley.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, who is a male-to-female transgender, laid out the case in the op-ed titled “Should Classic Rock Songs Be Toppled Like Confederate Statues?”

“As we take another look at the sins of our historical figures, we’ve also had to take a hard look at our more immediate past and present, including the behavior of the creators of pop culture,” Boylan wrote. “That reassessment extends now to the people who wrote some of our best-loved songs.”

Chief among the candidates for cancellation is “American Pie,” the 1971 classic song by Don McLean. Boylan cited past allegations of domestic violence made against McLean as justification for the song’s cancellation.

“I want to live in a world where I can be moved by art and music and literature without having to come up with elaborate apologies for that work or for its creators,” the columnist wrote.

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Cancel Culture Is Ideological, Not Generational

From streaming services removing older episodes of “The Office” to scholars and teachers losing their jobs and suffering serious professional consequences, cancel culture is running rampant in America today. However, new data from the canonical American National Election Studies (ANES) reveals that significant numbers of Americans believe that cancel culture has gone too far. Self-censoring and easy offense are on the rise. And contrary to popular belief, younger Americans are just as likely as their older counterparts to view cancel culture as a net negative. Americans’ opinions of cancel culture and hypersensitivity fall along traditional ideological, educational, and racial lines, suggesting that this movement is anything but something exclusively spawned by younger Americans.

Specifically, the latest round of ANES data shows that non-trivially large numbers of Americans across all generational cohorts report censoring their speech at similar frequencies. Forty-five percent of Gen Zers (Americans ages 18 to 24) as well as 45 percent of Millennials (ages 25 to 40) say that they self-censor themselves at least occasionally. Forty-one percent of their Gen X parents (ages 41 to 57) report doing this, and 40 percent of their Boomer grandparents (ages 57 to 75) say the same. Ironically, those in the Silent Generation – Americans between ages 76 and 93 – are far less likely to report silencing themselves, with only 29 percent reporting doing so. Even if the eldest cohort is more open, the fact remains that almost 4 in 10 Americans readily concede that they limit and watch what they say on a fairly regular basis and think this is not healthy behavior in a democratic polity.

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Olympic opening ceremony director fired for Holocaust joke

The Tokyo Olympic organizing committee fired the director of the opening ceremony on Thursday because of a Holocaust joke he made during a comedy show in 1998.

Organizing committee president Seiko Hashimoto said a day ahead of the opening ceremony that director Kentaro Kobayashi has been dismissed. He was accused of using a joke about the Holocaust in his comedy act, including the phrase “Let’s play Holocaust.”

“We found out that Mr. Kobayashi, in his own performance, has used a phrase ridiculing a historical tragedy,” Hashimoto said. “We deeply apologize for causing such a development the day before the opening ceremony and for causing troubles and concerns to many involved parties as well as the people in Tokyo and the rest of the country.”

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Psaki Says Americans Who Post “Misinformation” Should be Banned From All Platforms

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Friday doubled down on the government’s censorship of Americans.

Psaki on Thursday casually admitted the federal government is censoring American citizens and flagging “problematic” social media posts.

“We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office,” Psaki said Thursday. “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

On Friday Psaki took it to another level and said Americans who post “misinformation” should be completely unpersoned and should have no access to online platforms.

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“Sensitivity readers” to proofread books so they don’t offend cancel mobs

New, widespread phenomena inevitably create new economies, and new job titles; the strong push to align content, including books, with what can be summed up as “woke values” is no different.

The Spectator writes about a new brand of copy editors – “sensitivity readers.” The term is appropriately Orwellian in itself, given what these people get hired by publishers to do: make sure that stories that don’t represent a writer’s “lived experience” are “corrected” to better reflect that.

And the “sensitivity authority” who decides what is authentic is the freelancer given the job. It sounds fairly arbitrary, like many other things happening in society these days that flirt with some form of censorship or suppression of content.

And it continues to sound arbitrary even when it is explained that in order to “qualify” for a “sensitivity reader” you have to advertise your status as a member of an ethnic or cultural group, somebody who has experienced trauma or abuse, or just be a self-declared expert in a hobby.

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Why Saving Comedy Is So Crucial To Saving America

Conan O’Brien did his final late night show last week, after 28 years on air. He’s stepping away at the right time. Whether you liked his comedic style or not, he really was trying to make people laugh.

When was the last time you watched “The Late Show” in order to laugh? That’s a trick question — nobody who watches Stephen Colbert is laughing. Laughter is entirely beside the point; Colbert’s show is political catechism in nightly hour-long installments.

One of Colbert’s masterworks in June was a song “parody” titled “500 Vials,” which didn’t even have a joke — it was just telling everyone to get the vaccine. It may be the least funny video ever created, and after the female-empowerment version of “Ghostbusters,” that can’t be said lightly (but remember: Anyone who didn’t laugh is sexist).

Increasingly, though, Colbert is the norm for late-night shows. For four years, limited big-tent political comedy got replaced by an aggressive churn of anti-Donald Trump “Resistance” theater barely papered over by jokes.

Some have just about given up the ghost entirely: John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” is pretty much nothing but lectures on what a liberal is supposed to be mad about this week.

And remember “The Daily Show”? While certainly steeped in sarcastic vitriol, it’s impossible to say it’s been relevant since Trevor Noah took the reins nearly six years ago.

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Cancel Karma: 11 Hollywood Celebrities Who Have Been Eaten By Their Own

The woke cancel mob has developed a taste for its own kind — and at the top of the menu are left-wing Hollywood celebrities.

The recent cancellation of Chrissy Teigen, Billie Eilish, and Lin-Manuel Miranda shows that everyone is fair game now, even stars who have spent years building up left-wing credentials. Wokeness no longer discerns between right and left in its hunger to destroy everything it touches.

At least eleven Hollywood celebrities have seen their livelihoods come under attack from the cancel mob in recent months. The vast majority are left-wing or have expressed left-of-center views, which might have insulated them not so long ago but now offer no protection from the wrath of the woke.

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