Who’s Waging & Winning
the Cancel Culture War?
BY STEVE ERICKSON
When a phrase makes
it into a Trump
speech, its use has
likely peaked. But
America’s media hasn’t gotten over
its obsession with “cancel culture”
just yet. Like “political correctness,”
“fake news” and “identity
politics,” it’s turned from an actual
concept into a meme that stops
thinking dead in its tracks. Depending
who’s speaking, it refers
to different things. Just as no one
goes around praising TV shows or
movies for being politically correct,
few people claim to be a part of
cancel culture.
For a long stretch now, #celebrityname
isoverparty has trended
every day on Twitter. A new celebrity
went under the chopping block
of social media disapproval. The
problem is that their offenses varied
wildly, from singers Slayyyter
and Camila Cabello tweeting racist
slurs when they were teenagers
to people promising to cancel their
Amazon Prime subscriptions because
the streaming service listed
Oscar Isaac fourth in the cast of
“Star Wars: the Last Jedi.” I suppose
one could make a case that
this is a slight against a Latinx actor,
but anyone who can get angry
at Amazon over something this
petty but never spoke out about its
monopoly over web hosting, collaboration
with ICE or notoriously
abusive work conditions needs
some new priorities.
But it’s easy for pundits to
cherry-pick tweets and other social
media statements as if they
represented much larger cultural
trends. The urge to spend the week
canceling a different celebrity every
day suggests a confl ation of
stan culture — the love for tabloid
drama — and social justice. The
ambiguity of a trending hashtag
also makes it hard to perceive
irony: many of the people who
posted #AmazonPrimeisoverparty
were probably bored and trying to
blow off steam during this diffi cult
COVID period.
In the last few months, pop
singer/ rapper Doja Cat has been
called out for genuinely troubling
behavior and statements, long after
old tweets of her saying “faggot”
were unearthed and she was
already “canceled” the fi rst time.
Just after Doja Cat’s song “Say So”
hit #1, videos of her chatting with
neo-Nazis turned up, as well as
an old song named after the racist
slang phrase “Dindu Nuffi n.” Yet
“Say So” is still hanging on, and
her career does not seem to have
taken a tumble.
Kanye West has gone further
than any celebrity in recent memory
to piss off his fans, but his Yeezy
fashion line made him a billionaire
and his last album, “Jesus Is
King,” still got to #1 and went gold.
This version of cancel culture represents
a distraction akin to binging
TMZ videos, not a case of real
oppression aimed at “problematic”
celebrities.
Writers like Conor Friedersdorf,
Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Chait,
and Bari Weiss have devoted much
of their time to convincing readers
that an army of Stalinists is gathering
on college campuses. Even
though Friedersdorf and Chait
claim to be liberals, they’re de facto
propagandists for an ideology trying
to transform college into a very
expensive trade school for STEM
fi elds by demonizing liberal arts as
political indoctrination. However,
at the moment parents must be
more concerned with whether their
children will be attending college
via Zoom this fall than whether
their English class syllabus prioritizes
Toni Morrison and Chinua
Achebe over Shakespeare.
The same old debates about political
correctness dating back to
Allan Bloom’s 1987 book “The Closing
of the American Mind” are now
being recycled via cancel culture.
It’s very odd that anyone thinks
this should be a priority while
COVID is running unchecked in
the US, spreading the disease has
become a symbol of conservative
pride, and the DHS is kidnapping
protesters off Portland’s streets.
When former New York Times
columnist Weiss was a Columbia
student, she became a public fi gure
by calling for Professor Joseph
Massad to be fi red over his anti-Zionist
political views. Her supposed
championing of free speech does
not extend to people who question
the Israeli state’s merits. Psychologist
and self-help author Jordan
Peterson rose to fame by misrepresenting
a Canadian civil rights law
that added transgender people as a
protected class as an attack on his
free speech. Yet he threatened to
sue a woman who called him sexist
in a Vox article and planned to
launch a database of leftist professors
who offended him. Neo-McCarthyism,
anyone?
Feminist video game critic Anita
Sarkeesian, as well as other women
in the gaming industry, had to
cancel public appearances and
even driven from from their homes
due to death threats from far right
fanboys who couldn’t handle her
YouTube videos; the ensuing backlash
became known as GamerGate,
birthed the alt-right, and helped
America down the road leading to
Trump’s election. Laws criminalizing
support for the BDS movement
against Israel have broad support
from American politicians. Whatever
one thinks of BDS, Americans
should be free to advocate
any policy against a foreign government.
In a true violation of her
First Amendment rights, not a ban
from YouTube or a picket of a college
speech, Palestinian-American
public school teacher Bahia Amawi
was fi red in 2018 because she refused
to sign an oath declaring her
opposition to BDS. Isn’t it ironic
that journalists and novelists with
enormous institutional support,
who ridicule the concept of safe
spaces on college campuses, take
criticism as censorship when far
more vulnerable people are likely
to suffer from it?
Cases where people have been
canceled on social media with real
consequences exist. David Shor
was fi red after tweeting a study
that suggested ‘60s riots harmed
Democrats in elections. That’s appalling,
but few people have suggested
otherwise. Beauty YouTuber
James Charles was falsely accused
of being a sexual predator by several
makeup industry infl uencers
P E R S P E C T I V E : C u l t u r e Wa t c h
who had become business rivals,
which led to him losing millions of
subscribers and becoming deeply
depressed. An intra-minority debate
around trans YouTuber ContraPoints’
views on non-binary
identity blew up and led to a debacle
where her friends were told
to publicly denounce her without
knowing why.
But above a certain level, fans
will always stick around. While
ContraPoints’ video about this
situation details the pain it caused
her, offering a critique of cancel
culture grounded in a personal
experience much different from
Weiss and Sullivan’s, it’s been seen
by 2,200,000 people.
Even if J.K. Rowling’s recent dive
into unapologetic transphobia — a
faint theme lurking behind many
accusations of cancel culture run
wild — cuts her audience in half,
her next novel will still succeed beyond
the wildest dreams of most
other writers. The incidents where
careers have been ruined mostly
involve credible accusations of real
crimes committed by people whose
fans take their politics seriously,
like the queer punk band PWR
BTTM. On the eve of its second
album’s 2017 release, allegations
of sexual assault made against
singer/ guitarist Ben Hopkins led
to the group being dropped by both
record labels to which it had been
signed and its music being pulled
from streaming services.
Social media shaming exists
for several reasons. One can’t emphasize
enough that Twitter, Facebook,
and YouTube’s algorithms
are designed to promote drama
and confl ict. But another is the
failure of our legal system to deal
with sexual harassment and assault.
We’ve arrived at an odd position
where men like Woody Allen
and Louis C.K. have never stood
trial for their alleged child molestation
and admitted sexual harassment,
respectively, but the marketplace
has assigned them a penalty.
It’s as though C. K. went through
criminal proceedings with the result
that he lost $35 million (if his
➤ CANCEL CULTURE, continued on p.25
GayCityNews.com | July 30 - August 12, 2020 15
/GayCityNews.com
