How Cancel Culture Must End

 

I am inclined to be overoptimistic. I have been wrong about this before. But I feel we might be at the tipping point. 

It is like the story of the boy who cried wolf. You lie once too often, and get caught, and it is all over. 

In Canada, the lies the government and media are telling about the behavior of the “Freedom Convoy” look like this to me. Their wild claims do not match the many visuals all can see on YouTube.

More broadly, their claims about Covid are no longer believed by a large portion of the public, as the Ottawa rally demonstrates.

I think, when the pandemic hit, the governing elites, in the civil service, the universities, the media, the schools, were already in a state of paranoid hysteria, seeing their positions threatened by the new technology.

As a result, they have overreached to the pandemic. They were already afraid of losing control, so they conceived this as a greater threat than it was. And, given control as a result, they are having a hard time releasing their grip. Their knuckles are whitening.

The pandemic, the lockdowns, and the vaccine mandates now become the symbolic rallying point for the opposition, and may bring them down altogether.

I think by now, it is dawning on the average person that the elites are either insane or consistently lying, and the reasonable guys are on the other side.

Joe Rogan stands as the perfect image of this: he is so transparently just folks, straight and honest. And so many people have listened to him, for hours, that it is hard to make any slandering of his actual views stick. It looks suicidal for the leftists to have gone after him.

But they had already gone after Don Cherry, and J.K. Rowling, and the president of the United States, and the logic of revolutionary prestige is that they always wanted to get credit for a bigger and more improbable scalp. It was bound to end in their destruction when they overreached. If they have not yet, they inevitably will.

This also looks like the point at which the guillotine is turned on the Committee for Public Safety itself. Attempting to cancel Joe Rogan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Stephen Stills are cancelling themselves. Whoopi Goldberg got herself suspended for two weeks, and reputedly is threatening to quit—self-cancellation. Her colleagues on The View are also threatening to cancel themselves in protest. Jeff Zucker over at CNN cancelled himself, apparently with a push from Chris Cuomo, whom he cancelled a month or so ago. Arguably, he was this revolution’s Robespierre.

At some point, it makes the most sense not to cower and obey, but to turn on the censors and guillotine them before they get around to guillotining you. Because eventually they will get around to you no matter what you do. So there is a growing incentive for people who feel relatively safe to risk turning openly against the cancel culture. Jon Stewart seems to be a recent convert. John Cleese. Elon Musk.  This natural tendency, once it starts, and it seems to have started, means that in short order, the radical censors find themselves as the small irrelevant fringe.