The Reality of Cancel Culture By chris Knight

     We have been covering aspects of the cancel culture phenomena, which has mainly been discussed in the Alternative press, the mainstream, despite all evidence, regarding such claims as conspiratorial. But, some are breaking rank:
  https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2020/07/12/virgil-welcome-to-year-one-all-prior-history-is-cancelled/
  https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/yes-cancel-culture-is-real-and-its-dangerous

““Cancel culture” doesn't exist, leftists say out of one side of their mouths. At the same time, out of the other side of their mouths, they are cheering on the online mobs that seek to shame and even ruin the lives of those deemed to have committed thought crimes. This is gaslighting, and it is absurd. Cancel culture is real, and it’s a dangerous threat to a society that once prided itself on open speech. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has been leading calls to boycott Goya Foods after the CEO complimented President Trump, waded into the debate in her predictably shallow manner on Twitter last week. “People who are actually 'canceled' don’t get their thoughts published and amplified in major outlets,” she wrote. “This has been a public service announcement.” Ocasio-Cortez added, “The term ‘cancel culture’ comes from entitlement — as though the person complaining has the right to a large, captive audience,& one is a victim if people choose to tune them out. Odds are you’re not actually canceled, you’re just being challenged, held accountable, or unliked.” The trigger, if you will, for Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet thread was likely the recent controversy over the publication of a letter in Harper's Magazine, in which many authors and academics defended the idea of open debate. The list included many liberal voices, such as Noam Chomsky. It also included other prominent names such as Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who has come under fire for making the completely obvious declaration that biological sex is real and for criticizing radical transgender activists for the damage they are doing to young women.

The Harper’s letter, however, was not intended as a list of people who are claiming to have been canceled. Rather, it was an example of those with a platform defending the concept of open debate on behalf of those who lack a platform yet have suffered the wrath of the outrage mobs. As the letter noted, in the current climate, “editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.” In one recent example, David Shor, a 28-year-old data analyst who worked on President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, sent out a tweet summarizing a study by Princeton professor Omar Wasow which found that historically, riots have hurt Democrats’ vote shares, while nonviolent protests increased the Democratic vote. In the outrage storm that followed, Shor was accused of “minimizing black grief and rage” and of making coworkers feel less safe. He apologized, but it was too late — he was promptly fired from his job at Civis Analytics. Last month, the Washington Post took the extraordinary step of publishing a 3,000-word investigation into a tasteless costume worn by a virtually unknown private citizen to a 2018 Halloween party at the house of the paper’s cartoonist. That person was promptly fired from her unrelated job.

In 2019, Carson King, a 24-year-old security guard who appeared on an ESPN college pregame show holding a sign asking for beer money, went viral, and as donations flooded in, he ended up raising $1 million for charity. But that prompted the Des Moines Register to publish insensitive tweets he had posted when he was 16. In the resulting backlash, Anheuser-Busch, which had previously agreed to match charitable donations, severed ties with him. Young conservative Kyle Kashuv saw his admission to Harvard University rescinded after racist comments he had made in a group chat at age 16 were exposed. He apologized and explained that he had changed a lot in the intervening years — particularly after having survived the Parkland school shooting. But it was to no avail. In Hollywood, there have been countless examples of cancellations, some of them literal. Rosanne Barr's show, Rosanne, was canceled over a racist joke she tweeted. Kevin Hart was canceled as host of the Academy Awards for past homophobic tweets that weren't even news — he had previously apologized for them. Of course, not all cancellations are created equal. There is clearly a distinction between celebrities who are already well off losing out on gigs for comments they made as adults and people with no public profile who lose out on opportunities and jobs due to old statements and actions from their high school years. And not every lame joke that leads to cancellation has the same implications for speech as the shutting down of academic discourse. That said, there are multiple ways in which the current climate of cancellation is so dangerous. For one thing, there is no way we can evolve into a more tolerant society if all people are deemed irremediably racist for things they wrote as teenagers and if major publications target non-public figures.”

     Here is some reading material on the culture of wokeness, tracing its philosophical roots to cultural Marxism and postmodernist relativism, which is odd, since relativism undermines cultural Marxism, for if all positions are equal, so is cultural Marxism with its anti-thesis. But, logical consistency is not something the Left are known for.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSHL-rSMIro&feature=emb_title
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoi9omtAiNQ&feature=emb_title
  http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2020/07/07/intro-to-woke-supremacy/