Posted on July 21, 2024

Who Cancels Whom?

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, July 21, 2024


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I know many people who have had their lives wrecked by “cancel culture.” They lost jobs, spouses, houses, friends, and social networks. Some are permanently unemployable for anything but manual labor.

This has real consequences. Politics revolves around the friend/enemy distinction and patron/client relationships. Those on the Right learn quickly that few on “their side” will defend them from an attack by antifa magnified by media. Few institutions or leaders will protect them. Progressives can count on a network of nonprofits, lawyers, and friendly media to ensure that even “extremists” find new berths.

Van Jones was dropped by the Obama White House after conservatives publicized his connections to communists and conspiracy theorists. Today, he lectures Americans about what is acceptable discourse from his perch at CNN. There is no right-wing equivalent to left-wing terrorists like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn getting prestigious university posts.

Such recoveries are hard to imagine for conservative dissidents. We have made progress advancing our issues within the Right, but that’s not much benefit to people who were the vanguard. There will be no tributes at CPAC to Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, or even Pat Buchanan. Metaphorically speaking, the vanguard chokes the rivers with the corpses of their careers so respectable conservatives can walk across and pretend they led the fight the entire time. The limited professional success Steve Sailer now enjoys may be a sign this is changing, but within careful limits.

This ”imagine if the roles were reversed” situation is obvious, but the reasons for it are less clear.

One reason is political will. For most on the Right, politics isn’t their top priority. It’s not their religion. Some Christians even seem to believe there is a kind of virtue in losing, because it proves their virtue and ensures a heavenly reward.

More broadly, a conservatism that is based on “limited government” can lead to a belief that power is inherently bad and that it is immoral to use it. Of course, any political movement that believes this is not really a political movement, because politics is competition for power. A movement that tells its followers that power is bad is preparing them for endless defeat.

In contrast, it is because progressive goals are utopian and impossible that they can motivate people to fight. Human equality is impossible. Different groups will never perform at the same level. There will always be classes. Human differences do not come just from education, social conditions, or luck, but from biology. It is more accurate to say that class is a biological construct than that race is a social construct.

Therefore, leftists can never truly “win” or achieve their goals. This is a strategic advantage. They are always fighting privilege. They are always in the right. They are never the ones in power; the are perpetual underdogs — even now. They must never let up, because there is always an enemy to fight: nature itself. Impossible demands fuel their zeal rather than weaken it. This is inherent to leftism.

A second reason leftists can punish enemies is because the system is on their side. It is not clear whether most activists are progressives because the system is biased that way and they want to go along with it, or whether the system is biased because most activists are lefties.

Either way, civil rights, “sexual harassment,” DEI, “anti-colonialism,” “trans rights,” etc., give non-whites, non-Christians, and non-straight people (and sometimes women) great power. Whatever the letter or intent of the law, it is essentially illegal to offend these people. There is no freedom of association that would allow them to be excluded.

Furthermore, because concepts such as “hostile work environment” are subjective, the more neurotic and easily offended a person is, the more power he has. Higher education trains America’s brightest in new ways to be offended, to use hurt feelings to gain power. Their professors probably believe what they are saying, and this changes institutional reality.

With universities and media tilted hard left, conservatives always hear leftist reasoning and understand progressives much better than the reverse. This should make conservatives better debaters, because they understand their opponents. In practice, they almost never have a chance to debate. Progressives have no sympathy for conservatives, fear them, and use naked repression to silence and punish them. On a less extreme level, progressives are less likely to be friends with anyone who disagrees with them.

Thus, almost everyone right-of-center understands that there are opinions, symbols, or phrases that are taboo. It doesn’t matter if you are a politician, celebrity, professor, or nobody. You don’t have to do anything except stand there. Ask Nick Sandmann of Covington Catholic or Christopher Healy of Furman University. Many leftists have no understanding of this.

The Left is now getting a slight taste of its own medicine. The band “Tenacious D” put its tour on hold after a member defended the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. The X account “Libs of TikTok” is highlighting people who either defended the attempted murder, or even celebratied the death of Trump supporter Corey Comperatore in the audience. Some of these people have lost their jobs.

Some argue that conservatives who join in cancel campaigns are hypocrites, because the Right is supposed to be against “cancel culture.”

If Barack Obama were wounded in an assassination attempt, no progressives would proudly defend people who publicly wished the shooter hadn’t missed. Besides, explicitly defending acts of violence and encouraging future ones is not the same as making a politically incorrect joke or gesture. Conservatives lost careers or were hounded into suicide for far less.

Unfortunately, reason, logical consistency, or principles have little to do with which side wins in politics. If conservatives are squeamish about even this level of “cancel culture,” they can give up on mass deportations or cracking down on crime. Their nerve will break after the first sob story or sad picture.

However, there is a principle at stake worth talking about. The conservative debate over “cancel culture” misses the point because progressives have a vast media/legal/university system that almost gives them veto power over the jobs and public access of people they don’t like. We may not be able to do anything about the Right’s political will, but we may be able to do something about that system.

Exit Group blog, written by someone who was doxed, says:

The debate about this phenomenon among conservatives has been framed largely in moral terms: is it fair to do this to some poor old lady? Is it proportionate? Is it hypocritical to institute “right wing cancel culture” when we’ve spent the last decade resisting it from the Left? Are we “no better than them” if we do “the same thing” when we are “in power”?

The problem is, we aren’t in power — not even close.

“Cancellation”, as characterized by its leftist proponents, is simply the result of doing and saying things that a lot of people don’t like. If you do something that enough people don’t like, you will find yourself proscribed in your professional and social opportunities.

They are right that there’s nothing unfair, and certainly nothing unconstitutional, about facing social opprobrium for unpopular speech and behavior. People have no moral obligation to listen to speech they find repulsive, or patronize businesses whose agendas they reject.

That is what happened to Dylan Mulvaney, and it’s what is currently happening to Jack Black [of Tenacious D].

But it’s not what has been happening to us for the last decade.

The reason you can get fired for liking a Steve Sailer tweet, or donating $25 to a legal defense fund, isn’t because of a Groundswell of Popular Outrage — it’s because your employer can face 9-figure fines if they refuse to enforce a particular set of social strictures. . . .

It turns out, nobody actually cares if an entry-level finance drone [like me] thinks that feminism sucks.

But it wasn’t about a “social media outrage mob”. My employer was a glowie intelligence contractor — they didn’t “cave to popular pressure”. They don’t even sell to the public.

It was about avoiding the threat of being sued for creating a Hostile Work Environment by allowing my words to go unpunished. They fired me to comply with federal law.

Richard Hanania makes this case in The Origins of Woke. Federal law essentially bans right-wing opinions about sex, race, or patriotism from the workplace, and requires left-wing opinions. The attempt to ban racial discrimination and segregation spawned an ever-expanding bureaucracy that tries to solve the unsolvable problem of group inequality

The shock of losing jobs because they praised an assassination attempt has put progressives on the back foot for now, but employers still have to make sure they won’t be sued by non-whites, gays, women, or other protected classes. The Right’s advantage will wear off in a few days.

One solution would be to repeal the Civil Rights Act and restore private property rights and freedom of association. Private employers should be able to hire or fire anyone for any reason, and should be able to refuse service to whomever they wish. This will almost certainly not happen. The “Civil Rights Revolution” is far more central to what passes for American identity today than the American Revolution.

The best tactic may therefore be for conservatives to push to make opinions expressed outside the workplace a protected category. Some progressive outliers could be cited as inspiration. This would make sure that right-wingers can’t be fired for going to a rally, hosting a podcast, or donating money. Because so much of left-wing politics is driven by privileges for protected classes, leftist politics is largely protected by the state. Political freedom for the Right is not protected, and it won’t be unless employers stand to lose a lot of money for discriminating against people with dissident opinions.

I will not shed tears for progressives who, probably for the first times in their lives, are hurt because of extreme views. Yet I will not pretend that the underlying structure has shifted. Punishing ordinary leftists for their opinions would be effective — if it were done on a mass scale and over a long time. That won’t happen.

The problem of political will on the American Right is a long-term struggle, but we can change the legal incentives that give us so many scolds, snitches, and neurotics. Conservatives may even be able to say a few hapless progressive “victims” were an inspiration for such protective laws. There is an opportunity here, but it means changing the system while the Right has a chance. We can’t grab a few meaningless scalps and declare victory. The “principled” stance of protecting political opinion may now be the most practical one.

About Gregory Hood

View all posts by Gregory Hood
Mr. Hood is a staff writer for American Renaissance. He has been active in conservative groups in the US. You can follow him on Gab.