Cancel culture

Thursday

Justin Lee

Jeanine Cummins is guilty — of writing a bad book

Flatiron Books has canceled the promotional tour for Jeanine Cummins’s new novel American Dirt due to ‘safety concerns’. Cummins’s novel, which follows a Mexican mother and her young son as they flee cartel violence and seek asylum in the United States, is intended to spur readers’ sympathy at a time when Americans are increasingly indifferent to the plight of refugees. Instead she is the target of rancor and her book the target of censorship.‘I’ve never in my life seen this kind of public flogging,’ said novelist Ann Patchett, defending Cummins even as other writers signed an open letter asking Oprah Winfrey to rescind her endorsement.The outrage is following a familiar script.

american dirt jeanine cummins

Tuesday

Gavin McInnes

The mob and me: my life in the crosshairs

Millennial journo-geeks have declared cancel culture over. Tim Pool cites Ricky Gervais’s ability to host the Golden Globes despite a campaign to stop him and J.K. Rowling’s refusal to apologize for insisting there are only two genders. TIME magazine’s resident black Muslim Sarah Hagi also claims that cancel culture is a non-issue and tells us, ‘While some powerful men may not have the status they once did, they have hardly been canceled.’ She then goes on to cite Louis C.K.’s recent sold-out shows. She ignores the fact that his sexual transgressions cost him $35 million and forced him into hiding for half a decade. Well, as someone who has been canceled, I can tell you this culture is far from over.

gavin mcinnes

Sunday

Amber Duke

The left’s real cause is muzzling its opponents

In February 2019, I appeared on the now-defunct NRATV to discuss anti-Semitic comments that Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib had made. Timothy Johnson, a so-called researcher for Media Matters for America who has spent nearly a decade lying in wait for conservative pundits, was watching. He didn’t like that I opposed the new de facto leaders of the Democratic party. In revenge, he posted several screenshots of inappropriate jokes about Jewish people I made on Twitter seven years earlier. The screenshots went viral. My mentions and DMs flooded with demands for an apology, calls for my firing and orders that I kill myself. Bookers reached out to tell me that upcoming television and radio appearances were canceled.

amber athey

Saturday

Douglas Murray

How to fight back against ‘cancel culture’

From our UK edition

‘Cancel culture’ is a horrible term because outside of a dictatorship nobody can actually be ‘canceled’ or otherwise ‘disappeared’. All that can happen is that people can be found to have trodden across one of the orthodoxies of the age. A small number of bullies then come for them. And a larger number of otherwise decent people then fail to stand up for them. It is this last part of the matter that is worth focusing on. It is the only part that is fixable. All ages have their orthodoxies. And if writers, artists, thinkers and comedians do not occasionally tread on them, then they are not doing their jobs. Meanwhile human nature remains what it is.

Friday

Ben Sixsmith

Why aren’t leftists happy Joe Rogan endorsed Bernie?

As a twenty-something man who spends excessive amounts of time on the internet I have of course watched countless hours of The Joe Rogan Experience. Like any viewer, I know the martial artist-cum comedian-cum-actor-cum-commentator-cum-podcaster's irritating traits. He is morbidly obsessed with mind-altering drugs. He has a dilettante's weakness for pseudoscience. Worst of all, he — or, at least, his production company — censors people who make fun of his friends, despite his oft-expressed opposition to censorship. But whatever our complaints with the joke-cracking, pad-kicking, pot-smoking, elk-killing renaissance man we have to admire the range of his talents and the scale of his energy. And, besides, listen to anyone talking for hours and you will find a lot to dislike.

joe rogan
canceled cancel culture
Toby Young

So you’ve been canceled. Here’s how to fight back

In April 2017, a group of students at Dartmouth College met with Dr David Bucci to complain about sexual harassment in the department of psychological and brain sciences that he chaired. The allegations didn’t sound particularly grave — none of the students complained of rape, for instance — but Dr Bucci flagged it up with the Title IX office even so. It was that office’s responsibility to follow up sexual harassment complaints and it duly did, suspending three professors and mounting several investigations. You can imagine Dr Bucci’s surprise, therefore, when seven female students named him in a lawsuit they filed against Dartmouth 19 months later, accusing him of ignoring the original complaint.

Thursday

Daryl Austin

A hostile media helps Donald Trump

The news media of the late 1700s and early 1800s consisted almost entirely of partisan political operations. Ron Chernow, the biographer of Washington and Hamilton, describes the newspapers of that era as 'avowedly partisan’, with 'no pretense of objectivity'. It was, Chernow, writes, a 'golden age for wielding words as rapier-sharp political weapons’. Some two centuries later, we are returning to a media landscape in which the majority of sources are 'avowedly partisan' with little pretense of the objectivity that only a few decades ago was a hallmark of American journalism.

media

Friday

Spectator Editorial

Tyranny of the minority

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, the Romans used to say: ‘Of the dead speak only good.’ We can speak nothing else of the friend and longtime Spectator contributor we lost in January. Sir Roger Scruton was a fearless and humane advocate for art, beauty, faith, peoplehood and tradition; a fierce defender of the right to free and honest speech; and a clear-eyed advocate for the legal inheritances and cultural unity of the English-speaking peoples. He was one of the first people to undergo ordeal by ‘cancel culture’, or persecution by progressives, which is why we dedicate this free-speech issue to him. In the early 1980s, Roger was effectively expelled from the academy for expressing conservative opinions in public.

Thursday

Niall Gooch

Barack Obama helped create cancel culture. Now he condemns it

Like many others, I was very struck by recent footage of Barack Obama criticizing cancel culture. Less than three years since he left the White House, he already feels like a figure from another age. No doubt this is partly due to the contrast between his demeanor and that of his successor, which could hardly be more marked. As the now-viral video comparing Trump’s speech on Sunday to Obama’s statement on the death of Bin Laden shows, Obama played the statesman role well. Donald Trump just seems to relish being at the heart of a 24-hour traveling circus of provocation and outrage. But there is another reason why Obama has a slightly old-fashioned feel, so soon after leaving office. The right has changed, yes – but so has the left.

barack obama

Tuesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

The Hunt and conservative cancel culture

Cancel culture claimed another victim this week. This time it was The Hunt, a Universal Studios thriller in which a group of — presumably liberal — elites go around hunting and killing ‘deplorables' for sport. The premise is awful, and it does nothing to encourage the kind of spiritual healing Marianne Williamson correctly believes our nation so badly needs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8IifEu67yU But consider some other cinematographic successes. ABC’s Designated Survivor tells the story of a terror attack that wiped out the entire American government, leaving a lowly Secretary of Housing with the job of Commander in Chief.

the hunt