Cancel culture

Tuesday

Nicky Otis Smith

Bodies Bodies Bodies cancels its characters to death

Movies that define an era — Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Easy Rider, Casablanca — rarely get stuck there, even if anachronistic references and jokes fly by without notice today (does anyone watching Fast Times today know what a mimeograph is?). Annie Hall and Nashville are as particular to mid-1970s America as they are timeless works of art, both emotional panoramas of a period filled with affluent and successful but unhappy people, confused and eventually destroyed by their own wandering eyes and broken hearts. You didn’t have to have lived through the disappointment of the late 1960s — Vietnam, all of the assassinations — to feel the exhaustion and disillusionment of these films: it’s in every frame, often unsaid.

bodies
#MeToo
Phoebe Maltz Bovy

So much for #MeToo

Five years have passed since Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey and Ronan Farrow’s Pulitzer-winning reporting on sexual misconduct in Hollywood and beyond. Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo’s Perv Patient Zero, is in prison. Bill Cosby spent three years there as well. Woody Allen — Farrow’s estranged father, one-time accused child molester and husband of his ex-partner’s adult daughter — still walks free (not having actually been charged with anything), but a bunch of A-list actors won’t work with him, and you now have to preface every mention of Annie Hall with a handwringing disclaimer. Donald Trump, well, he wasn’t reelected, which has to count for something. The world, we were assured, would never be the same.

Friday

Cockburn

Tucker Carlson grills Kanye West

Tucker Carlson has tackled a question that has long puzzled Cockburn: is Kanye West crazy? Ye has had his fair share of controversial moments: he appeared on a 2006 cover of Rolling Stone mimicking Jesus Christ with a crown of thorns. He infamously stormed the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards stage to tell Taylor Swift she didn’t deserve her award. For the past couple years, he's been battling ex-wife Kim Kardashian and her family, during which time he also became religious, started hosting Sunday Services and bought a ranch in Cody, Wyoming, which he tried to sell but then took off the market. Most recently, Ye incited establishment ire by wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt alongside conservative firebrand buddy Candace Owens at Paris Fashion Week.

ye

Friday

Ben Domenech

This season should be Saturday Night Live’s last

The 48th season of Saturday Night Live premieres tomorrow, and this one should be its last. The show has never felt more out of touch — a stale, punch-pulling iteration marked by a dim vision of what comedy can achieve in a politically and socially divisive moment. This is a target-rich environment, but SNL seems firmly of the opinion that taking shots against our current feckless leadership class is verboten. At a time when online comedy is exploding and hilarious sketches and specials abound on YouTube, SNL operates as if they have no competition. This offseason saw the show's biggest staff turnover in almost thirty years. This might have been an opportunity: if Saturday Night Live wanted to be relevant, the talent is obviously out there.

Monday

Teresa Mull

Maren Morris should transition to pop where she belongs

Country music singer Maren Morris is so open-minded, inclusive, and tolerant that she’s considering not attending a major country music awards show because someone she disagrees with will be there. Here’s the backstory: country star Jason Aldean’s wife, Brittany, posted on Instagram a video of herself getting glam, along with the caption: "I'd really like to thank my parents for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase. I love this girly life." Her husband commented: “Lmao!! I’m glad they didn’t too, cause you and I wouldn’t have worked out.” The post got a ton of support — including a pair of heart-eye emojis from Lara Trump. Then Morris lashed out online, writing: “It’s so easy to, like, not be a scumbag human?

Friday

Bethany Mandel

In defense of the ‘canceled’ Nate Hochman

It’s no fun being canceled by a mob, but it is useful in one respect: it's an easy way to tell who your friends are. Recently, a young conservative writer, Nate Hochman, learned this the hard way after a hit piece appeared on the Never Trump site the Dispatch that was in part about him and comments he made while on a Twitter Spaces call last winter. Twitter Spaces, if you (like me, before this) are unfamiliar with it, is basically a group conference call platform. In the winter, Hochman hosted a Space about what role, if any, white supremacists like Nick Fuentes should have in the conservative movement. Fuentes then showed up and the Dispatch reported what happened next: The Dispatch obtained an audio recording of the Twitter Spaces conversation from an individual who listened in.

Monday

Ashley Rindsberg

Taylor Lorenz is a crybully

The Washington Post is one of America’s most revered news organizations. Once led by Katharine Graham, an era-defining media CEO, and edited by news legend Ben Bradlee, the Post is famous for the Watergate-era journalism of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which made it the nation’s political paper of record. Today, one of the Post’s most high-profile employees is an internet-culture reporter named Taylor Lorenz. Her involvement in numerous scandals involving reporting errors, frequent falsehoods, violations of journalistic norms and troubling online interactions call into question whether outlets like the Post can continue to function effectively as the Fourth Estate in the age of online clout-chasing and click-based news.

Lorenz

Friday

Ben Domenech

Louis’s comebaC.K.

He's officially back. The past month has seen the quiet return to public life of comedian Louis C.K. as the incredibly popular — but very much canceled — creative genius has gone on a podcast tour promoting his latest film, Fourth of July, which is available to stream at his website starting August 6. His path to a comeback was made possible not just by his stature as a member of most comedians' Mount Rushmore of comics, but also by his innovative approach to connecting with his fans — an approach that was ahead of the curve at the time, and signals the path comedians may increasingly take in an era where their jokes can cause headaches for streaming services. C.K.

louis c.k.

Monday

Art Tavana

Vince McMahon’s final act

Vince McMahon displays a T-Rex skull in his office. It is mounted against blood-colored walls. But is it real? It doesn’t matter, as it’s authentically Vince McMahon to mount such a garish display of masculine bravado on his wall. It’s the kind of over-the-top centerpiece you’d expect from the mogul who built World Wrestling Entertainment into the behemoth it is today. A giant of a man, McMahon has spent four decades laughing maniacally as he feasted on the flesh of his puny competition. “It’s on my wall and symbolic of my voracious appetite for life,” he tweeted. There’s also prophetic symbolism to the dead-dinosaur skull. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that the WWE board was investigating a “secret $3 million hush pact by CEO Vince McMahon.

McMahon

Wednesday

Peter Tonguette

Charlie Rose, comeback king

For some of us, Charlie Rose serves the same function as Proust’s madeleine. His eponymous public television interview program, which began airing in 1991, was a fixture of the pre-millennium media landscape, a halcyon age in which newspapers carried the news, Amazon was a mere purveyor of books, and “woke” referred to a state of wakefulness rather than political correctness. Such nostalgia augurs well for the carefully managed reemergence of the disgraced broadcaster, who has ended his exile with new conversations thrown up on his website, charlierose.com. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Five years ago, Rose — by then, also the co-host of CBS This Morning — first became the subject of sexual misconduct allegations.

Thursday

Ben Domenech

Who will stand for free speech?

The primary feeling is a sense of dread. The oily scent of torches set aflame is in your nostrils, and the glint of pitchforks in moonlight appears on the horizon. You have, either accidentally or intentionally, said something that aroused the anger of a mob. Those of your friends who enjoy a good scrum send you laughing messages; those who are born afraid of such things ask quietly if you are all right. Your name is trending nationally and, amid it all, you worry it will never end. This is an experience that too many Americans have had in the era of social media.

speech

Saturday

Amber Duke

Alison Roman joins the cancel brigade

Alison Roman is back on YouTube with a new video on making homemade smashburgers, including some very strong opinions on how to best dress the griddled patties: iceberg lettuce, thinly sliced onion, NO TOMATO, pickles and tons of mustard. Oh, and hold the fries: instead serve ’em up with a heaping side of cancel culture. In the middle of Roman's cheeky rant about her pickiness when it comes to burgers, the cookbook author and food vlogger declares that the bun has "got to be" a "potato roll." However, Roman never actually says the "potato roll" part — it's actually dubbed in via a text-to-speech robot. When Roman holds up the package of "perfect" potato rolls, the brand name is blurred. Why?

Thursday

Teresa Mull

Matt Drudge was ahead of his time

There are two new movies in the works about internet provocateur Matt Drudge, and with the mic dropping on Roe v. Wade, today, they couldn’t come at a more appropriate time. Drudge has been dictating the national news conversation for decades, but he wasn’t always doing it out of the limelight. The tale of how a CBS Studios gift shop clerk came to inform the most powerful leader of the free world (Trump used to be a big fan) and the likes of the late Rush Limbaugh has been documented in articles, books, and a television series. Drudge went dumpster diving, found a discarded contract, and was the first to report that Jerry Seinfeld was negotiating for $1 million an episode for his show. Drudgereport.

Friday

Ben Domenech

The Cato Institute fails to stand up to cancel culture

The recent controversy over prominent legal commentator Ilya Shapiro's employment at Georgetown University Law Center ended last week. In a Wall Street Journal column on a Friday, Shapiro declared that his cancel culture nightmare was over, vindicated after a four-month investigation into a troublesome tweet. On Monday, the WSJ ran the rare immediate follow-up column, where Shapiro announced his decision to quit the university rather than subject himself to an inevitable future cancelation. Shapiro's experience was astounding in how much it reveals about the insanity of the woke left brigades, and how much their heckler's veto is empowered by the administrators at universities like Georgetown.

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Things at the Washington Post are great!

We need a complete and total shutdown of the Washington Post until we can figure out what the hell is going on. Internal drama at the Post has spilled out into the open on Twitter, resulting in the month-long suspension of national reporter Dave Weigel for a retweet of a supposedly “off-color” joke. The charge was spearheaded by politics reporter Felicia Sonmez, who days later remains on her online crusade on Twitter, divulging gossip and musing on newsroom ethics, or lack thereof. Features writer Jose A. Del Real found himself embroiled in the drama as well when he stood up for Weigel and drew Sonmez’s ire. “So I hear the Washington Post is a collegial workplace,” she tweeted, alongside a screenshot showing that Del Real had blocked her.

washington post

Saturday

Kari Jenson Gold

In defense of Joshua Katz

Last July 17, my daughter, Solveig Gold, married (then) Princeton professor Joshua Katz. It was a glorious, indeed transcendent (as one friend put it) celebration of the glory of God and the power of love — attended by a large gathering of the canceled, the not-yet-canceled and a lucky few who are seemingly uncancellable. Last month, as the world now knows, he was fired. If you haven’t yet read Solveig’s piece in Bari Weiss’s Substack, put mine aside and read hers first. It is beautiful and inspiring. Mine, by contrast, is merely mad as hell. In July 2020, Joshua published a piece in Quillette taking vigorous exception to the now infamous July 4 “Princeton faculty letter.

joshua katz

Thursday

Karol Markowicz

Canceled for Covid

No one is getting canceled, we’re told. There’s no such thing as “cancel culture.” It’s just consequence culture. People say racist, sexist, mean things and so they deserve to be fired from their jobs, stripped of their standing in society, shunned by their friends. Should Hitler have been able to keep his job after publishing Mein Kampf, huh? If only life were that simple. But mob rule is, by definition, imprecise. The people who get canceled aren’t really Hitler, of course. And somehow, actual criminals find themselves forgiven far sooner than regular folk who say something out of step with the narrow set of guidelines proffered by the worst, wokest people in society. Still, there’s something different about the people canceled for their Covid views.

covid

Friday

Cockburn

Netflix changes woke course after Chappelle attack

Cockburn has always said that when the going gets tough, the tough gets going…to a bar. But when the going gets tough for giant corporations — in this case, “tough” meaning $50 billion in lost subscriptions for Netflix — companies tend to get going in whatever direction will induce the mob to keep paying for their goods and services. Netflix has done just that by updating its “corporate culture memo” to let employees know they may have to work on material that triggers them. And letting them know if they don’t like it, they can leave. Over the course of the last several months, as he kept searching in a stupor for The Crown in the wee hours, Cockburn began to notice an increase in the amount of Netflix programming featuring in-your-face progressive messaging.

Friday

Teresa Mull

Having fun again on Derby Day

The woes of the world are a’plenty. People are anxious, stressed-out, and burned-out. It seems that no matter what side of the political aisle you gravitate toward, there’s a new battle to be fought at the dawn of each day. Even innocent settings — school board meetings, comedy shows, the Magic Kingdom itself — are not immune from partisan vitriol. Luckily for us, though, this is Derby Day, which means it’s the perfect time to do something about the very real but underreported disorder that’s been plaguing our society for a while now: we’ve forgotten how to have fun. It’s a contagious disease that affects brain function and mood, and if left untreated, could result in everyone becoming a smug, humorless elitist (a prognosis worse than Covid).

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

When ‘words are violence’ turns to actual violence

In the wake of comedian Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special The Closer, activists both online and off warned that Chappelle’s jokes about the trans community would lead to real-world harm, even murder. Instead the trans community has struck first by attacking Chappelle onstage. In his special, Chappelle tells the story of a trans person and friend who defended his stand-up material. Chappelle offered his friend career help by having her open for him on stage. Yet after being bullied by the trans mob for supporting Chappelle, his friend committed suicide. Earlier this week, Chappelle himself was physically attacked at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, during a comedy set that saw many famous faces, including Elon Musk and Chris Rock, in the audience.