Cancel culture

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.

Tuesday

Jesse Singal

The problem with being anti-woke

From our UK edition

I'm going to do something that will likely annoy you, dear reader: I am going to make an argument about a certain class of people without naming names. If I do name names, any response will devolve into a debate over whether I am unfairly tarring the individuals in question. That’s beside the point, because the phenomenon in question is undoubtedly real. That phenomenon is anti-wokeness curdling into reactionary crankery. Don’t get me wrong: as I’ve previously written, I think there’s a moral panic afoot in many liberal institutions. Whether you want to call it 'wokeness' or something else, it seems undeniably the case that a culture of illiberalism has corroded these spaces.

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.

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

NASCAR is where free speech crashes and burns

It’s Cinco de Mayo, and if you so much as think about using this day to indulge in Chili’s Margarita of the Month, I will have you undergoing sensitivity training faster than you can say “extra salt on the rim.” You see, applying a firm image to a person, thing, or group is wrong (even if it means massive profits for our Mexican neighbors by way of 335,000 gallons of tequila consumed on a single May 5). Or at least NASCAR thinks so, as the corporation plays politically correct whack-a-mole with drivers who say things they don’t like. The latest victim of almost-cancel culture is Denny Hamlin. Last Sunday’s race at Talladega Superspeedway ended with Kyle Larson “battling for the win approaching the start-finish line,” reports the Charlotte Observer.

Thursday

Jack Wakefield

Why Christie’s is wrong to cancel Eric Gill

From our UK edition

Eric Gill was an incestuous paedophile and his own letters prove it, but the value of his work can run into millions of pounds. So it was a surprise to hear rumours that auction house Christie’s will no longer be accepting his art. Will they really be turning away all Gills, even the masterpieces? I asked one Christie’s employee for confirmation. ‘Yes,’ they said. ‘It would not be consistent to refuse to sell the Gill trifles but continue to sell his masterpieces.’ The Christie’s press office said they wouldn’t comment, which is a shame because the decision raises interesting questions. Why single Gill out?

Tuesday

Amber Duke

Washington Post lies in defense of Taylor Lorenz

The Washington Post is defending a widely criticized article that "exposed" the creator of the viral Twitter account, "Libs of TikTok." The article, published Monday, was authored by tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, who has come under fire for her questionable journalistic ethics. Lorenz used information sourced by a former Twitter employee to reveal the identity of the Libs of TikTok account owner, who chose to operate the account anonymously and is otherwise a private citizen. The Post reporter even showed up to the home of the account owner's relatives and harassed a random Instagram user with a similar name, asserting that she was going to be "implicated as starting a hate campaign against LGBTQ people.

Taylor Lorenz attends VidCon 2019

Monday

Alexander Larman

Standing with J.K. Rowling

When Roland Barthes wrote his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” he probably didn’t intend that, fifty-five years later, a major American news outlet would be provocatively suggesting that the world’s bestselling author should be de-personed, de-platformed or de-materialized from history. And yet that is exactly what has happened with the New York Times. They recently ran a series of advertisements on the subway featuring a reader named “Lianna” who is, as much of their subscriber base now are, “breaking the binary,” experiencing “queer love in color” and meditating on “heritage in rich cues.” So far, so predictable. But the ads took a grimmer turn when one suggested that Lianna was “imagining Harry Potter without its creator.

Rowling

Thursday

Cockburn

The new ‘conservative’ cancel culture

Working at The Spectator has its perks. The unflinching resolve of the world’s oldest English-language magazine in the face of cancel culture is just one of them. Cockburn has been threatened by shrill delusional mobs in his time with the Speccie — but now it’s the turn of his glamorous colleague Amber Athey, who was defenestrated from her radio side hustle at WMAL-DC following complaints about a joke she tweeted about Kamala Harris’s State of the Union outfit. In the week that Amber went public with the reasons for her ouster, WMAL-DC issued the following unrelated tweet: BREAKING: @elonmusk takes a majority steak in @Twitter . Big tech is shaking! - Tune in live for more on the stories that matter to you: https://WMAL.

cancel culture