Cancel culture

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.

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

Tuesday

Paul du Quenoy

New York City’s desperate attempt to lure Floridians

In his latest desperate attempt to prove that New York is “back,” the city’s hapless mayor Eric Adams has taken a hysterical potshot at Florida — a much happier jurisdiction to where many of his constituents have had the good sense to move. Adams announced that private funds made available to his cash-strapped city would be used to place billboard and digital ads in five booming Florida markets: Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. These ads invite Floridians to “come to a city where you can say and be whoever you want.” The jibe is directed at Florida’s recently approved Parental Rights in Education bill, which prohibits instruction in sexuality and gender identity for children from kindergarten through third grade.

Monday

Amber Duke

I was fired for a joke about Kamala Harris’s outfit

I am no stranger to cancel culture — or what we know more commonly (and accurately, in my opinion) as censorship. When I was one of a handful of conservatives on a liberal college campus, my peers on the left reported me to our resident advisor for "creating an unsafe environment" and demanded the administration step in to cancel speaker events I hosted through the College Republicans. They later would ask the university to revoke my degree. Throughout my six years as a political journalist and commentator, left-wing activists have tried every trick in the book to drive me out of the industry: digging up old tweets, demeaning my appearance and harassing my employers. None of it has worked... until now.

cancel culture

Thursday

Karol Markowicz

There’s nothing ‘pro-trans’ about deleting women

I can pinpoint the moment I knew I wouldn’t be able to remain, as I had thought of myself until that time, “pro-trans.” I had grown up in 1990s New York City and had known many gender-bending people. Very few called themselves “trans,” but androgyny was in. Drag queens ran the club scene. “Girls who want boys/Who like boys to be girls/Who do boys like they're girls/Who do girls like they're boys,” the 1994 Blur song went. What was the big deal about being a girl who wanted to look like a boy or a boy who wanted to present as a girl? No one was hurting anyone. You like red lipstick, that boy likes wearing a dress. Who cared? I certainly didn’t. It was the early 2000s, the heyday of the blogosphere, and the comment sections were lit.

Monday

Teresa Mull

Cancel culture gets its comeuppance

Cancel culture has struck again, but this time its would-be victims aren’t apologizing. The Daily Mail — a publication notorious for being “free” with its own speech — is leading the anti-cancel culture charge this month with a series of stories that point to an encouraging trend. A handful of prominent creatives are standing up to woke bullies and noting the dangers (and impracticalities) of their demands, which essentially amount to writers and entertainers forsaking their imaginative talents by only addressing things they’ve personally experienced. Except they aren’t supposed to be candid about those things, either, as they might offend someone if they’re too honest.

Thursday

Peter Wood

When Harvard canceled a black professor

Roland G. Fryer is a tenured professor of economics at Harvard — an anointed member of the elite by most definitions. He is also black, widely published and the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur “genius” grant for his work on the black “achievement gap” in grade school. Fryer was a student of Nobel laureate Gary Becker and a close associate of other economists who focus on rigorous analysis of empirical data. That's led him to observations that were a bit unsettling to higher education orthodoxies. For example, Fryer found that the academic achievement gap accelerates between kindergarten and eighth grade. He also found that controlling for a few variables, the initial disparity disappeared.

Joan Collins
Joan Collins and Taki

Hollywood, fist-fights and getting canceled

Introductions Scene: a drawing room in London. When the recording starts, Taki is already mid-anecdote... Taki: I was sent out to Monte Carlo to speak to Roger Moore. The Spectator offered to pay all my expenses. I said thank you, I’ll pay my own. I went and had a terrific drunken dinner with Roger who really spilled the beans, cos we were buddies. I came back. The tape was empty because I’d never turned the recorder on. Joan: I’d known Roger since I was fifteen, because my father was a big agent in London and I came back from school — oh, fourteen actually, because I left school at fifteen — and there’s the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen standing there. He came over and said, “How do you do? You must be Joan, my name is Roger Moore.

Sunday

Zoe Strimpel

Peter Boghossian’s fight for freedom

The prospect of my meeting with Peter Boghossian seemed to have angered the gods, so furious was the disruption to road and rail as I tried to make my way from Seattle to Portland. Torrential rain and flash floods summoned a ricochet of mudslides which abruptly terminated my Amtrak journey in Centralia, a middle-of-nowhere town in Washington State. There was no rail in either direction for at least forty-eight hours, no buses and seemingly just one Lyft — which I managed to slip into an hour later with a few other stranded passengers. Or perhaps it was the anger of very particular gods that rule over the Pacific Northwest, that hotbed of wokeness so concentrated you can feel it like toxic humidity in the air.

boghossian

Monday

Peter Jones

Twitter has taken the place of the ancient curse-tablet

Twitter and other easily accessible means of online communication have encouraged the public to believe that Their Voice Will Be Heard. When it isn’t, they express their frustration through abuse and threats or by blocking roads. In this way, the mentality of the ancient curse-tablet lives on. In the Ancient world, the purpose of the curse was to “bind” the person you disliked — i.e. frustrate them from achieving the end they wanted and you did not. It was written on a thin lead plate, rolled up tight, sometimes twisted (to “hobble” the victim) and pinned (to constrain him), then placed into the tomb of someone who had died before his time. The belief was that the dead man, resentful of his early demise, would be happy to enact the curse against the named victim.

curse-tablet

Monday

Teresa Mull

Country music drowns out cancel culture

They got him! Another prominent white male called out by the mainstream media for being racist has had his career destroyed, tossed down the memory hole, never to drawl about beer, trucks, or girls ever again! Or did they? In January 2021, the 28-year-old, mullet-rocking, cutoff flannel shirt-wearing, small-town Tennessee country music star Morgan Wallen arrived home late at night (or early in the morning?) with his friends and yelled by means of farewell to one of them, “Take care of this p****-ass mother******  — Take care of this p****-ass n*****.

reformation
Grayson Quay

The Tudor roots of wokecraft

In January 2019, I received an email from an administrator at Georgetown University, where I was a graduate student. She and my department chair wanted to meet with me to “discuss concerns that have been raised by some of your peers about classroom comments and behavior.” This meeting, they told me, would “function as the start of a conversation.” They didn’t say where the conversation might lead. I concluded that the next step would be a formal disciplinary hearing. I was terrified. Three-quarters through a two-year program, I was in danger of being forced to leave without a degree. And for what? I scanned my memory for deviant statements. There were a few: I’d alluded in print to certain essential biological differences between men and women.

Sunday

Micah Mattix

Lionel Trilling against cancel culture

You’re sick of cancel culture, and you’re not alone. Just last week, the fashion designer Tom Ford complained that cancel culture “‘inhibits design’ because ‘everything is now considered appropriation’ and designers can no longer ‘celebrate other cultures’.” The actress Dakota Johnson, famous until recently for being the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, told The Hollywood Reporter she finds the whole thing — and I do mean the whole thing — sad. “I feel sad for the loss of great artists. I feel sad for people needing help and perhaps not getting it in time. I feel sad for anyone who was harmed or hurt. It’s just really sad.

Monday

Alexander Larman

Mel Gibson defies the keyboard cancelers

News that the John Wick spin-off TV series The Continental has cast its lead actor has produced an unusual amount of vitriol. Was this because it was not an actor of color, a trans performer or some other member of a minority? No: it was because it was Mel Gibson, the walking bête noire for liberals in Hollywood. As many other outspoken conservative or simply unsavory figures (hello, Kevin Spacey! Greetings, Armie Hammer!) have found their careers curtailed for their antics, Mel Gibson’s continued ability to book high-profile acting roles has driven the sharp-fingered mob of social media into a frenzy of disdain. Granted, Gibson’s star has waned considerably since his heyday in the Eighties and Nineties.

mel gibson

Monday

Christopher Sandford

The Rolling Stones cancel themselves

First, the good news. Despite the recent death of drummer Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones are back among us, playing a series of sold-out US stadium shows between now and Thanksgiving. It’s not just that the three surviving band members, now all in their seventies, refuse to grow up. They seem actually to live in a time warp: in an era when most rock stars dress like they work at UPS and offer a relentless diet of screwed-up nihilism and phony salves, the Stones are still out there in their skimpy, Day-Glo T-shirts and leather pants, serving up great meat-and-potato rock songs garnished with lyrics about sex and drugs, and generally carrying on like it’s 1967 all over again. Now the bad news.

rolling stones
Dr Byram Bridle (University of Guelph)
Jane Stannus

Crush the science

Something is rotten at the University of Guelph. Just what deceased creature has gotten stuck under the floorboards remains unclear, but a strong odor of something that’s not right assails the nostrils when one reads the open letter recently penned by Dr Byram Bridle, an immunologist and tenured professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, addressed to the president of the university. What has happened at Guelph is a useful case study for everyone, because vaccine mandates are spreading like the plague they aim to cure.

Wednesday

Matt Purple

Jeopardy! is in trouble

THIS...iiiiiis Jeopardy! And it’s time now for today’s final answer. This pack of gibbering monsters is witlessly tearing down everything that’s good and decent about our society. What is us? All of us. The vicious and grievance-obsessed people we’ve become. Jeopardy! is that rarest of American traditions, one that really hasn’t changed. The quiz show has remained a granite bulwark against the pop-cultural tides: same sober presentation and aesthetic, same challenging questions and unforgiving pace. There are no blazing graphics, no CGI car chases through downtown Montpelier during the ‘State Capitals’ category. There hasn’t even been a crossover with the Real Housewives — ‘Bitch, the largest fossil-fuels producer in Central Asia isn’t Uzbekistan!

jeopardy

Sunday

Christopher Sandford

Fatty Arbuckle’s fall

Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle (1887-1933) never won an Oscar or saw his name emblazoned on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but he should be remembered as a movie pioneer. Despite his considerable physical size, he was a remarkably versatile and agile actor, and his best films are weirdly droll as much as slapstick funny. He predated both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as a master of physical comedy played with a straight face. Arbuckle was also an accidental pioneer of cancel culture. Exactly a hundred years ago, he found himself sitting in a cell on ‘felony row’ at the downtown San Francisco jail, held without bail for the alleged rape and subsequent death of a 26-year-old actress named Virginia Rappe.

fatty arbuckle