Cancel culture

If you’ve ever smugly pulled out your cellphone to record a confrontation with a stranger, hoping to publicly humiliate that person and even destroy their life, you’re probably a Karen of the worst ilk. Likewise, if approached by an insufferable busybody who lives to scold people minding their own business, and your first reaction is to call the police, you’re also a Karen. Manhattan is filled with Karens, the meme that once referred to the ‘can I speak to the manager’ lady with stacked hair and chunky highlights that evolved into a way to call out any very annoying person who loves rules and tattling. It is high Karen season across the country.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Those who want me canceled should probably admit that their efforts have been mostly unsuccessful. I have been banned from Twitter for speaking about the impact of gender-identity legislation on women’s rights, but I haven’t been silenced. Long before I began on trans issues, I’d already fallen into disfavor among those who claim progress as their own, on account of my opposition to the sex trade. The New New Left, for those not in the know, believes the invisible hand of the market will regulate the global sex trade, mysteriously transforming one of the most dangerous and exploitative industries in the world into something ethical, despite all evidence to the contrary.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Political tribalism is high school all over again. I moved every year and a half growing up, and one of the many side effects was that I became deeply distrustful of groups. I went to 10 schools in 12 years — three of them in eighth grade. It was hell. I was always the outsider. If I was acknowledged at all, it was as ‘new girl’ and, once they got to know me a bit better, ‘Bitchit’ or, my personal favorite, ‘Birdshit’. I went to schools in rich suburbs where I was ‘poor’ and schools in inner cities where I was the minority.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Last summer, at a secretive dinner in Manhattan, I heard a New York Times staffer regale our table with some tales. He told us about how a dozen or so people had, like him, faced the most perilous horror imaginable for a blue checkmark Twitter person. They’d been canceled. For some, it was a tweet. For others, posing in a photograph with a Republican, or clicking ‘like’ on a Facebook post written by a known transphobe, or perhaps expressing an unhealthy familiarity with the work of Milton Friedman. For the Times staffer, he deigned to question gender theory in the office and sent half his team hyperventilating into paper bags and the other privately giving him the thumbs up.

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.

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.

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.