Cancel culture

For some time now conservatives have been using the tactic of rummaging around in a person’s past, searching for evidence of problematic behavior. They call it ‘cancel culture’. What makes this entire situation worse is that conservatives are not even doing anything original. They are attempting to appropriate a custom which has been practiced by people on the left for years, claiming it as their own. Normally I would see mob-shaming as a perfectly legitimate method of purging society of wrongdoers. The digging up and cataloguing of people’s past micro-aggressions so that we may discredit and ostracize them from the Tribe is something The Woke have been doing for at least a decade now.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much misery been caused to so many by so few. I’m thinking of the hard-left rage mobs that have been policing the public square since the beginning of June — quite literally in the case of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle. I’ve been keeping a list of all the people who have suffered catastrophic career damage because they’ve fallen foul of the Red Guards — and it’s growing ‘exponentially’, as a virologist might say. Like the COVID illness at its peak, it has been doubling every two to three days. Some of the victims have been people you’d expect to lose their heads in this cultural revolution.

If you are on the internet you have no doubt heard of ‘Karens’. ‘Karens’ are middle-aged white women who have a fondness for reporting people, especially black people, to the authorities. ‘The archetypal “Karen”,’ says Vox in one of its invaluable explainers, ‘Is blonde, has multiple young kids, and is usually an anti-vaxxer.’ She ‘has a “can I speak to the manager” haircut and a controlling, superior attitude to go along with it.’In practice, calling someone a ‘Karen’ is generally an excuse to abuse a middle-aged white woman and make it seem woke.

For some people, the video of police officer Derek Chauvin callously kneeling on the neck of the unarmed, pleading George Floyd looked like many things. A travesty. A horror. A stark reminder of the brutality and injustice of American policing, and an urgent call to stand up, dig deep, and demand change.But for the subjects of an article published in the Washington Post on Wednesday, the video prompted a different kind of deep digging.‘Blackface incident at Post cartoonist’s 2018 Halloween party resurfaces amid protests’, reads the headline, a prelude to 3,000 words of groundbreaking work in the field of offense archaeology.

Another day, another Alison Roman drama. The Instagram-famous celebrity chef and bestselling cookbook author was infamously canceled a few years weeks ago over her snide remarks about fellow lifestyle personalities Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo. Now, the journalist Yashar Ali, a friend of Teigen, has circulated a photo of Roman dressed, he initially alleged, as a chola, or 'a young woman belonging to a Mexican-American urban subculture associated with street gangs'. Roman contends the costume was a poorly-considered attempt at an Amy Winehouse get-up in 2008. https://twitter.

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.