cancel culture Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Charlie Kirk and cancel culture

Leviticus 18 v Leviticus 19

My first inclination was to write SOMETHING about Charlie Kirk. Then not. But what I’m noticing that would be fascinating if it weren’t so damn scary is this: “conservatives” are engaging in the very “cancel culture” that they complained about less than a decade ago. In fact, the graphic is from the website of a conservative Republican Congressman from 2020.

I put “conservatives” in quotes because the mainstream media and other entities have been cowed into punishing people who have challenged the narrative that Kirk is a free speech advocate and that he was killed by the “radical left.” The attacks have little to do with grief and much to do with political weaponization.

The Daily Show has covered the topic here and here.

ITEM: From Katie Couric -“A 2024 report from the National Institute of Justice found that since 1990, far-right extremists have carried out the vast majority of ideologically motivated killings in the U.S. — 227 attacks that claimed more than 520 lives. By contrast, far-left extremists were behind 42 such attacks, killing 78 people.”

Couric notes, “The study was reported missing from the Justice Department’s website on Sept. 13, just three days after Kirk’s assassination. It has since been archived, but the DOJ hasn’t explained the removal, saying only that it is ‘reviewing its websites … in accordance with recent Executive Orders.’ This study isn’t an outlier. Other research points to the same conclusion.”

I would accept “radicalized” without the descriptor.

Frankly, I find the discussion about whether Kirk’s killer was radicalized by the “left” or “right” sophomoric. But it was the reason Disney’s ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show “indefinitely” after conservatives accused Kimmel of misrepresenting the politics of the accused, a ‘Red Alert Moment’ for Free Speech, according to Common Dreams.

From the NYT: Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, “was interviewed on the right-wing influencer Benny Johnson’s podcast and appeared to threaten fines or revoke broadcast licenses over what he called ‘news distortion’ and specifically mentioned — of all people — Jimmy Kimmel.” Soon, Kimmel was gone.

Sen. Ted Cruz, not one of my favorite people, said that Carr sounded like a mafia crime boss when he threatened ABC’s licenses over Kimmel’s comments about Kirk.

SAG-AFTRA noted, “The decision to suspend airing ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ is the type of suppression and retaliation that endangers everyone’s freedoms.” Free speech was the hallmark of the Charlie Kirk “brand,” even though Kirk regularly berated the TV host.

ITEM from The Guardian via MSN: Pam Bondi faces rightwing backlash for saying she’ll target ‘hate speech’ after Kirk killing. “Bondi said on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller, the wife of the rightwing White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, that there is ‘free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society.’

“Legal experts and conservative pundits have condemned the comments because there is no ‘hate speech’ exception in the First Amendment right to speech, and as such, targeting people for their charged rhetoric would be unconstitutional.” As Daily Kos noted, “Even Charlie Kirk would’ve disagreed with Pam Bondi about ‘hate speech.'”

Republican political strategist Karl Rove, whom I disliked intensely when he was in W’s administration, noted in the Wall Street Journal. “No. Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed by ‘them.’ ‘They’ didn’t pull the trigger. One person did… Using Charlie’s murder to justify retaliation against political rivals is wrong and dangerous. It will further divide and embitter our country. No good thing will come of it.”

Your brain on propaganda

ITEM: Read Brainwashed nation, part I: Assault and battery upon the American brain from Nation of Change. “Propaganda is not just about the content of a message but its mode of delivery. The right-wing media moguls and their ranting hirelings; a radically politicized fundamentalist Christianity that preaches a puerile albeit vivid biblical literalism… have reshaped not only the American ‘mind,’ but millions of brains as well.” I will admit that Charlie Kirk was REALLY good at this.

Per Heather Cox Richardson: FOTUS “Has Divided the World Into Friends and Enemies.”

“Vice President JD Vance hosted The Charlie Kirk Show and ended his episode with a rallying call to report anyone sharing negative views of Kirk in the wake of his death to their employers.” I wonder what Charlie would think?

One week before the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Utah Valley University released a statement affirming its “commitment to free speech, intellectual inquiry, and constructive dialogue.” The statement went on to paint a vision of the intellectual environment the university strives to create: one in which “ideas — popular or controversial — can be exchanged freely, energetically, and civilly.”

So that’s “civility”?

So Charlie Kirk could “civilly” say, as he told the crowd at his annual conservative political conference, AmericaFest, in 2023. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.” His narrow sense of history boggles.

He could “civilly” make undermining comments like, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.'” Ah, he was the target audience of “DEI in the Sky? No More, Thanks to Racial Support Pilots” on The Daily Show a few months ago.

He could “civilly” tell TV children’s star Miss Rachel, who quoted Leviticus 19, “love your neighbor as yourself,” that “in Leviticus 18,’ thou that shall lie with another man shall be stoned to death.’ Just saying.” This bastardization of Christianity rankles me.

He could “civilly” put professors on his Turning Point USA target list, some of whom had received death threats.

And the presumed constitutional scholar could “civilly” say, “There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the Constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.”

But what IS truth?

Journalist and author Ann Neumann notes, per my friend Jeff Sharlet: “The outpouring of grief for Kirk has been fraught with controversy: The old ruse of not speaking ill of the dead has melded with Republican righteousness to warp newspapers’ reporting and lead to the sacking of employees for saying the truth about Kirk: He called enemies ‘maggots’ and ‘vermin,’ he suggested that Black women lack ‘brain processing power,’ that Jewish financiers fund anti-whiteness, that children might benefit from viewing televised executions. He said it all with an affable affect. It made him rich and powerful.” The effect makes folks think, “Well, I never thought about it THAT way.”

“It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in Vanity Fair. “It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry.” By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, Coates argues, pundits and politicians are sanitizing Charlie Kirk’s legacy.

Finally, DelSo has some sage advice: “Protect yourself and your energy. Refuse to engage with anyone wishing to debate you – especially when evidence (I like to call it facts) supports your position. You will never persuade someone to abandon their stance when actual documented events are rejected by those who instead choose willful, blind ignorance.”

Charlie Kirk would “debate anyone,” but he was largely successful by ambushing young, naive, and unprepared college students who had not thought their arguments through. When a Cambridge student confronted him, Charlie got SCHOOLED.

So I have, I hope, purged the topic from my mind. Probably not. Oh, yes: Charlie Kirk should not have shot. Do I really have to say that? I’d better, just in case.

Iconic things I have grown tired of

“a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual”

Particularly in the past year or two, there are certain songs, a famous speech, and a cliched term that I have grown tired of. I feel as though that saying so is almost a betrayal of the culture.

There are songs played/sung too often. This includes Imagine, the John Lennon song, played whenever we have a “Can’t we just get along” moment. Gal Gadot admits her cover was in “poor taste.”

Leonard Cohen’s great song Hallelujah is another. I’m partial to the version by k.d. lang, but there are others. I don’t even watch music competition shows on TV. But when I flick through the channels, someone is emoting that song. A 50-year moratorium would be nice; OK, 20 – give another generation a chance to rediscover it.

Also on the list is the hymn Amazing Grace. This is definitely a COVID thing. I ADORE Amazing Grace, especially Aretha’s version. Yet, after too many deaths, from disease, disasters, and other tragedies, it’s become the go-to song. And not always done well. I could use a break from it. Sacrilege, I know. Though when it’s played on bagpipes, it STILL gets to me; go figure.

Promissory note

I’ve said this before, but it’s the “I Have a Dream” speech by MLK. (sigh.) No, not the WHOLE speech. “One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” Good stuff.

Or, “In a sense, we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.”

The summer of our discontent

Or “This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality… Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.”

That’s all in the first third of the address. Instead, all we hear is the ending. Specifically, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

To that end, the takeaway by too many is that we’re all now equal, those who were born on third base and those in the on-deck circle with a broken bat. No, one can’t talk about the latter part without fixing the former. (n.b., we ain’t there yet.)

Free speech

The term “cancel culture” has, to my mind, been rendered meaningless. The culture has always “canceled” people, whether it be Hester Prynn in fiction or Copernicus in real life. It is almost “them” doing the canceling, whereas when “we” do it, it is to create “standards.”

As this article states, “Cancel culture is built into the fabric of documenting history. Implicit in the phrase ‘those in power write the history books’ is the notion that stories, victories, and pain of everyone but the winners are erased or greatly diminished.”

In my lifetime, there was a group called the John Birch Society. Its critics, such as old-line conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. and the magazine National Review, considered it a fringe organization element of the movement. They were certainly “canceled”, in modern parlance.

Yet, Politico noted in 2017, The JBS is back. “Bircher ideas, once on the fringe, are increasingly commonplace in today’s GOP and espoused by friends in high places. And the group is ready to make the most of it.” And has.

If so virulent an organization has become the “mainstream”, then “cancel culture” is, at best, not nearly as monolithic as some have suggested.

My obsession with “cancel culture”

Voting rights

I have become fairly obsessed with the notion of a so-called cancel culture. How did the term so “quickly became one of the buzziest and most controversial ideas on the internet”?

“Despite the seemingly positive intentions of many cancellations — to ‘demand greater accountability from public figures,’ as Merriam-Webster’s evaluation of the phrase notes —” Let me stop in mid-sentence here. Accountability is what we feel we want in a civilized society and don’t always receive.

Continue… “people tend to call out cancel culture itself as a negative movement, suggesting that the consequences of the cancellation are too harsh in minor instances or represent rushed judgment in complicated situations.”

That’s undoubtedly happened, especially involving things one has done in the past. I’m so glad I wasn’t on Instagram in the 1980s.

The term is of recent origin. But the notion of canceling people because they violated the conventions of the day has long existed. It’s that now, we have the technology to better facilitate it.

Often it’s been powerful organizations who’ve silenced dissenters. The church canceled Copernicus and Galileo. If it had access to Twitter, it’d have had a field day with Martin Luther. Maybe we’ll see the return of the scarlet letter.

“The kind of language that’s used to talk about groups of people assembled together—or their collective actions seeking to change the status quo—often maligns communities as irrational, ‘mobs’ or ‘rioters’ with uncontrolled, invalid emotions, a kind of faceless contagion that presents a threat to civilized, law-abiding society and the ruling establishment.”

Every social movement for changing labor laws, or giving rights to women or people of color, e.g., involved some “uppity” people making the status quo uncomfortable. Of course, there will be pushback. The difference now is that the discussion is online, so there are lots of megaphones.

A boycott is always a double-edged tool

Before Major League Baseball decided to move this year’s All-Star game out of Atlanta, Former and possible future Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams had hoped it wouldn’t happen.

“I understand the passion of those calling for boycotts of Georgia following the passage of SB 202,” the founder of the voting rights organization Fair Fight Action said. “Boycotts have been an important tool throughout our history to achieve social change.

“But here’s the thing: Black, Latino, AAPI and Native American voters, whose votes are the most suppressed under HB 202, are also the most likely to be hurt by potential boycotts of Georgia. To our friends across the country, please do not boycott us,” Abrams continued. “And to my fellow Georgians, stay and fight, stay and vote.”

But MLB commissioner Rob Manfred stated, “I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game.” Will the action help or hinder the fight against more restrictive voting laws? Will “canceling” the Peach State rescind the recently-passed law? Hey, idk.

The greater good

Remember Ralph Northam (D-VA)? He was, and is, the governor who, some years ago, was wearing blackface in a yearbook photo. He was immediately apologetic and repudiated his previous behavior. Some nevertheless called for his resignation. He survived because the next two officials in the Virginia gubernatorial succession line had problems of their own.

Northam has “signed several bills into law that aim to expand voting access, most prominently a measure that makes Virginia the first state in the country to enact a state-level voting rights act.”

It is “modeled on the federal law of the same name after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted a key provision of the federal VRA in 2013. That invalidated provision had required jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination—including much of Virginia—to “preclear” any proposed changes to voting laws or procedures with the Justice Department to ensure they weren’t discriminatory.”

It would have been a shame if Northam had been forced out of office.

Conservative punditry

Ann Coulter, in a recent email alert, referred to Derek Chauvin as a Human Sacrifice. “In modern America, we periodically offer up white men as human sacrifices to the PC gods. Among our benefactions: Jake Gardner, Kyle Rittenhouse, Darren Wilson, the Duke lacrosse players, University of Virginia fraternity members, Stacey Koon, and Mark Fuhrman.

“The rest of us just keep our heads down and pray we won’t be next.”

This is a fascinating swipe at cancel culture, conflating white cops who beat or killed black people, and a vigilante with a couple of complicated college-related cases. Chauvin, Dr. Coulter notes, should be exonerated because it absolutely was not his knee that killed George Floyd.

She concludes, “In the darkest days of Jim Crow, the entire country never ganged up on a single individual like this. Please, gods of wokeness, we ask that his human sacrifice be acceptable! Throw another virgin into the volcano.”

Virgin. Oh, give me a break. His bullying in other incidents shows a pattern of behavior unbecoming of a peace officer. That’s what they used to call them.

A lazy phrase

The BBC had an interesting article, which you should read. The final paragraph quotes Parker Malloy of the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America. “It’s OK to believe that social or professional consequences for things said or done are either too harsh or not harsh enough…

“And it’s OK to be concerned about the outsized power tech companies like Facebook or Twitter have in the world, but using the framing of ‘cancel culture’ to make these points will always come off as lazy and cowardly.”

And Theodor Geisel as Dr. Seuss

sturm und drang

Seuss books — Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers

In this blog, Dr. Seuss has been mentioned numerous times, often on March 2, his birthday. I love the work of Theodor Geisel, especially Bartholemew and the Oobleck. It involves speaking truth to power. And oobleck is green. Though I found The Lorax movie only so-so, I don’t fault the source material.

I’ve learned new words, such as gox, which my spellcheck doesn’t seem to like. REM confounded me with their reference to him. But Ted hasn’t said all of the trite things that have been attributed to him.

Back in 2009, I noted him as one of 20 men I admired. So this made-up “controversy” over the voluntary cessation of future publication of a few books hurts my heart. It’s because I think Dr. Seuss, were he still alive, might very well agree with the action.

As Ty Burr said in the Boston Globe, “You can still get a hold of the six early titles that Seuss Enterprises has chosen to cease publishing anytime you want to. They’re in libraries and used bookstores; they’re on eBay and Alibris and Amazon. No one’s destroying any copies; they’re just not printing any new ones.”

Recognizing changing attitudes

More to the point: “It’s likely the good Dr… would be down with that. Before his death in 1991, he expressed regret to biographers over the virulently anti-Japanese political cartoons he had drawn during World War II; a great-nephew told the New York Times in 2017 that ‘later in his life, he was not proud of those at all.'”

And have the folks screaming “cancel culture” even perused these books? I read If I Ran the Zoo as a child. And I found the stereotypes of “potbellied, thick-lipped blacks from Africa, squinty-eyed” Asians unsettling.

But I didn’t read And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street until I was an adult. The yellow-colored “Chinaman”, later recolored and relabeled “Chinese man,” bothered me greatly. I noted that things were different in 1937.

The sturm und drang of the false narrative exhausts me. The “thinking” is that “liberals” are inflicting the cancel culture. But folks such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris had praised Seuss in public settings. Therefore liberals are also disingenuous hypocrites. QED. Oy.

Some folks seem to relish the fact that Dr. Seuss is now dominating the Amazon best-seller list. At this writing, 11 of the top 12. But, oddly, NONE of the six books being pulled is even on the Top 100.

See also what Jaquandor and Chuck Miller wrote. Daily Kos quotes Ben Carson. The Weekly Sift takes on the Silly Season in the Culture Wars.

Tag: cancel culture