The term de jour is Cancel Culture.
I am pretty sure most of you know what it is and how harmful it is. For those who have been hiding under a rock...Cancel Culture attempts to nullify voices and actions that are disagreed with.
Goya Foods is besieged after their CEO had the effrontery to praise Donald Trump. Social media platforms lite up with calls for boycotts, inflammatory rhetoric claiming the company was Un-American. Thankfully it backfired and Goya experienced a dramatic jump in sales. A similar situation happened with the My Pillow company when their founder Mike Lindell offered his support to Trumps Presidential election campaign. His cancelling resulted in major chains no longer selling his products. Whether or not My Pillow is affected adversely is yet to be seen not all cancelling is aimed at Trumpsters.
Ever since the George Floyd incident it has been highly volatile to voice any opposition to the BLM movement or the organization by the same name. It matters not that there are many many disturbing attributes with both. Any opposition is immediately labeled racist or white supremacists. Never mind that BLM and Antifa joined in the Summer long riots, looting and destruction. You are required to agree that there is systemic racism throughout the country, yet no one has been able to offer a clear explanation for what they mean. Corporate America’s knee jerk reaction was to the tumult is handing over many millions of dollars to the BLM organization regardless to the fact that they are self-admitted Marxists.
Much of the cancel efforts are political, but some are merely reactions to triggers of progressives and leftists.
Of note is the recent 6 to 1 decision of the San Francisco school board to rename 41 buildings. Names such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and even Senator Diane Feinstein are no longer worthy to be prominent or honored. This is a cancel that leaves many shaking their heads. We are now to believe that Abraham Lincoln, the one who ended slavery, did not care enough about blacks, Jefferson owned slaves and is therefore a social pariah. This is very reminiscent of ancient Egypt erasing the images of Pharaoh Hatshepsut from obelisk’s, monuments, reliefs and all manner of commemorative displays. The price of falling out of favor was being cancelled the old fashioned way.
Politicians, celebrities and prominent persons are easy targets for the cancel cadre. One misstep, tweet, or post no matter how long ago that surfaces is enough to destroy their reputations. Cancel is a weapon equivalent to a guided missile. Once the action starts on social media there is no stopping it. The calls for retribution echo across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and a hundred other platforms and get louder and louder until they get picked up by the media and reiterated on talk shows and news broadcasts.
Cancel consumers find it very easy to troll, boycott, reject and hate because they become keyboard cowboys cloaked in the anonymity of their comfy spaces where they are free to accuse, ridicule, and damage with no rebuff.
Even appeasement on the part of the target of the cancel crews does not necessarily work. Corporations apologize for perceived missteps, comments, offensive content no matter how slight (or merely someone being triggered). None have the spine to push back. Make a statement and move on. But no they bend over backwards to placate their accusers. Press releases, executive firings, large donations do not remove the cancel cloud.
It takes a steadfast resolve to challenge cancel efforts. One more current example of being able to overcome is the case of Nicholas Sandman of Covington fame. Media wrongly portrayed the youth as the aggressor in a confrontation at a rally. The film clip was all over every outlet for days. Not one of those outlets retracted their presentation as incorrect. They lived to rue the day(s). Sandman the target of the derision sued the mainstream media organizations and won the very first case against CNN. Of course, the settlement was not disclosed but it is rumored to be in seven figures. That is only the first such suit.
Cancel is a response to virtue signaling which accuses the target of nefarious intent for the simplest misstatement. It does not matter if your entire life and reputation are sterling. One N-word or offensive comment now or in your past is a death sentence. Ask Paula Deen, who foolishly said that when she was growing up in the south the word was commonplace in her youth. It took her years to reclaim her good name and return to her cooking shows. It just proves that history is a problem for cancel culture.
History is being erased the same way that the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984 rewrote it at the direction of Big Brother. Statues are no longer reflections of the glorious, if spotted, past of America. The Summer of 2020 will be remembered for the destruction of any symbol of the Confederacy as if it never existed. The Civil War happened, there were two sides. The North won and saved the Union. Does that give us the right to dismiss our valiant opponents? Surely, they were on the wrong side of the issue, but they had the conviction of cause to fight. Is their blood not enough to be remembered. Sadly this cancel effort has won the day with government officials causing and cheering the removals of any commemoration of the Confederacy.
The world is getting smaller, or less correct, in the cancel world. Be careful not to wind up in a very plain vanilla society.
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