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In the days following Charlie Kirk's murder, has seen a wave of employers being contacted regarding off-color remarks made by employees on social media about his passing. The debate is, does this constitute cancel culture, but by the right instead of the typical left? Some have argued that it is not the same thing, due to the disparaging comments being immediate, vs old comments dredged up in an attempt to cancel someone. There is a big difference between someone desecrating Charlie Kirk in an overt manner right after his passing, compared to a social media post made 10+ years ago against living targets that could be deemed as racist only under the most uncharitable light.
My take is, contacting an employer with the intent of getting someone fired for something not work-related or fired in the public interest as a 'concerned citizen', by definition, is cancel culture. Sure, one can argue that this is a different degree of cancelation, but it's the same principle. Someone posting a vile comment on his social media celebrating someone's death doesn’t necessarily affect his ability to do his job, like making sandwiches or whatever. Sure, if said individual confessed on social media to spitting in customers' sandwiches or making disparaging remarks about customers, go ahead and get his ass fired to protect the customers if no one else. But this is not like that. Consumers and other employees are not negatively affected by an employee holding a grudge against a dead podcaster.
To turn the tables, imagine if George Soros died and many of those same people wrote "good riddance" on their social media accounts, should this be grounds for cancelation? By the above logic, yes if you want to be morally consistent.
relevant tweet https://x.com/politicalmath/status/1967066826590028174
Of course it's cancel culture. I can maybe, sort of get behind shaming some of the most egregious cases just like I could maybe get behind shaming some of the extreme cases the left highlighted during peak woke, but this type of thing always degenerates rapidly. That's exactly what's happening right now. There's a website serving as a MAGA doxxing database over this stuff, which supposedly only includes the worst examples, yet I'm finding cases like this one and this one. Posting stuff like "and the world kept spinning" is apparently a fire-worthy offense in MAGA's eyes.
Just pure MAGA hypocrisy. I can't believe I once saw the modern right as an ally in the fight for free speech.
I recall "All Lives Matter" written on a BLM mural at a major corporation leading to an internal investigation to find the culprit. I remember "It's okay to be white" flyers posted on a university campus being investigated by the FBI, and commenters here claiming that was a reasonable response.
I am comfortable with both of those people losing their jobs. I am not a hypocrite, I stopped believing in "free speech" a long time ago. There are a few people here I consider to actually hold sincere free speech principles; I consider them to be badly mistaken, and I do not think you are one of them.
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That’s on the employer. With over 50k submissions it’s unlikely many are getting much pressure
Anyway it’s not even close to the same thing as what the left was getting people fired for. A cop made an anonymous twenty dollar donation to Rittenhouses defense fund. The fund was hacked and the list spread. For his crime the officer was fired. But sure, it’s totally the same thing >.>
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Only if you they're looking tor excuses to not call it cancel culture, otherwise it's about as hypocritic as Ukrainians bombing Russian territory. Centrists that never spoke up against progressive cancel culture, but act outraged now, are much worse than this.
In some cases it's prudent to escalate to using the opponents' tactics to secure victory. Stuff like gerrymandering comes to mind, where unilateral disarmament is self-defeating.
This is not one of those cases. Cancel culture will blow up in MAGA's face eventually if they go down this road as hard as the Woke did.
So let's not go down this road as hard as the Woke did. Let's use Blue Tribe's unforced error to deal serious harm to their cadre and their institutions, without proceeding on to getting people fired over dongle jokes and OK gestures. It does not seem to me that this should be difficult to do.
We are arguing here over public celebration of a political murder. We are a long, long way from the road the Wokes started on.
48 hours into the new right-wing cancel culture, and already the demand for people "celebrating the murder of Charlie to Kirk" to cancel exceeds the supply. There are cancel mobs out for speech on the lines of "Of course Charlie Kirk shouldn't have been murdered but that doesn't change the fact that he was a racist/homophobe/other kind of bad person" and "I think this level of public mourning is excessive for a murdered podcast bro". And the official policy of the United States government is that "making light" of Kirk's murder is deportable - that is a much broader category of cancellable speech than "celebrating" it.
It is inherent to the nature of witch hunting that the demand for witches exceeds the supply, and accordingly that the definition of a witch is subject to scope creep. The type specimen here is 1950's anti-communism. Senator McCarthy's lawyer, an corrupt faggot by the name of Roy Cohn, sicced McCarthy on the US Army after they wouldn't give his catamite a cushy desk job. This led to the Army-McCarthy hearings and eventually blew up McCarthyism. After being driven out of public life, Cohn built a successful legal practice in NYC representing corrupt politicians, gangsters and real estate developers. One of his jobs was to negotiate the arrangement where Fred Trump paid off the mafia to ensure that there were no union problems on his construction projects. A young executive in the Trump organisation who was closely involved with the deal regards Cohn as an important mentor.
So I don't think a political movement led by Donald Trump is going to resist the natural tendency of cancel culture to spiral out of control until it starts eating its own. Based on public statements by Donald Trump and Steven Miller, I don't think they even want to.
You might be right, but at the moment you're freaking out over getting hit with a fraction of the force you were dishing out over a decade, so I don't know if you're qualified to gauge demand exceeding supply, or who is likely to spiral out of control.
I'm not in America so this isn't about me - I'm mostly worried about the damage to the system from another round of purges. McCarthyism was on track to break the system if it hadn't been stopped by the Army-McCarthy hearings. Wokestupid cancel culture didn't just unjustly end a few careers - it made a whole bunch of institutions dumber. It would in fact be a good thing if America had university social science departments that could do research in the social sciences, movie studios that could make good movies, or a left-wing political party that could nominate replacement-level candidates. (And that is just the institutions where the brain damage from wokestupid looks fatal.) If it does go full retard in the way such things usually do, MAGAtarded cancel culture will also break institutions - with the most immediately obvious candidate at this early stage being the armed forces.
Wokestupid cancel culture ended up harming the American left, America as a whole, and the American-led system that delivers peace and prosperity to billions of people. If MAGA choose to play three-tits-for-a-tat (and that is what the President of the United States and most of his core supporters in the country appear to want) and no pro-establishment right faction is able to stop them Army-McCarthy style then the clapback is going to do three times as much damage to America and the system as wokestupid did. And that is scary.
I'm trying to find a way to move the conversation forward and not dredge up the past, but when I hear stuff like this it's really hard. Like, how come you never mentioned all your worries about the system when every other anti-woke here was doing so? How come the spectre of McCarthyism didn't worry you enough to bring it up, when it was progressives doing it?
And is "I'm not in America" a good argument for you? Your country is literally arresting people for tweets, and you're worried about people getting fired an ocean away from you?
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The problem with your perspective isn't necessarily that you are wrong, but that you are mostly powerless in political circles. One side has not learned (or at least has forgotten) the problem with cancel culture, and they will now get to experience what it is like to be at the shit end of it.
After a while, cancel culture will either run its course after some critical mass of the public actually get a taste of what it's like and we will all collectively decide to STFU online, or social media will decide (or be forced) to fix their outrage algorithms and get people to STFU, or it will continue to spiral. Whatever the case, near term cancellations perpetrated by right seem unavoidable.
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Hopefully we'll all be able to take a step back, and have a conversation about the rules of warfare. A vicious cycle of escalation, ultimately ending in the defeat of the red tribe, is certainly possible, but I don't see how unilateral disarmament ends any better.
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Has cancel culture blown up in the woke's face yet?
Blown up no,not so dramatic, but it did hollow out the political consultant class in the Democratic Party machine of a lot of talent, which was basically one of the main contributors to Harris’ loss. This is pretty widely conceded as a primary cause even among hardcore mainstream Democrats. Because the woke purges happened to apply disproportionately to non-college educated younger staffers, they were left with disproportionately college educated young staffers, which ironically creates a blind spot that theoretically DEI was supposed to fix (it just replaced one with another, so to speak)
Do you have more info on this?
Although not about the election and focusing on the nonprofit administerial/management classes, there was a lot of discussion around woke movements destroying nonprofits capabilities back in 2022. E.g. https://ryangrim.substack.com/p/elephant-in-the-zoom. People here at least probably wouldn't object to them being considered quasi-political/Democratic.
As for the Democratic Party apparatus itself, I don't think it's ever had a full reckoning, but I also don't think it ever was dominated by true believers in the same way media/academia/nonprofits were/are. Instead, its failings were more conventional: domination by a gerontocracy and a risk-averse leadership whose main qualification was never rocking the boat. That's how you end up with a comic scenario of Kamala Harris whining that it's Biden's fault because he stayed on well past the sell by date and because no one in his administration was willing to do anything about it.
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Upon reflection I probably overstated my case honestly. (I do think it’s a major issue but not one they are paying lots of attention to).
They do say it indirectly though. Maybe a good barometer would be these statements back in February for DNC chair, on what they’d do differently. The eventual winner said they did too well among the wealthy and college voters, systemically, and that they needed more local election focus too.
Another said less democracy talk and more economic talk, and door knocking was overrated. The last said more social media work and rely less on people who watch the news.
So few people are saying it directly I guess but it’s latent underneath a lot of these ideas: that the machine is out of touch.
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This is that - but note it was necessary for the right to respond in kind to create the consequences that would deter it in the first place.
As Arjin noted, when someone bombs you, and you don't like that - and you maybe even think nobody should bomb anyone - that doesn't mean it's hypocrisy to bomb them back.
Si vis pacem para bellum. To create a world without war you must be able to wage war.
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Yes. They drove freethinking independent media personalities like Joe Rogan away from the left, and the lack of substantive intra-coalition criticism from the center led to Kamala being chosen as an affirmative action VP, which set the Democratic Party up for collapse when Biden's health failed.
That wasn't just because of the left's cancel culture, it was also because of, but not limited to, it's dogmaticism, aversion to debate with the outgroup, radicalism, and the application of it's rules in a one-sided manner, according to an oppressor-oppressed framework.
I doubt we would have been where we are, if the left satisfied itself with cancelling racists, and otherwise acted normal.
This is a bit like saying “I doubt the milk would be all over the floor, if the glass had just stopped in midair instead of hitting the ground and shattering to pieces”
Yes, that is technically true, almost by definition—but in practice, “the left only cancels racists and is otherwise milquetoast colorblind meritocratic Third Way Clinton Democrat/Blairite New Labour straight outta the 90s” is, like a glass of milk after being knocked off the table but before hitting the floor, a highly unstable state that can only exist for a moment on the inexorable path to a decidedly higher-entropy equilibrium.
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