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I think you have plenty of fair points, the realpolitik aspects of whether it’s better to be shamelessly hypocritical or to be principled can be debated forever. There are certainly some people posting mostly unobjectionable things that are getting caught up in the cancellation fervor. Agreed that being a partisan of one side or another makes you blind to your own side’s transgressions. But, as one of those partisans, doesn’t keeping score of the specific behavior matter a little bit…?
Forgetting all of the higher profile public figure type cancellations of the 2014-2024 woke era. In 2020 the national health authorities currently in the midst of recommending lockdowns throughout the country announced that racism was a bigger public health issue than COVID and sanctioned “protests” over a career lowlife felon who died in police custody after swallowing a bag of fentanyl while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. There were riots across the country throughout the summer causing billions of dollars of damage to property, with reporters of major news networks calling them “mostly peaceful” while cars were burning in the background. Major Democrat (and even many Republican, at the beginning) politicians solicited donations to bail out those arrested in the riots, and campaigned for various “defund the police” style reforms in major cities. Rioters were mostly given slaps on the wrist, and the policy changes led to a massive increase in homicide rates. In the midst of all of this, regular-ass people (in addition to tons of higher profile celebrities, politicians, professors, businesspeople) were not only being cancelled/fired/publicly shamed for being unsupportive of the “current thing”, but for sentiments deemed racist years in the past. Regular-ass people were being accosted by minorities and being filmed and publicly cancelled for not kissing their feet. It’s hard to exaggerate how widespread this behavior was. I was in college at the time and there were people making anonymous Twitter accounts posting screenshots of random high school classmate’s Facebook posts from when we were literally 12 years old. There were hundreds if not thousands of students who had college admissions revoked for social media posts from when they were in middle school. There was a professor fired for saying a different word that sounds like the N word. Companies were paying exorbitant fees to DEI consultants to tell everyone they were racist no matter how fervently they denounced racism. In just one example of higher profile news, the NBA players threatened to cancel their season due to an insufficient response to a multiple-time felon being shot while attacking the police with a knife as he was trying to kidnap his children. Shortly after the worst of the Floyd summer subsided, there was a whole other cancel culture brouhaha regarding Covid vaccines where you could be fired from your job for not taking them.
In contrast, you have a few news anchors, an unfunny late night show host and a relatively large number of normies “cancelled” for in many cases publicly supporting or excusing the very recent political assassination. Charlie Kirk, whatever you think of his political opinions or tactics, was an upstanding citizen participating non-violently in political discussion.
Some number of these cancellations are wholly unjustified I’ll agree, but people are not being successfully cancelled for being democrats, not being republicans, being democrats 10 years ago, or not being republicans 10 years ago. Normies are not scared that they tweeted an unrelated left-wing opinion when they were 12. They aren’t in trainings at their job about being too anti-white. Pro-assassination posts on normie Twitter still routinely get 300k likes from face accounts. The wokes did have a super-power for a while, they got a significant contingent of the country to support their policies, won the 2020 election, and had normies completely afraid to publicly disagree with them for years. It wasn’t until Elon bought Twitter and Trump narrowly missed having his head blown off that the vibe shift occurred. It’s hypocrisy in that it’s “cancel culture” sure, but also not really. I think a norm that you shouldn’t publicly celebrate the assassination of political talking heads that are otherwise upstanding citizens just because they have the same political opinions as your boomer uncle is good. I think a norm that you shouldn’t do things that circa 2020 woke morality deems racist is wrong. No hypocrisy.
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