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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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I think the idea of a 'cancellation' is kind of retarded without properly addressing who is functionally doing the cancelling. Yes, lib/left/progressives hate guys like Hanania. They have already 'cancelled him' by never associating with him and doing everything they can to make him fail. Like, this was always the case. So who is actually cancelling Hanania now and from what? If it's not Musk banning him off twitter, what is actually going on?

those who are doing the cancelling want to turn him into a fringe figure like David Duke, Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, or David Ike, who have little or no academic or intellectual credibility or even much credibility in the mainstream, even if they have large audiences, and also to persuade his wealthy and influential backers and friends, such as Marc Andreessen, disavow him. They, the left, see Hanania as being more than just a dissident or a heretic, but more transgressive. It's not so much as cancelling Hanania, although that is part of it, as it's trying to get the rest of the establishment to know where the boundaries are, and that Hanania is outside of them.

This did not work for Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan, it only sort of worked for Jones, and it wasn’t even attempted with David Icke. The only truly canceled figure on that list is David duke, and that appears to have been a bottom up cancelation that spread to institutions after he didn’t have any support yet.