The Right's Cynical Weaponization of "Cancel Culture"

Over the course of the past few years the meaning of “I’m being cancelled” has shifted dramatically, from “I have done horrible, unforgivable things and my career is fundamentally over for reasons I wholly understand” to “I am an innocent victim of a woke lynch mob intent on destroying me because I dared to say something that offended the Nazi Thought Police. If anything, the fact that I’m being targeted by people who are so extreme and insane speaks to how innocent I must be.” 

I knew that the backlash for the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements would be fierce. I was not wrong. It did not take Conservatives long to weaponize the words and concepts “Cancel”, “Cancelled” and “Cancel Culture” in their never-ending culture war with the Left. 

When rumors began swirling about Trump-loving Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz sex trafficking underage girls, he responded with predictably Trumpian arrogance and defiance, tweeting, “I may be a canceled man in some corners. I may even be a wanted man by the Deep State. But I hear the millions of Americans who feel forgotten, canceled, ignored, marginalized and targeted. I draw confidence knowing that the silent majority is growing louder every day.” 

At the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference where Donald Trump delivered his first speech since being destroyed in the 2020 election by Joe Biden the theme was “America Uncancelled.”

If Trump still had a Twitter account it seems safe to assume that it would be filled with references to the cultural Cancer of “Cancel Culture” because the current Conservative hysteria over what they see as the excesses and insanity of “Cancel Culture” is really just a re-branding of “political correctness.” 

During the 2016 Presidential campaign Trump famously said that the biggest problem with our country was political correctness and vowed to fight it with ever fiber of his being. 

After all, does the concept of “free speech” mean anything at all if someone who was once the most powerful and famous person in the world can’t say that Rosie O’Donnell is a fat pig, and also a loser and smells bad without people rightly accusing him of sexism and cruelty? 

The right’s cynical re-purposing of “Cancel Culture” as modern-day McCarthyism with its roots in the Salem Witch Trials perfectly suits its fierce conviction that while they may pretend to care about free speech the left are actually an angry, intolerant mob out to silence or destroy anyone or anything that does not measure up to its impossible levels of moral purity and “wokeness.”

Here’s the thing: people like Gaetz are not innocent victims of cancel culture. Instead they’re being held accountable, legally and morally, for their transgressions. There’s a big difference.

The Right seems convinced that it can win over the hearts and minds of the American people by making “Cancel Culture” public enemy number one and pretending that The Cat in the Hat and The Grinch That Stole Christmas were being cancelled and banned by Joe Biden and a Maoist Democratic party. 

If the Republicans can whip their base into a frenzy over non-issues like major league baseball changing the location of its All-Star game, raunchy rappers topping the pop charts or football players kneeling during the National Anthem they can sneak through the massive tax cuts for billionaires and corporations and xenophobic policies that they really care about.  

In the 2020 election at least it sure seems like the Democratic platform of giving money to people who desperately need it during an unprecedented financial and health crisis and getting the COVID vaccine to people quickly and efficiently was more appealing to the masses than Conservatives’ bizarre obsession with forcing a private literary estate to keep racist books in circulation for perpetuity as a way of owning the libs and making the other side (the one Seuss himself was on) look bad. 

The hypocritical self-righteousness of Progressives can, and should, be called out but from a place other than Conservative hypocritical self-righteousness, which is really what this kerfuffle about “Cancel Culture” is really all about, considering that their answer to what they see as infringements on free speech involves cancelling anyone they disagree with, including Coca-Cola, Delta airlines and pretty much the entirety of professional sports. 

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