Donald Trump's War on MeToo/Cancel Culture
The #MeToo movement was dedicated to the radical notion that men in positions of power, particularly rich, straight white men, have a predictable and horrifying predilection for absuing that power.
The movement promised a long-overdue reckoning where men who had flagrantly abused their power for decades would finally be held responsible for their sexual transgressions.
This proved tremendously unpopular among powerful sexual predators who did not want to be held responsible for their sexual and professional transgressions. They did not want to lose power or status.
To use the parlance of the time, they did not want to get “canceled.” They did not want to become radioactive, unemployable pariahs. They did not want to lose social standing. They did not want to apologize for all of the terrible things they had done that they hoped no one would know about.
There is no progress without backlash. The backlash to MeToo was fierce. It did not take long for the prevailing narrative to shift in a way that, unsurprisingly, favored the powerful and punished the powerless.
MeToo went from being seen as essential and long-overdue, if occasionally overzealous, to being demonized as “Cancel Culture.”
Being cancelled became a source of pride for conservatives. They insisted that if their enemies were trying to cancel them it’s because they were exposing important truths about their malevolent misdeeds.
“Cancel Culture” became a right-wing catchphrase, cynical shorthand for being oppressed by power-mad leftists out to destroy everyone who challenges their myopic worldview. Getting “canceled” by the left became a point of pride for the Alt-Right. It meant that they were pissing off the right people and had the right enemies.
Trump’s re-election became the final nail in MeToo’s coffin. It sent the none-too-subtle signal that, despite what the history of MeToo might suggest, we actually love creepy sexual predators who abuse their power to terrorize vulnerable women. Heck, we just elected one to be the most powerful person in the world for a second time!
The cult leader of the MAGA movement should have been canceled countless times for myriad crimes, legal, sexual, moral, and otherwise. Yet the slippery bastard managed to somehow get re-elected and avoid prison all the same, despite being convicted of 34 felonies.
Do consequences even exist in a world where being impeached twice, convicted of thirty-four felonies and found criminally liable for sexual assault, in addition to incompetence, arrogance and stupidity doesn’t prevent someone from being elected the most powerful person in the world?
The 45th and 47th president ran, and won, on anti-Woke, anti-Cancel Culture, anti-MeToo, anti-DEI platform. He rode the backlash to MeToo all the way to the White House.
Nominating Matt Gaetz for Attorney General was a giant “fuck you” to the MeToo movement. Trump was flexing his awful, awesome power by tapping a man under active investigation for sex trafficking and drugs to be the most powerful lawyer in the country.
He was letting his fellow Republicans as well as Democrats know that he was going to do whatever the hell he wanted to do, and if people had a problem with that, they could go fuck themselves.
In entertainment, sometimes writers or produers will put something egregiously tasteless or offensive into a script that they know a network or studio or censors will want cut as a bargaining tool.
The idea is that you agree to cut the line you never thought would make it into the project in the first place so that something that’s extreme and troubling, but not quite as extreme and troubling, won’t get cut.
Trump trolled his critics by nominating a wildly unqualified, wrong pick for an important position so that Congress would be kinder to controversial choices like RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth can sneak through on the grounds that while they may be terrible choices, they aren’t quite as terrible as Gaetz. Hegseth and RFK Jr. have been accused of sex crimes, but not as many or as recently as Gaetz.
The curious case of Marko Elez exemplifies this new approach. Elez was part of Elon Musk’s DOGE goon squad until he did the decent thing and resigned after it came out that last year he tweeted lovely sentiments like, “I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” and, “Normalize Indian hate.”
This understandably angered Vice President JD Vance, whose wife and children are Indian. He was apoplectic that journalists would report on the actions of someone given an unholy amount of power that he seems to have done nothing to earn.
To Vance, Elez shouldn’t have suffered any consequences for his tweets. They should have been ignored or forgiven instantly. Besides, those tweets were published months ago. He was a mere 25! Now he’s 25 and a half! It's a whole different ballgame!
Vance, whose self-righteousness and fake piousness render him every bit as obnoxious as his boss, if not more so, argued that “stupid social media activity shouldn’t ruin a kid’s life.” He went on to say that the racist dweeb should only be terminated “if he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team.”
Vance apparently feels that publicly expressing sentiments like “Normalize Indian hate”, “I was racist before it was cool” and “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” does not make you a bad dude. They’re just words! Free speech, baby! Besides, shouldn’t conservatives show Christ-like compassion to people who agree with them?
In defending Elez’s words as meaningless bluster, he was doing exactly what Elez wanted in normalizing Indian hate. After all, if a guy with an Indian wife doesn’t have a problem with it, how bad can it really be?
Donald Trump and Elon Musk agree that people who disagree with them or criticize them publicly should be fired and/or thrown in jail, but if you brag about how racist you are, all should be forgiven and forgotten if Elon Musk—who is definitely not racist—vouches for you.
Vance saves his hatred for the monstrous journalists who dared to do their job and report on the egregious, unabashed racism of one of the children Elon Musk has tapped to rule the country.
“We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever” the sanctimonious, fake pious piece of shit lectured.
The crazy thing is that Elez wasn’t even fired. He resigned out of a proper sense of shame, only to have Musk and Vance beg him to come back so that he can hold tremendous power over the groups HE IS ON RECORD BEING RACIST AGAINST.
So crazy that the Alt-Right, racist users of Musk’s Alt-Right hate site don’t have a problem with racism! In fact, they seem to be “based”
Like a piece of shit, Abraham Lincoln, Trump has freed the worst people in the world to say whatever the fuck they want without consequences or repercussions as long as they support him.
Vance has infinite Christian grace and forgiveness for everyone on his side and bottomless rage toward vulnerable people being rounded up and deported.
Speaking of the worst people in the world, Nancy Mace made news when, during a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, she used a transphobic slur.
When gently scolded by Democrat Gerald Connelly, who implored, “The gentlelady has used a phrase that is considered a slur in the LGBTQ community and the transgender community” because he is apparently a Dixiecrat from the 1950s, she screeched that slur repeatedly.
Instead of doing the decent thing and criticizing Mace’s hate speech, Republican James Comer claimed that he didn’t find the word offensive because he isn’t “up to date” on his “LGBTQ terminology.”
That’d be like responding to a colleague screaming the N-wor by saying that you weren’t familiar with black slang and consequently found nothing wrong with the phrase.
To cite an even more extreme example, Kanye recently took to what I will always call Twitter for a massive rant that seemingly set out to offend everyone in the world, including people who are ostensibly on his side, but mostly Jews.
“I can say Jew as much as I want. I can say Hitler as much as I want.” Kanye screamed via the internet.
Even by Kanye's standards, this seemingly drug or mental-illness-fueled spree was appalling and excessive. Kanye thinks that in this brave new world, he can be as racist, anti-semitic, and hateful as he’d like and not get canceled because we live in a post-cancellation world where the only things that can get you into trouble are expressing concern and solidarity with oppressed groups or criticizing Trump and Musk in any way.
Horrifyingly, he’s probably right.