Projection, Thy Name is Progressive Part II
Also Known As: I dOn'T rEmEmBeR cOnSeRvAtIvEs GeTtInG uPsEt AbOuT cAnCeL CuLtUrE wHeN tHe DiXie ChIcKs GoT cAnCeLlEd!1one.
I wish there was a font that did that whole IdIoT sPeAk thing. It takes too long to type.
At long last! What I pomised back in April: Part Two.
What is Cancel Culture?
Wikipedia defines it as;
A modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles – whether it be online, on social media, or in person. Those who are subject to this ostracism are said to have been "cancelled".
That’s a really high level description, but I don’t see anything wrong with it. The problem is that from that base level, the further definitions will depend on who you talk to. Two views that I find equally odious are the mostly-progressive view of “Cancel culture doesn’t exist, it’s just holding people accountable for their actions” and the mostly conservative view of “Everything that I don’t like is cancelling me.”
If you don’t hold either of those views, I’m not talking about you. Don’t @ me.
The reason I find both of those views odious is that they both require a suspension of disbelief to function: We’ve seen people get cancelled. Cancelling not only exists, but it obviously exists. On the other side: Not all cancelling is bad, and some is in fact deserved. It’s probably a good thing that Bill Cosby can’t find an ad agency willing to let him shill Jello from jail. Josh Hawley needs a hammer so he can pry the nails he used to crucifiy himself out of his wrists.
The difference between a Cancellation (which could be either good or bad) and Cancel Culture (which is bad) is mostly in the stimulus, and the targets.
What’s an Example of Cancel Culture then?
Kelly Donohue. Donohue went on Jeopardy, played four games and won three. When he was first introduced, he waved. When he was introduced the second time, he put his hand on his chest with a finger extended to signify his one win. When he was introduced the third time, he put his hand on his chest with two fingers extended to signify his two wins. When he was introduced the third time, he flashed a white supremacist hand gesture. Wait… No. Nope. It was just his hand on his chest, with three fingers up to signify his three wins. I kinda wonder what he would have done at 6. It doesn’t matter. All of a sudden Donohue was in trouble for “white supremacist dog whistles”, Jeopardy got literally thousands of bits of correspondance from people irate that the show hadn’t edited out the hateful offending hand gesture. Donohue got hate mail and death threats.
What’s a Dog Whistle?
Dogs hear frequencies outside the normal range of the human ear, so there are whistles that people can buy that only your dog can hear. They’re apparently kind of uncomfortable for the animal, and often used as negative reinforcement with training. Calling something like this a dog whistle is an allusion to how the dog hears something you don’t: In this case, the irate audiencegoers saw something that other people did not.
The thing about dog whistles is that they are almost by definition an obscure code. Think about it for a second…. Do you think that Donohue meant to make a white supremacist hand gesture? Did you know about the gesture? I’m still not entirely convinced that the gesture means what people say it does, because I’ve actually seen it explained three different ways.
And let's say for the sake of argument that Donohue actually was a raging white supremacist who flashed a signal on a game show… Death threats? Is that proportional?
Regardless… We’re a little bit off the beaten path here. That was mostly context.
Progressives seem to have a literacy problem, generally. They tend to regurgitate the same thought processes over and over again. It’s how “Read another Book” became a meme. There were full seasons where if the meme wasn’t about Harry Potter, it was about The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s gotten a little better in the last couple of years, but every now and again, it’s like the record starts to slip again. Over the last three weeks, I’ve heard, independent of each other, from progressives speaking in response to a point about cancel culture “I don't remember hearing anything about cancel culture when the Dixie Chicks were cancelled.”.
It’s a really…. Really fucking weird take for a variety of reasons.
First off, and this is a little semantic; Cancel Culture wasn’t a thing in 2003 like it is today. Cancel culture is a mutation from Call-Out culture, and even that was an early 2010’s thing. Even if we wanted to push back against what was happening to The Chicks (as they’re now called), we wouldn’t have had the words to do it that way.
Second off; It’s old… The Dixie Chicks entered politics 18 years ago. I often say that if you have to go back decades to make a case against someone, it’s probably not that strong a case. I’m sure that examples *could* be made more contemporarily, but it still begs the question; “what dug this up?”.
Third, and perhaps most importantly: There were conservatives talking about the cancellation as if it were a problem. John McCain brought John Dickey, head of Cumulus Media (which was the only radio station to actually pull The Chicks off the air) in front of the commerce committee and said this:
I was more offended or as offended as anyone by the statement of the Dixie Chicks, but to restrain their trade… because they exercised their right of free speech, to me is remarkable.
And
Because if someone else in another format offends you and there is a huge hue and cry and you decide to censor those people, my friend, the erosion of the First Amendment in the United States of America is in progress.
So there were conservatives talking about cancel culture in 2003, but perhaps your memory is fuzzy because it was so damn long ago.
So Are They Just Completely Full of Shit?
No. Some are. But to be fair to the point at large, the cancellation of The Chicks *was* in fact largely a right-wing driven movement. But there are serious differences in how the left and right cancel. Part of the reason that I think progressives are digging back to 2003 is that despite there obviously being other examples of cancellations on the right, they’re not nearly as frequent. List ‘em out…. The Chicks. Sure. Colin Kaepernick. Ok. I’d make the argument that the right cancelled Milo Yiannopolous, although I don’t know that anyone will really complain. Who else?
Meanwhile… There’s a near daily drumbeat of people getting cancelled by the left, often their own, for disagreement in scale as opposed to scope. #MeToo was a giant cancellation bonfire, and while we can agree that most of the people that got caught up in that were bonafide genuine scumbags, there were also people like Patrick Brown or Brett Kavanaugh who got caught up in some genuinely crazy stuff. I mean, we all know the Kavanaugh story at this point, but Brown’s story is much less well known;
What’s your point?
First off is that progressives don’t have a cohesive narrative on this. While some of them continue to pretend that Cancel Culture doesn’t exist, others are saying that it does, and they do it, but so do conservatives. We’re talking about that second group.
Second is when talking about that group, I’ll even go so far as to say that believe that they believe what they’re saying. But I think they get there through projection. I think that they understand that Cancel Culture isn’t healthy, or at least that it isn’t popular, and so there’s this whataboutism to try to deflect: “Sure, we do this bad thing, but you do it too!” The thing is, I’m not convinced that’s true. I think that with enough time, one could compile a list of cancellations, and you would find that progressive led cancellations are more common, more disproportionate, and more effective.
When progressives say “I don’t remember Conservatives caring about X back in 1993”, they’re not really saying anything material, even though they think they are. What happened 20 years ago could largely be irrelevant, especially if people’s positions have changed since them. But a lot of the time, they’re just making history up from whole cloth and responding to it.