by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I went to the grocery story today and saw my first MAGA New Right whack job protest drawn on a truck that drove past me. It said, in part, “Cancel Cancel Culture.”
This really gets to me because given where I live in Virginia, I wonder if the gentleman who was protesting woke cancel culture even knows what the fuck it is. My guess is he doesn’t. Or, if pressed, he would probably say something that translated into “having your life ruined for being conservative.”
It’s this idea of a woke mob chomping at the bit to ruin the lives of God fearing Christian people that causes manly men on Joe Rogan’s podcast to bitch and complain about the “media narrative” that makes it difficult for them to be the manly men that they want to me.
But let’s take an honest look at what, exactly “cancel culture” really is.
My first encounter with the concept of someone being canceled was on afternoon on Twitter a few years ago when it was trending. This or that person had done something to upset the Twitter mob and they were summarily pronounced “canceled.”
It was only a few years later that this idiotic canard came roaring back to the forefront of everyone’s mind. I simply do not believe that being “canceled” exists as conceived by the orthodoxy of the MAGA New Right. Yes, people can get in trouble for being conservative, but often times these people are odd balls in Deep Blue professions like showbiz.
There is the occasional Google programer who freaks out and rants about how “woke” Big Tech is, but they’re also just regular assholes.
I really struggle with how to make concrete the concept of being “canceled” as the MAGA New Right Orthodoxy perceives it. From what I can tell, the term is really more of a catchphrase for the general unhappiness conservatives have about the soft power of the center-Left. Because the fascist idiots of primetime Fox News know simply invoking the terror of being “canceled” rubs the emotional political clit of their average viewer, they throw the concept around as needed to make people stay awake at night worried about it.
From what I can discern, a lot of the fear of being canceled is an expression of how the center-Left sets the national agenda on some issues as the country is torn apart by macro centrifugal forces of titanic proportions. As such, you have Traditionalists who work at, say, a Fortune 500 company who grow enraged that they have to take regular sensitivity training.
They don’t think of themselves as racist or sexist and they take personal offense at the idea that their company would mandate they be more sensitive to the modern expectations of women and minorities. This, in turn, gets them interested in people like Joe Rogan, who, in turn, serves as a gateway drug to the MAGA New Right.
I guess what really bothers me is while elements of “woke cancel culture” do, in fact, exist, I don’t see any reason to burn down our 250 year old democracy because you’re afraid of it. But we have to take seriously the cold, hard fact that autocracy is extremely popular with about 46% of the population. They crave the order of a strong man who will “crush” the woke cancel culture mob and make it safe for them to say tone deaf racist or misogynistic things without having to worry about having their lives ruined.
So, as I keep saying over and over — we’re fucked. The end of America is near and, really, the only issue is if we slip peacefully into autocracy or if we bomb ourselves into oblivion and sort out the difference between Red and Blue that way.
