Fear Of “Cancel Culture” Has Now Produced “Coward Culture”

Recently, actor and Wrestler John Cena got into some controversy. During an interview for the new Fast And Furious film — because, for some reason, we need nine Fast And Furious movies — Cena said the following:

Taiwan will be the first country to see Fast & Furious 9. This movie is really great — and it’s huge. You’ll be the first to see the film.

This, naturally, angered the country of China, which has refused to recognize Taiwan as a separate nation for decades. So Cena, while speaking Chinese, said the following to the nation of China:

I must say, this is very, very, very, very, very, very important, I love and respect China and Chinese people. I am very very sorry for my mistake. You must understand, I really love and respect China and Chinese people.

Naturally, this angers some people, many of whom are against China engaging in imperialism — as their One China policy is — and who believe Taiwan is a separate nation from China. However, what are those people going to do about this? They could boycott the new Fast And Furious movie and refuse to engage in any media that contains John Cena until he retracts this apology and apologizes to the people of Taiwan, hypothetically. But doing so would cause them to commit the ultimate sin in today’s world: Engaging in the dreaded “cancel culture.”

Of course, in our culture today, nothing is worse than “canceling” another human being. Remember cancel culture Marytr Gina Carano’s comparison of those who “cancel” celebrities to the Nazis? Seriously, that’s what she said on Instagram in February 2021:

Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.

Here, we have a famous actress with a net worth of $8 million comparing herself to a Jew in Nazi Germany, just let that sink in for a minute. Carano was clearly comparing herself to a Jew in Germany to dodge pre-existing criticism of her political views, and our culture ate it up.

It should also be noted that the reason why Cena was forced to apologize to the Chinese was because they threatened to “cancel” him. That’s the irony of “cancel culture,” being against it only works when everyone else agrees not to engage in it. If an authoritarian regime is trying to “cancel” its opposition, then you must either allow them to do so or you must speak out against those who bend their knees. Of course, doing the second involves “canceling” on some level, which is why those who bend the knee to dictatorships keep telling us we’re the bad guys.

I must note, we live in a rather odd time right now; a time where millions of common people are taking to the internet to stand up for those with more wealth and power than they’ll ever have. Of course, these celebrities who become “cancel culture martyrs” will never do the same to the common folk. When someone loses their job over a politically incorrect tweet — a hypothetical we are constantly warned about despite it seldom happening — do these people really think Gina Carano, J.K. Rowling, or Nick Sandmann will rush to their defense? When a common citizen is “canceled,” as Justine Sacco was in 2013 after making a joke about AIDS in Africa, are they likely to stand up for the canceled or to join the mob?

Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows the answer, but that doesn’t stop millions upon millions of people from dedicating their lives standing up for the poor millionaires who are being criticized for a brief period of time on Twitter. For $20, you can buy a t-shirt that reads “I Stand With J.K. Rowling,” so the world knows that you feel the need to defend the author of the best-selling book series in all of history and a woman worth over $1 billion!

Of course, there are some exceptions to this rule. For example, when Leaving Neverland was released in 2019, an HBO film that tried to tell us that Michael Jackson was a sexual predator, all of a sudden all of the “skeptics” were willing to believe it over a dead man who had twice been found innocent by a jury of his peers. Many also believe O.J. Simpson is a murderer, again despite the fact a jury of his peers found him to be innocent.

However, more often than not, the trend is to side with the powerful and wealthy person over the group of small Twitter users who are angry. Now, maybe the small Twitter users are in the wrong, that’s perfectly possible; however, them being wrong as often as the mainstream media says they are seem rather unlikely.

A few months ago, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he has no plans of “bowing to cancel culture” in response to calls for him to resign because of the nursing home scandal and the accusations he sexually harassed staff. The Republican Party was accused of engaging in “cancel culture” when it demoted Congresswoman Liz Cheney in response to her voting to impeach Donald Trump. Here, we are told by those who scream about “cancel culture” that this isn’t true cancel culture for this or that reason, but none of them are ever able to explain how.

As Alley Stuckley said on Twitter at the time:

My gosh. Cancel culture is not being asked to resign because you led thousands of elderly people to the slaughter and sexually harassed a bunch of young women. Cancel culture is, among other things, being fired because you said a politically incorrect thing someone didn’t like.

Michael Knowles further expanded upon this in an article for The Daily Wire, stating:

“Cancel culture” does not refer to the general belief that people ought never to incur consequences for the things they say or write, nor does it suggest that society ought to have no standards whatsoever. No one believes that an employee who shows up to work in a brown shirt and yells, “Seig Heil!” from the water cooler has some sacred right to keep his job. Defenders of “cancel culture” evade the issue by straw-manning their opponents’ views.

The issue is, it’s impossible to see a way our current culture could go where what Michael calls ridiculous does not become the case. According to an Axios poll from 2017, roughly 9% of Americans think it’s acceptable to hold white supremacist and Neo-Nazi views. When Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes was banned from YouTube, Ben Shapiro tweeted the following on 2/14/2020:

Nick Fuentes is an absolute disgusting s***show. But if he was banned for his idiotic, garbage viewpoints rather than for violent threats, YouTube shouldn’t be deplatforming him.

If even someone like Fuentes, someone who is as close to a Neo-Nazi as one can be and still have some mainstream appeal, can be “canceled,” then why can’t literal Nazis? (Hey, I wonder what Knowles thinks of the idea that slopes can be slipped down.) Is there someone more Neo-Nazi than Fuentes who Knowles would be fine “canceling”? If so, who are they and what have they said that makes them worse than Fuentes?

Of course, Knowles never plans to actually create an end-point for “too far-right” before they can get “canceled.” The goal of people like Knowles — people who scream about “cancel culture” every chance they get — is to expand the Overton Window (or the acceptable realm of political discourse) as far open as possible. If that’s in some misguided attempt at “open debate” (as Dave Rubin does) or because they have something to gain from Nazi views being more normalized depends on the person, but either way, the goal is the same.

Notice how nobody came to the defense of Emily Wilder, the Jewish woman who was fired by the Associated Press for being anti-Zionist. This is because anti-Zionist views are in a weird middle where they’re both mainstream and considered contrarian— meaning nobody on either side really could come to her defense even if they wanted to. How is such a story spun in the “cancel culture” narrative?

As it stands, two major groups are promoting this “anti-cancel culture” narrative.

The first group is, to put it simply, people with unacceptable political views. Their arguments are nothing more than screaming PRATTs at you, and they will do everything possible to make sure you have to hear them. If you tell them that their views — monarchism, fascism, Luddism, theocracy, or some new bizarre ideology understandable only to them — are wrong, or harmful to society, you are canceling them.

When I think of these people, I’m reminded of what George Orwell wrote about pacifism:

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism.

In the same regard, a number of those who are against “cancel culture” are simply useful idiots for those with destructive, illiberal, and all-around horrible political views. However, the intellectuals among them — people like Sohrab Aharmi, Josh Hammer, and Tucker Carlson — are those who evil political views trying to normalize what they stand for.

The second group is the entitled elite, the people who hate the idea that you could disagree with them, and who demand you fall in line with what they believe. Whenever a celebrity complains about “cancel culture,” this is what they are actually saying. When they find out that the people want media that actually represents them and their interests in some way, instead of the vapid and mindless entertainment these people produce, they are enraged. How could we, the stupid proles to use Orwell’s terminology, dare want more than what we are getting?

To put it bluntly, I am perfectly okay with “canceling” cowardly celebrities who defend authoritarian nations over the free nations of the world. I am also okay with “canceling” those who wish to spread fascism, monarchism, Luddism, or any other authoritarian ideology as far as they can. These are the most basic things one can do to stand up for the interest of their homeland, and that’s something the enemies of liberty already understand all too well. In China, they cancel you for speaking out against Xi Jinping, if China really is our enemy — as we Americans keep getting told — maybe it’s time we start canceling those who support him in the United States.

I’m not calling for arresting those who believe in authoritarian ideologies, I am saying that we as a society have a right to demand they never enter the public square. If a man eats his own shit in public, he is arrested, because society has always had standards for what is and is not allowed around others. In the same way, authoritarian ideologies should be seen as the political version of eating your own shit, especially considering it’s hard to call one any less disgusting than the other.