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March 13, 2021

Maybe the pendulum is starting to swing on cancel culture

By Andrea Widburg

I've learned that, if I apply my natural cynicism and pessimism to anything that originated with leftists, I will almost invariably correctly predict the future.  Nevertheless, there's a small part of me that always hopes things will get better.  Perhaps that's why I'm reading a lot into three reports on Friday about people pushing back on cancel culture.

The first story involves Piers Morgan, the British commentator.  Morgan was unimpressed after listening to Meghan and Harry emote to Oprah.  Indeed, not only was he unsympathetic, but he was pretty sure that Meghan was lying about her travails, and he said so out loud.  When he said so during his gig on Good Morning Britain, he ended up storming off the set.  He then tweeted out more statements supporting his belief that Meghan and Harry were not being honest.

What happened next was cancel culture on steroids — 41,000 people complained to Good Morning Britain about his daring to challenge Meghan.  With that, ITV, the station running Good Morning Britain, terminated Morgan.  That termination may have had a little help from...Meghan herself.  The fabulously wealthy B-television actress and diva who feels free to badmouth the queen of England made a formal complaint to ITV because a TV presenter badmouthed her.

Morgan, to his credit, did not bow down to this cancel culture bullying:

In the face of Morgan's refusal to do the usual groveling that we've come to expect from celebrities on the receiving end of the woke mob's cancel culture, something amazing happened.  While 41,000 may have whined about Morgan, over 220,000 people had petitioned for Morgan to be returned to Good Morning Britain.

Those numbers are an excellent and much needed reminder that cancel culture is driven by a vocal minority.  The majority of people who resent it still have the power to push back.

Another example of a pushback came from a teacher in Loudon County, Virginia, the county in which the school district was the first to ban Dr. Seuss thanks to a leftist think-tank's insistence that Seuss is an avatar of racism.  Just listen to this brave teacher not only pushing back on the unconstitutionally racist Critical Race Theory being pushed on government employees — which is a form of canceling whites.  I hope you enjoy the way in which she hurls it back at the school board: "You are the face of privilege!"

It remains to be seen whether she gets fired, but I'm betting that, if she does, the Loudon County School District will find itself the focus of anti–cancel culture, anti–Critical Race Theory rage.

By the way, if you want to help push back against Critical Race Theory, here's a good cause: William Clark is a high school senior in Las Vegas.  He is biracial, with the "bi" in his racial being black.  His mother, also biracial, is raising him alone.  William attends a charter school, where he is the student with the lightest skin.  The school, therefore, insisted that he denounce himself as a "privileged" "oppressor."  When he refused, the school gave him a failing grade.  Instead of caving, he sued.  You can see his mother on Tucker Carlson here and donate here to help his legal fund.  (I did.)

And there's one more entrant in the category of people pushing back against cancel culture: Andrew Cuomo.  Cuomo has a lot of blood on his hands because he insisted on warehousing COVID-infected patients in old age homes long after it became clear that doing so was unnecessary (Trump had made enough hospital beds available) and that it turned old age homes into slaughterhouses.  It doesn't matter why he did it; it's enough that he knowingly, unnecessarily, and cruelly brought about the premature and lonely deaths of thousands of elderly people — and then lied about it afterward.

However, Democrats are afraid to attack him on these grounds because it will expose several other governors to impeachment or criminal prosecution (e.g., Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey).  Because he's a liability, though, they need him gone — and so they've rediscovered what everyone has known forever, which is that, like innumerable powerful Democrat feminist politicians, he's a groper and a lech.

And it's on those grounds, not on manslaughter and dishonesty, that his fellow Democrats are now demanding he resign.  What's so funny is that Cuomo is refusing to resign and, instead, is attacking...cancel culture:

"I did not do what has been alleged. Period," he said[.] ... "People know the difference between playing politics, bowing to cancel culture and the truth."

When you stop laughing at Cuomo's defensive use of a Democrat stock-in-trade, think about the fact that, when leftists start calling out and opposing the cancel culture mob, maybe the end really is near.

Image: Piers Morgan storms off the Good Morning Britain set.  Twitter screen grab.

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