patrick.net

https://spectator.us/conservatives-stop-appropriating-cancel-culture/

For some time now conservatives have been using the tactic of rummaging around in a person’s past, searching for evidence of problematic behavior. They call it ‘cancel culture’. What makes this entire situation worse is that conservatives are not even doing anything original. They are attempting to appropriate a custom which has been practiced by people on the left for years, claiming it as their own. Normally I would see mob-shaming as a perfectly legitimate method of purging society of wrongdoers. The digging up and cataloguing of people’s past micro-aggressions so that we may discredit and ostracize them from the Tribe is something The Woke have been doing for at least a decade now. But people on the right have begun to appropriate this custom as a way of ‘hitting back’ at us for daring to live our best lives by erasing those with opposing views from our village....

As you can see, in the Funny or Die skit, the ‘blackface’ in question [by Alyssa Milano] was actually a parody of Snooki from Jersey Shore who is famous for her over-the-top spray tan. Now, what I find most insulting about this weak attempt to emulate our cancel culture, is that right-wingers are not even particularly good at it! Once Alyssa had posted the video, many of them backed down and acknowledged the context of the image which had been reposted on social media. I mean, talk about Amateur Hour!!! If this doesn’t show a complete ignorance of our culture, I do not know what does.

If this ‘blackface Snooki’ campaign against Alyssa had been engineered by liberals, we would have pointed out that Snooki is in fact of Chilean descent and the fact she uses spray tan is neither here nor there. We would loudly and repeatedly insist that Alyssa had darkened her skin to play an ethnic minority, regardless of the context. She might have responded, producing very clear intent and context to the sketch, explaining that it was poking fun at the shallowness of reality TV celebrity culture, but that ‘weak explanation’ would be flatly rejected as a selfish and arrogant attempt to save her career. She would be labeled a racist underneath every post on all of her social media accounts. She would receive death threats and abuse. Blogs would be written about her lack of understanding regarding Chilean history and ethnic power struggles. The out-of-context screen grab of her dressed as Snooki would adorn the headings of a thousand articles, all proclaiming her to be literally worse than Hitler…until eventually she caves in into the pressure and releases a tearful apology. She would say that she was sorry for any pain she had caused the indigenous population of Chile and that she understands now that what she did was grossly insensitive. This would also be rejected because if anything, it would PROVE to liberal sensibilities that they were correct to flag up her past problematic attitudes. The liberal mob would petition for her removal from any projects she was currently involved in, and her employers would acquiesce to their demands, because seriously, fuck that hassle.

Cancel culture was never meant to be used against people from the left of the political spectrum. The process of ruining somebody’s life, taking away their job, their home, their friends, shaming them and generally making them feel like garbage is something that should only be done to bad people.