Obama famously said in his 2008 campaign that he sought to fundamentally transform America. And now we see the fruits of his labor. Thanks to people like Obama, America is more divided than at any time since the Civil War.
Cancel culture follows Saul Alinsky’s infamous Rules for Radicals, particularly his rule to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Interestingly, Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley College on Alinsky and his tactics. Beginning with the Clintons, cancel culture has become embedded in modern political discourse.
Cancel culture is all about tearing things down. It is inherently destructive. It builds nothing. It creates nothing. It only destroys.
Like the Vandals who destroyed Rome, cancel culture is destroying American culture. Systematically, it seeks to target and eliminate America’s heroes. It rages against symbols of our cherished traditions, urging its hateful mobs to “burn it down!” It is fueled by anger, bitterness, envy, and vindictiveness.
It is the same mean-spirited mindset that led French revolutionaries to reject their past, create a new calendar starting with Year Zero, and execute over seventeen thousand of their fellow citizens.
The widespread growth of cancel culture in America, with its unforgiving intolerance of all things past, instills a sense of terror—particularly in young people—that they too may be cancelled for saying or even thinking dissenting ideas. This leads to massive self-censorship, the absolute squashing of debate and civil discourse, and ultimately to the suppression of free and creative thinking.
Cancel culture rejects the Western and Christian notions of grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation. In its place, cancel culture promotes violence, terror, intimidation, intolerance, and retribution.
As Paul Kengor notes in his 2020 book The Devil and Karl Marx, Marx’s Communist Manifesto spawned a twisted ideology that explicitly encouraged violence and terror to abolish private property, destroy religion, and even abolish the family. It called for an unprecedented application of cancel culture to fundamentally transform society. But transform it into what?
Haven’t we learned from over a century of experience what Marxism, with cancel culture as its constant accomplice, produces? Are the deaths of 100 million victims of communism not instructive enough? We know from experience where it all leads and what happens when society is “fundamentally transformed.”
U.S. financial tech company PayPal has been accused of a “sinister form of cancel culture” after its decision to shut down the accounts of the Free Speech Union, a U.K. body that defends and supports members who are unfairly targeted or discriminated against by their employers for exercising their legal right to free speech.
The union announced via its social media platforms late on Tuesday evening that PayPal was blocking payments to the body through its platform for “alleged violations of the company’s acceptable use policy.”
Speaking to GB News’ Mark Dolan on Tuesday, Toby Young, the founder of the Free Speech Union, explained he had received an email from PayPal explaining that his personal account had been frozen, with a £600 balance effectively confiscated with no method to withdraw it.
Shortly after, Young received notifications that two companies he founded, the Daily Sceptic and the Free Speech Union, had also had their accounts indefinitely suspended. Young told GB News that approximately a quarter of the Daily Sceptic’s donors used PayPal as a payment method and would now be unable to support the company, and approximately one-third of the 9,500 members of the Free Speech Union paid their recurring membership fees via the payment platform, seriously impeding the group’s ability to receive much-needed income.
“This is the new battlefront in the ongoing war against free speech… financial services being withdrawn from people,” Young told the news channel.
In a statement, the Free Speech Union claimed it had been “demonetized by the financial intermediary PayPal for daring to stand up for free speech,” and urged its members to submit complaints about UK PayPal’s actions to the company.
Today’s America is not a place for subtlety and nuance. Today’s youth seem especially incapable of handling fine distinctions. No interesting heterodox mix of positions will be tolerated; total conformity is required. Cleave to the party line in toto, lest ye be canceled.
“Cancel Culture” is the new regime whereby one can lose one’s livelihood, one’s reputation, and even one’s friends for not hewing to every last tenet of the reigning orthodoxy. The gay journalist Chadwick Moore learned about the intolerance of left-wing cancelers when he came out as a conservative (italics added):
I began to realize that maybe my opinions just didn’t fit in with the liberal status quo, which seems to mean that you must absolutely hate Trump, his supporters and everything they believe. If you dare not to protest or boycott Trump, you are a traitor.
If you dare to question liberal stances or make an effort toward understanding why conservatives think the way they do, you are a traitor.
You must kneel before Rome, you must grovel at her feet. For wokesters, it’ll never do to be just “99 and 44/100% pure,” like the old Ivory Soap ads claimed. No, my fair cousin, one needs to be 100% pure. Otherwise, you might just be an anti-social deviant, or maybe even an adherent of deviationism.
When it comes to the big important issues, like whether one can choose one’s sex, there are no shades of gray, just black and white. Reality, however, is more interesting than the woke would have us believe. Some things (and people) are mixed, they can be both bad and good, both sacred and profane.
The woke can’t wrap their little minds around that. So let’s consider the dilemmas of serious people.
In the aftermath of the horrors of World War II, musicians wondered if they should perform the works of Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer. The dilemma was especially vexing for Jewish artists because Wagner was an anti-Semite, and had written ugly screeds on Jewish music. Even so, some of the world’s greatest Jewish artists chose to perform and even record Wagner’s operas.
The reason Jews didn’t “cancel” Herr Wagner and chose to perform his works is because they understood that an awful man with vile repellent views can also create beautiful music. (A word to the woke: Sometimes one needs to be able to hold seemingly contradictory things in one’s head at the same time.)
So Wagner (whom the French call vaughn-YAY) got a reprieve, and didn’t get thrown on the ash heap of history. And, get this, some of the finest interpreters of his work are Jews.
This was brought home to me when I happened on a video of the Jewish conductor Georg Solti in a recording session. And who do we see sitting in the trumpet section but Helmut Wobisch, who as a youth had been a Nazi. (You may get a kick out of watching Solti in the video; he was quite energetic.)
Instead of training in military pursuits, personell are learning all about racism, sexism, ableism, ageism and all the rest. Rather than learning how to be better soldiers, sailors, marines, pilots, they are being educated in wokism. At this rate, after their military service is over, they will be good candidates to get jobs in higher education where they can bully professors for engaging in micro-aggressions.
I’ve done it. I’ve finally done it. I’ve finally converted to wokeism. Count me now amongst all of my new friends on the left in favor of cancel culture, transgenderism, intersectionality, BLM, stamping out micro-aggressions, critical race theory, Marxism, and calling for diversity, inclusion and equity rather than ability to do a job. I now see systematic racism as the source of all evil. I now apologize for being a white heterosexual male.. (It is a bit inadvertent; I can’t help it; well, I suppose I could work on the sexual part, but, I’m not inclined to go that far. I’m not known far and wide – at least in my own mind – as Walter Moderate Block, for nothing at all). I’m now a liberal, a socialist, a communist, a collectivist, a pinko, a leftie, a progressive. I hereby apologize, profusely, for, yes, I admit it, being a member of the ruling class thanks to being supremely white and cis-gendered. (See how I can now spout the correct lingo!)
What turned me around on this? What made me see the light on this matter? What was the turning point for me on my road to Damascus?
It was the woke military of the U.S. I finally woke up (pardon the pun) to the fact that the armed forces of this nation are themselves waking up, and that this is an altogether a good thing. No, scratch that. A very, very good thing.
The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines started weakening themselves by welcoming homosexuals. Then, they followed through by inviting women into their ranks, with roughly the same results, although for obviously different reasons. The latest wakefulness of these organizations is that they have embraced the explicit wokeist philosophy. The same thing seems to be occurring north of our border, and this, too, is all to the good: Canada has almost always been a junior partner in US expansionism.
Instead of training in military pursuits, personell are learning all about racism, sexism, ableism, ageism and all the rest. Rather than learning how to be better soldiers, sailors, marines, pilots, they are being educated in wokism. At this rate, after their military service is over, they will be good candidates to get jobs in higher education where they can bully professors for engaging in micro-aggressions.
Space Force Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier, commander of his squadron, objected to this new initiative. He was fired for writing a book mentioning these concerns of his: “Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military.” In this book he criticized, among many other things the 1619 project of the New York Times. That’s a bad book, based on this new philosophy.
Want to hear about a good book? The US Chief of Naval Operations has recommended on his professional reading list for sailors, How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi. This is a publication that proposes future discrimination against white people.
But these are only the tips of the iceberg, matters for headlines. The actual day to day training of army personal is ongoing, comprehensive and supremely woke.
Why is this all to the good? That is because the main function of these people is not to defend the home country, but, rather, to roam around the world trying to export democracy to the entire planet. To this end, there are some 800 military bases located in about 130 different countries. Since there are only roughly 200 nations on the entire planet, this constitutes a clear majority of them.
Has U.S. military imperialism been a force for good? That is a difficult position to defend. Had this country not entered world war I, the two sides would have run out of soldiers, on both sides, thanks to losses in trench warfare. There never would have been a Treaty of Versailles, which led to the German hyper-inflation of 1923, which eventuated in the rise of Hitler, the Nazi party, communism and world war II. It is difficult to see what the U.S. sojourns in VietNam did any good for the world. The same holds true for the American fighting presence in Afghanistan for almost two decades. Now, the neo-con warmongers are pushing for entry into the Russian – Ukrainian fracas even though, again, US foreign policy – pushing Nato to the very border of Russia – was to blame..
However, thanks to the weakening of the U.S. military (hey, we can still kick Grenadian butt), it becomes less and less likely that this institution will intervene. So, let us raise a glass to wokeism in our armed forces. That is perhaps not the best route to world peace, but beggars can’t be choosers. The less power wielded by the US the more likely we are to be saved from thermo-nuclear war. We always have to be ready to welcome strange bed-fellows. Yay, wokism. Three cheers, not two.
Woke supremacy has been taking a toll on Western civilization. The casualties of wokeness are too many and sundry to track. But we should not forget that wokeness was first germinated in higher education, from whence it metastasized to the wider social body. The academy is the cathedral pulpit from which the ideological dictates of the elite flow downward to the hoi polloi.
According to David Acevedo of the National Association of Scholars, hundreds of North American academics have been subjected to cancel culture to date, including yours truly. And the number continues to grow. This is to say nothing about the curriculum, which has suffered excisions of canonical works from literature and philosophy and the denunciation of correct answers in math, among many other abominations.
Now woke ideology has led to the resignation of the most famous academic alive: the psychologist, best-selling author, and public intellectual Jordan Peterson, who announced in the National Post his decision to retire from his position as tenured full professor at the University of Toronto.
Peterson cites two main reasons for his resignation. The first involves his otherwise bad conscience regarding graduate students. For one, his white cis-hetero grad students are unlikely to land academic jobs due to the explicit discrimination that white males face in the academic job market.
I can attest to this fact, having served on hiring committees that set aside top-notch candidates who happened to be white males in favor of far less qualified and sometimes utterly unqualified comers whose membership in “marginalized” identity categories was their most distinguishing qualification. Adding insult to injury, academic job applicants must now submit “diversity” statements in which they swear allegiance to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), or diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE), despite the ideology’s discriminatory function and, in the case of those from “dominant” identity categories, the likelihood that it diminishes their own prospects.
Furthermore, given Peterson’s association with the alt-right and white nationalism by hysterics in the media and the academic Left, his graduate students face even more discrimination than usual. Basically, any intellectual that opposes communism and third-wave feminism is dubbed a Nazi and a misogynist by academic leftists, and Peterson is no exception. Yet the public mischaracterizations and libelous accusations have been particularly egregious in his case.
The second reason Peterson gives for his retirement is generalized disgust with the DIE ideology and its erosion of academic standards. Peterson simply wants nothing further to do with the woke hegemony and has come to regard continued association with the university as tantamount to complicity with the woke regime.
In addition to academia, Peterson also pans Hollywood and the corporate world. The selection of actors in Hollywood is based on identity rather than excellence. The same goes for screenplays and the granting of awards. In every respect, the criteria for success have been utterly corrupted by DIE ideology.
Peterson also calls out the corporate world for its compliance with wokeness. Why, he asks, do capitalist companies accede to woke dictates? I’ve given my own explanation for this elsewhere. Wokeness serves as a demarcation device, a shibboleth for identifying cartel members and distinguishing them from the nonwoke competitors, who are to be starved of capital investments.
Peterson rightly calls the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) index a Chinese-style social credit score for corporations, a characterization that I drew several months ago and most recently in an essay on the Great Reset published in November 2021. The collectivist planners use the ESG index to squeeze nonwoke players out of the market and to drive ownership and control of production away from the noncompliant. The ESG score is an admissions ticket for entry into the woke cartels.
In addition to these objects of Peterson’s ire, we might also bemoan the woke infiltration of the media, professional sports, the music business, the fashion industry, advertising, book publishing, live theater, museum curation, and even religious belief and expression. Wokeness, in fact, is a religion in its own right. It has pervaded nearly every aspect of culture and society, subverting, displacing, and rendering obsolete and anathema the once cherished values of nearly all our institutions.
Where academia is concerned, the water has long since gone under the bridge. The West has been undergoing a ghoulish cultural revolution for several years, replete with struggle meetings and self-criticism sessions. Academia not only generated this cultural revolution but was the site first ravaged by it. Higher education is long gone, and Peterson’s retirement from it is somewhat anticlimactic. Nevertheless, given his intellectual prominence, Peterson’s resignation represents a high-water mark for the ravages wrought by DIE ideology on our society. Author:
Certain groups love saying cancel culture doesn’t exist — that the calls to stifle individuals and put offending companies “out of business” are about consequences. But the act of calling for the masses to admonish people who merely see things differently is akin to childhood bullying.
Fortunately, there are people unwilling to toe the line, even at the risk of losing millions.
Bill Maher: “I’m a free speech guy”
Comedian and political commentator Bill Maher has a few choice words for the woke — eight, to be exact. In a recent episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the host rattled off a list of terms cancel culture proponents need to stop redefining: hate, victim, hero, shame, violence, survivor, phobic and white supremacy.
Bill Maher’s 8 words to stop redefining (from the show’s official YouTube channel)
Maher also clarified his stance on the Dave Chappelle controversy. “I’m a free speech guy. Now I’m team Dave, but that doesn’t mean I’m anti-trans. We can have two thoughts in our head at the same time.”
Rapper-turned-actor Ice Cube has walked away from a $9 million paycheck after declining to comply with a movie production’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate. Filming for “Oh Hell No,” co-starring Jack Black, was set to begin in December.
Adam Bielawski, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Cube’s decision attracted hordes of anti-anti-vaxxers, primarily on Twitter, despite the actor’s alternative efforts to combat the spread of Covid-19. Last year, Cube donated 2,000 face marks to Bacone College in Oklahoma, and he also released a series of “Check Yo Self Before You Wreck Yo Self” shirts, with proceeds being donated to frontline health workers.
Despite receiving several nominations, country singer Morgan Wallen isn’t welcome to awards shows. Earlier this year, he was video-recorded using the n-word after a rowdy night out. Despite making profound apologies and committing to do better, Wallen was dropped by his label, disqualified from the CMA and at least temporarily banned from radio and streaming stations. Still, his records continued to sell.
Based on music charting, Wallen is nominated for AMA’s Favorite Male Country Artist and Favorite Country Album. But an asterisk appears next to his name, referring to the disclaimer: “Morgan Wallen is a nominee this year based on charting. As his conduct does not align with our core values, we will not be including him on the show in any capacity (performing, presenting, accepting).”
Propaganda is the foundation of all our problems, and the us vs them dynamic is the foundation of propaganda. If humans can awaken in a visceral, experiential way to the reality that all is one we can inoculate ourselves against propaganda and begin moving toward health together.
“To protect Taiwan we must be prepared to go to war with China.”
~ Imperialists who just lost a war to the Taliban
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I’m genuinely disturbed at how many people would be willing to fight a world war over Taiwan’s governmental preferences. The power and effectiveness of the imperial propaganda machine never ceases to amaze me.
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The astonishing amount of pushback I’m getting for my very sane and normal “Let’s not fight World War Three over Taiwan” position makes it abundantly clear that many people don’t truly understand that starting a war means you have to actually send actual human beings to go fight that war.
The correct response to someone who supports going to war if China attacks Taiwan is “Are you enlisted?”
The correct response when they inevitably answer “no” is “Then shut the fuck up.”
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People who are fine with the idea of increasing aggressions between nuclear-armed nations simply haven’t thought hard enough about what nuclear war is and haven’t learned enough about the many different ways it could occur. It’s a comfort held in place by compartmentalization.
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The decision to go to war with China would be the single most important and consequential decision ever made in human history. You’d have to weigh it against millions to billions of deaths. Defending Taiwan’s preference of government clearly wouldn’t weigh enough to justify that cost.
The empire’s greatest weapon is not its military but its propaganda machine. There’s simply never been anything like the global narrative control provided by the western news media, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. The military fights wars, the propaganda machine wins them long before they start.
A lucid and well-informed examination of the world’s problems will keep bringing you back to this one fundamental issue: that Earth’s inhabitants are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale into organizing themselves in ways that serve the powerful instead of the people.
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Congratulations to those who were awarded the same highly esteemed Peace Prize as Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger.
It’s very cute how we all think that everyone else is gullible except for us. Even assuming that is true is already very gullible.
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Humans are not inherently fucked up, we’re just traumatized and manipulated by an abusive system into doing fucked up things. Very few of the ugly behaviors we see in people would exist if we had conscious and compassionate systems in place for organizing ourselves in this world.
Everyone gets that it’s wrong to blame an entire group on the misdeeds of a few of its members, but few people seem to apply that same logic to humanity as a whole. All our systems are dominated by the worst among us, simply because they’re sociopathic enough to climb to the top.
Really it just boils down to the fact that the majority don’t understand how sociopaths’ minds work or how to counter them, and that the trauma of preceding generations keeps giving rise to sociopaths. I think the initial trauma stretches back to our evolutionary ancestors who literally spent their lives running from giant monsters who were trying to eat them. Our nervous systems still operate that way today, even though those monsters are long gone.
If we could just catch a break for one or two generations to heal that trauma, I think we’d be fine. But we keep passing our trauma on to new generations because the worst among us keep thwarting everyone’s attempts to set up conscious systems.
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To compensate for the fact that it won’t ever give the left any economic concessions the empire has been loudly amplifying some concessions on racial and sexual justice, so now even though nothing really changed you still get rightists saying politics moved “too far to the left”. This gives the propagandists a couple of different tools: it keeps discourse tied up on issues that will never hurt the agendas of any plutocrat or warmonger, and feeds into the culture war dynamics which facilitate us-vs-them propaganda tactics.
Propaganda is the foundation of all our problems, and the us vs them dynamic is the foundation of propaganda. If humans can awaken in a visceral, experiential way to the reality that all is one we can inoculate ourselves against propaganda and begin moving toward health together.
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There is something both stirring and sad about Winston Marshall’s goodbye letter to Mumford & Sons after he found himself in the eye of a Twitterstorm for praising the work of anti-Antifa journalist Andy Ngo.
It’s stirring because here we have a public figure making an enormous sacrifice – leaving the band he loves – in order that he might more freely express his political beliefs. That’s rare in this age in which celebs, columnists and politicians usually respond to Twittermobbing with abject apologies, mistakenly believing that public displays of atonement will appease the thoughtpolice. Of course it does the opposite. Apologies embolden the cancel-culture mob. They feast on retractions. The thrill of having successfully forced someone to recant deepens their lust for power.
So to see Marshall stand up for himself feels bracing. His ‘offence’ was that he tweeted favourably about Andy Ngo’s book, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. The woke left fantasises that Antifa’s Fisher-Price revolutionaries, its pampered TikTok vanguard, its masked middle-class activists who love beating up journalists and punching stupid working-class Trump supporters, are the 21st-century equivalent of the International Brigades. So anyone who takes the side of Mr Ngo – who recognises that Antifa is actually a bunch of dangerous arseholes – must be evil. And that includes Marshall.
The reaction to Marshall’s pro-Ngo tweet was, even by the standards of today’s viral inquisitions, deranged.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
Last summer, when cinemas were open in France, I saw the film Mr; Jones and wrote about it for LRC. As I wrote then, the film dramatizes “the voyage of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (played by the English actor James Norton) to the Soviet Union in 1933 where he became an eye witness of the forced famine in Ukraine now called the Holodomor, (the word is from the Ukranian meaning murder by hunger). The Holodomor, which consisted of the slow tourtured murder of millions of Ukranian peasants by Stalin’s Communist Party, is barely known by the general public, especially compared to the Holocaust perpertrated by Hitler’s Nazis.”
Also in that article I wrote about Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter in Moscow at the time. “The response from that era’s mainstream media, the foreign correspondents stationed in Russia, was akin to the cancel culture of today. Taking the lead was the Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent for the New York Times (isn’t it always the Old Gray Lady?) Walter Duranty, known as Stalin’s apologist. From the book on Duranty by S.J. Taylor the events are known. A Soviet press officer told the correspondents that their credentials would be denied unless they repudiated Jones. They even made a party out of the meeting to come up with the phrases to call Jones a liar in all but name. Duranty’s response to Jones included perhaps the most cynical excuse for power ever uttered. “But–to put it brutally–you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the Bolshevik leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialism an any General during the World War who ordered a costly attack in order to show his superiors that he and his division possessed the proper soldierly spirit.” While admitting that there had been “food shortages” there was no “death from starvation” but only “widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.” Jones responded in the Times (printed about a month later after the furor had died down, but much more from that newspaper than we could expect today) that he would stick to the facts that he had found on the ground, interviewing peasants themselves, not learned second hand through government sources. Jones even felt pity for these compromised journalists who had to be “masters of euphemism and understatement.””
The Ukranian Weekly explains that the Duranty revocation campaign has the following goals: First, to build a network of journalists and educators, empowering them to continue writing articles, editorials, and promoting the great travesty of mistruths and lies perpetrated by Walter Duranty. Second, to request that the Ukrainian American community, especially students, use social media to promote an awareness campaign to help with media pitching, design work and writing. Third, announce a social media contest to develop and post Duranty memes with the hashtag #RevokeDurantyPulitzer. Fourth, spur a worldwide petition on change.org for the revocation of Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize.
The Committee maintains an information packed website to learn more about the Holodomor. One historical item posted is a State Department memo from 1931 filed from Berlin, where Duranty had stopped in during his vacation. It is the smoking gun for his complicity, but also critically important to note is the complicity of the New York Times itself. The memo states, “In conclusion, Duranty pointed out that, ‘in agreement with the NEW YORK TIMES and the Soviet authorities,’ his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet régime and not his own.”
I support the efforts of the Committee to expose the pedalling of false news 80-90 years ago. It is sweet irony to see cancel culture applied to the New York Times where more than ever they are still a key propagator of various flavors of propaganda.
MCViewPoint 
