By Gib Kerr
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.”
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