'Cancel Culture': Old Tyranny in New Bottles

If the progressives succeed, they will create what the Founders feared.

The last few weeks we’ve seen programmatically progressive media outlets purging their political bedfellows for deviating from the “woke” party line. Some, like erstwhile New York Times editor James Bennet, confessed and apologized for their alleged sins voluntarily, like an old Bolshevik apparatchik in a show-trial. Others, like Times editor Bari Weiss and Atlantic writer Andrew Sullivan, resigned before they were hustled to the guillotine, at least salvaging some self-respect.

And it’s not just today’s people and institutions that are facing the baying mobs of mostly callow millennials who pitch a fit over anything that challenges their fragile self-esteem and “smelly little orthodoxies.” For months we’ve watched two-bit anarchists and race-hustlers knocking down monuments from our history as a graphic repudiation of America and its defining principles––a 21st century version of the old Roman damnatio memoriae, in which enemies of the state or emperor were disappeared from history by removing any public reference to them in inscriptions, statues, or books.

Indeed, today’s “cancel culture” is nothing new. It is just the latest manifestation of tyranny: As Aristotle defined it, “arbitrary power . . . which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No free man willingly endures such a government.”

Historically, the tyrant has achieved that power by violence, especially against anyone who appear to be a threat to his ambitions or power. Herodotus has a famous anecdote about the tyrant’s use of violence. In the 7th century BC, Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, deliberating over how to keep his power safe from rivals, sent a messenger to Thrasybulus of Miletus asking his advice. Thrasybulus led the messenger into a field of wheat, and as he questioned him during their walk, broke off the tallest ears of grain. Periander got the message: “Kill outstanding citizens.”

Today’s leftists haven’t yet descended into that level of political murder. Instead they practice character assassination, the destruction of their enemies’ careers and reputations. Their weapons are not daggers or poison, but the catalogue of question-begging epithets, particularly “racism”––after all, as they keep telling us, “words are violence.” What’s also typically modern about their purges is the emphasis on personal feelings and identity, and complaints not about actual crimes or injustices, but confected ones like “systemic racism” and white cops targeting black men for execution. The subalterns at the Times who got their editor fired over an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton claimed that it made “people of color” on the staff feel less “safe,” as though affluent, privileged members of the cognitive elite live, like hoaxer Jessie Smollett, in daily fear of packs of Klansmen roaming Manhattan looking for blacks to lynch.

Therapeutic solace, not correcting injustices, is what in part the demands for “inclusion” is about. It’s not about “diversity” and working in an organization that reflects the demographic variety of America. If it were, there would be a lot more conservatives and Christians working at the Times or Atlantic. It’s about establishing a safe, comforting “herd of independent minds,” to borrow art critic Harold Rosenberg’s phrase, a “safe space” in which nothing challenges or upsets the “woke” persona of righteous “social justice warriors.” It’s about something no one people before the age of Freud ever thought about: How any individual other than the sick and destitute “feels” about himself and his circumstances.

But make no mistake, for all its therapeutic sensibilities, the “woke” herd is mainly about achieving the quintessential totalitarian aim–– the autocratic power that defines the tyrant. That’s what makes the current progressive media so important: Their incessant coverage of “cancel culture” and the violent protests gives the “woke” the power of publicity that confirm their self-righteousness, legitimizes them with the “halo effect” from prestigious cultural institutions, and bestows on them the shopworn romance of revolution, just as a poster of the Caucasian psychopath Che Guevara does in their bedrooms.

Of course, violence is still a necessary tool of the aspiring tyrant, who uses murder to remove rivals and challengers, and intimidate the mass of sheep into remaining sheep. Destroying and vandalizing public monuments and private businesses, and physically attacking the police, are telegenic advertisements for the rioters own power and the civil authorities’ weakness. Allowing this mayhem to continue for two months strengthens that power as well as the status of the mobs. And the appeasement by mayors, governors, and Democrat politicians, whether from fear or political calculation, validates the charges that America is corrupt, unjust, and guilty of institutionalized racial injustice. Why else would official authority retreat and placate the mob, going so far as to kneel before them in contrition?

And, this failure of nerve in the face of public violence allows mostly middle-class poseurs and layabouts to get all this attention and validation on the cheap. It’s a lot easier to strut, scream epithets, and throw rocks, bricks, and bottles at the cops when you know it’s unlikely that you will experience the wonderfully mind-concentrating effects of a nightstick bouncing off your skull, followed by a trip to the emergency room, and then arrest and trial. “Social justice” is one thing, but a criminal conviction staining your public record is taking it too far.

What this protest theater suggests is that this level of riots and violence is not going to bring on a revolution that radically changes the American political order. The savvier members of Black Lives Matter know this, so their aim is to create enough disorder to hurt Trump’s chances for reelection, and then install a pliant Democrat who will play Charlie McCarthy to the radical Dems’ Edgar Bergan. Whether by design or chance, the capitulation of the Democrats to the Bernie Sanders/AOC wing of the part has strengthened this tactic.

So too have the lockdowns, which have damaged Trump’s signature achievement, an economy revitalized after eight years of Obama-Biden malfeasance. Along with the subsequent ongoing riots and protests, they have created a sense that the country is dangerously out of control. I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but it’s suspicious that the second wave of lockdowns and the blue-state enabling of the violent protests happened just as the economy was showing signs of recovery.

Finally, “fundamentally transforming” America doesn’t need a violent revolution. What we are witnessing today is the acceleration of changes begun over a hundred years ago. The critical factor in moving this country from political freedom to soft despotism has been the rewriting of the Constitution, and this has been happening since Woodrow Wilson. The progressive ideal of technocratic government by means of metastasizing federal bureaus and agencies has been created, and is so entrenched in our political culture that most Republicans and “conservatives” seldom question it. Today, the idea of unalienable natural rights like freedom of speech, peaceful assembly, and bearing arms are under assault, as they have been since progressive Charles Beard in 1912 call them “obsolete and indefensible.” Hence today’s progressives agitate for limiting the Second Amendment, and curtailing free speech, which is the aim of “cancel culture.”

Also under attack has been the Constitutional order of balanced and divided government. Technocracy, as Wilson understood, requires centralized and concentrated power wielded by unelected, unaccountable experts: a “bureau of skilled, economical administration,” Wilson wrote, comprising the “hundreds who are wise” to guide the thousands who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.” One big step to achieving the goal of weakening the balance of powers was also taken during the Wilson administration––the popular election of senators, which stripped from the sovereign states the power to appoint senators and through their checks on executive power protect the states’ interests, rights, and powers.

So no surprise that today progressives are seeking to weaken federalism by basing the number of senators on population rather than on equal representation for each state; and by abolishing the Electoral College to create the tyranny of the majority feared by the Founders. The result of these changes, if effected, will be to further limit the freedom and autonomy of individuals, states, businesses, and civil society­­––just as during the pandemic we have seen blue-state governors and mayors suspend or compromise the natural rights to bear arms, peacefully assemble, and worship publicly.

Progressives have long desired and worked for those changes to the Constitution. If achieved they will create what the Founders feared––tyranny and the end of our political freedom, the ultimate aim of “cancel culture.” When that happens, it won’t just be this reporter or that institution that will be cancelled­­––it will be the United States and the principles, virtues, and political order that have made it the freest, richest, most powerful country in history.

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The Great Deletion

Reddit’s purge of ‘hateful’ forums shows us how unfree the internet is becoming.

My two most recent columns for spiked dealt with cancel culture and hate-crime hoaxes. Thanks to the internet being what it is, events during the past month have provided me with a perfect real-life combination of these two trends.

On 29 July, Reddit, the self-proclaimed front page of the internet, deleted a popular ‘subreddit’ (a type of forum specific to the platform) dealing with hate-crime hoaxes. (Those so inclined can check out what is now simply a blank page here.) That same day, Reddit also deleted a number of other popular subreddits, including the r/GenderCritical and r/TrueLesbians/ – forums known for hosting debates by female feminists about the role of trans women in the feminist movement – and a subreddit devoted to female reproductive-health issues. It also deleted r/HBD – short for human biodiversity – a page which focuses on questions of race and human genetic variation. For good measure, the site also kicked off what may have been its most popular right- and left-wing political forums respectively: r/TheDonald/ and r/ChapoTrapHouse.

The explanation Reddit gave for banning all of these communities was that they ‘promoted hate’. Having been on Reddit, this is probably not a wholly baseless claim. It is hard not to notice a small but noisy contingent of alt-righters on the HBD forum, alongside biology grad students and Charles Murray fan-boys, who seek an (elusive) wholly genetic explanation for small differences in traits like tested IQ and running speed. r/GenderCritical was attacked fairly often for criticising both straight males and trans women – often for the same reasons. And, certainly, both r/TheDonald and r/ChapoTrapHouse/ were known for crude, if often funny, memes mocking everything under the sun.

However, the deletion decision becomes a bit more surprising given what Reddit left up. While deleting r/GenderCritical/ as potentially offensive to women (of both the trans and ‘traditional’ variety), the site specifically decided not to take down the r/RapeKink subreddit, which is dedicated almost entirely to rape pornography and fetish stories (though this page was at least temporarily quarantined). r/RapeFantasy made the cut too, although a sub called r/StruggleFucking/ was eventually taken down.

For those curious in the crowd, the primary ‘bukkake’ subreddit survived as well, as did the hyper-popular subreddit just called ‘Ass’. As a free-speech absolutist, I take no real position on the existence of these forums. But it’s an odd world indeed where ‘RapeKink’ is considered less potentially harmful to women than a feminist forum. To some extent, we see here the logical application of modern ‘social justice’ morality, within which the worst sin is intolerance: TERF-y feminism is intolerant and thus bad, while rape porn is okay.

What should worry us most is that the Great Deletion has undeniably suppressed some serious ideas. The striking thing about many of the vanished subs is that they were mostly populated by wonks and geeks, not Nazis. Even if these forums may have attracted some assholes, human biodiversity, hate-crime hoaxing, gender-critical feminism, the lived experiences of lesbians and discussions about female health disorders are all essentially classroom topics of study. Offensive memes may have provided the initial justification for taking down the forums – this is the internet, after all – but lurking behind Reddit’s decision is the belief that some ideas are too dangerous for discussion of them to be allowed.

This sort of thing is becoming more common. On Twitter, a popular account called ‘Anti-Racist Science’ – which gained more than 1,000 followers during its first day active – has called for a total ban on ‘further use’ of the most common data-set of national IQ scores, put together early in the 21st century by the quantitative psychologist Richard Lynn. Lynn’s data includes the IQ test scores of more than 80 nations. But according to this Twitter account, it is ‘fraudulent’ and has been used to support ‘scientific racism’ concerning ‘the inferiority of people with African ancestry’. For good measure, the Anti-Racist Science account includes an official form that any interested follower can use to report the use of Lynn’s data or other ‘racist / race-science misinformation’ in a peer-reviewed academic paper.

Similar activity is not uncommon inside elite journals themselves. In 2016, academic David Gilborn wrote in the Journal of Educational Policy: ‘We need to (understand) that any assertion of fixed and inevitable inequalities in ability / intelligence between racial / ethnic groups is…racist.’ While I am myself a culturalist when it comes to questions of IQ and have some serious questions about Lynn’s famous data set – such as, how many years of school did the African and East European kids in his samples attend? – claims like Gilborn’s are over the top. Ability is a broad term. Is the good professor arguing that the average Samoan guy is as fleet-footed as the average Kenyan guy? If so, can’t we just go down to the track and test that?

The censoring of ideas, including some quite serious ones, as too ‘dangerous’ or ‘hateful’ to be heard is far more prevalent than most might think. Years ago, when I became active on Facebook and later Twitter, I made a list of accounts I generally disagreed with but enjoyed trolling or arguing with. That list included Minister Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, Third World Press, You Owe Blacks Trillions, and much of the black-nationalist hotep movement. It also included provocateur Milo Yiannopolous, Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists, Cop Block and many left- and right-leaning libertarian pages, and even the now-banned Chapo Trap House. Searching the accounts on this list a few weeks ago, I was surprised to find that essentially all of them had been disappeared across all social media – as had white nationalist Stefan Molyneux, my old debate foe Jared Taylor from the Southern Poverty Law Centre, virtually anyone considered alt-right, and even the first Black Lives Matter Facebook page I ever followed and sparred with.

While not generally a conspiracy-minded fellow, I can’t help suspecting a long game here. For decades, the US mass media – whose star reporters, producers, and on-air talent almost universally share a single cosmopolitan center-left viewpoint – had enormous influence over what written and visual content Americans were able to access. Then came the internet. And within a decade or two, commentators like Matt Drudge, Tim Pool, Joe Rogan and more than a few of those mentioned above had become some of the most well-known ‘journalists’ on the planet. To many wired-in young people, ‘boomer’ mass media began to seem increasingly dated and irrelevant. Between 2000 and 2019, some 2,100 American newspapers, many quite major, closed.

In recent years, however, mainstream media outlets seem to have adopted a two-pronged strategy of fighting back. First, by posting their own content to social-media platforms; and secondly, by backing efforts by those platforms to censor any voices which are even mildly heterodox. MSNBC, for example, is now a major player on YouTube, with more than 3.3million subscribers. Online, too, the network is losing to Fox News, which has 5.78million subscribers.

While they build their digital presence, major outlets and publications almost invariably give positive coverage to actions like the deletion of the subreddits – which Buzzfeed, Vice, MarketWatch and People magazine all reported. Buzzfeed faithfully parroted Reddit’s line that this was ‘a crackdown on communities that promote hate’. Other alternative voices – from PragerU to Cop Block (and even myself) – are not banned outright but find their content is demonetised across various platforms. Mass media outlets are now in the enviable position of being able to run stories that advocate for the removal of their competitors, while simultaneously drawing clicks to their own online content.

How should ordinary netizens respond? A first, very simple approach is simply to remember that almost anyone famously removed from social media also has a professional website. If dark political humour is your thing, you can now find The Donald here and Chapo Trap House here. Alternative media platforms like Parler are increasing in popularity, although at times it can feel like a more professionally designed 4chan. Savvy citizens might go so far as to press their elected congressmen or parliamentarians to remind tech companies of the distinction between ‘platforms’ and ‘publishers’. Technically speaking, if social-media platforms want to avoid legal liability for user behaviour by claiming to operate merely as ‘host sites’ for content generated by third parties, they should be deleting little or no legal material.

And there is one more option – keep it old school. If you are genuinely interested in controversial topics like race relations, gender or human genetics, go down to the local library and check out a book. I myself wrote a fairly solid one on hate-crime hoaxes. When we are online, though, let’s try to keep the bastards honest.

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You can’t defeat racism with censorship

Afer his unhinged and seemingly interminable anti-Semitic rant, the rapper Wiley has been dropped by his management and is being investigated by the police. As if that weren’t enough, his tweets have provoked renewed calls for tighter regulation of speech on social media.

Home secretary Priti Patel has demanded an explanation from Twitter and Instagram as to why they took so long to remove Wiley’s posts. ‘Social-media companies must act faster to remove such appalling hatred from their platforms’, she said. For Labour’s shadow culture secretary, Jo Stevens, Twitter and Instagram’s ‘failure to tackle these high-profile examples of hate speech’ apparently ‘shows why we so desperately need proper legislation to force the social-media companies to keep people safe online’.

There is now a clear cross-party consensus in favour of state censorship of the internet. Labour’s main criticism of the Conservatives in this regard is that the government has been too slow to implement its proposed ‘online harms’ legislation. These new rules represent the most draconian crackdown on the internet in any Western democracy – something ministers seem oddly proud of.

It seems there is almost no social issue in the world today which cannot be answered with controls on social media. Racism? Regulate social media. People voting for populist causes? Regulate social media. People dying in a pandemic? Regulate social media.

But there are many reasons why we should oppose any and every attempt to stifle free expression – even if that means defending the rights of rappers to rant about the Jews (or some other ethnic group of their choice).

First, it is simply a myth to say that social media is a haven for free speech (which for many would-be censors is synomymous with bigoted speech). Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and PayPal have all banned users who they consider to be spreading ‘hate speech’ – a definition which extends from conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and racist motormouth Katie Hopkins to left-wing feminists like Meghan Murphy and some Antifa organisations.

As well as overseeing their own opaque and unaccountable regimes of censorship, the social-media firms are already subject to the laws of the lands in which they operate. In the UK, where hate-speech laws, online-communications laws and public-order laws already conspire to undermine the right to free speech, nine people are arrested every single day for what they post on social media. Only last month, British police arrested a 12-year-old child for sending racist messages to a footballer. (And even when there are no legal restrictions on the average tweeter, such as in the United States, the phenomenon of cancel culture means that a few badly phrased or unorthodox posts could cost you your job or your reputation.)

When countries have tried to introduce social-media regulation on top of this, it has backfired spectacularly. It is clear why. For instance, by the time the whole internet had seen them, it might well have been obvious that Wiley’s tweets were racist and should therefore have been censored. But in order to censor content before it is seen by thousands, social-media companies have to act quickly. That tends to mean censoring first, asking questions later.

The NetzDG law in Germany, which threatens enormous fines of up to €50million on social-media firms if they fail to remove ‘hate speech’, ‘fake news’ and other illegal content within 24 hours, has forced social-media companies to take this approach. It means that all kinds of innocent people get dragged through the net of censorship and plenty of non-racist babies are thrown out with the racist bathwater. One such person whose old posts were removed was government minister Heiko Maas, who as justice minister was the very politician charged with drawing up the law. In France, new laws against fake news led Twitter to ban a campaign encouraging voter-registration which was produced and paid for by the French government.

If even government ministers and campaigns end up being censored, who could possibly know how many innocent civilians are also being silenced at the behest of some algorithm. Satirists are particularly vulnerable to being unfairly censored as even human censors are sometimes too obtuse to recognise their intent.

But more important than any of that is the fact that censorship does not and cannot defeat bigotry. It has become something of a cliché to say we need social-media regulation or hate-speech laws to prevent rising racism or even a second coming of fascism.

Leaving aside the histrionics of such predictions, they ignore the historical truth. In Weimar Germany, the Nazis and their ideas were censored – regularly, in fact. Leading Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for hate speech before they rose to power – and Streicher was imprisoned twice. The Nazi publication Der Stürmer was regularly confiscated and its editors were taken to court on at least 36 occasions. Anti-Semitic speech was explicitly prohibited by law, leading to more than 200 prosecutions in the 15 years before Hitler came to power. ‘As subsequent history so painfully testifies’, writes civil-liberties campaigner Alan Borovoy in When Freedoms Collide, ‘this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it’.

In contrast, the civil-rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s were intimately connected to the struggle for free speech. As historian Kevil Yuill explained recently on spiked, it is ‘always the powerless who gain the most from the freedom to speak out against their condition’ – and it is only the powerful who can establish the legal and regulatory limits to what can and cannot be said. Rules and laws around hate speech may be proposed in the name of protecting the weak, but ultimately it will be the powerful – in this case, governments or Silicon Valley tech giants – who will decide how those rules should operate.

Anyone who is serious about standing up to bigotry should go ahead and do just that. We should be winning the arguments in favour of equality and against racism, instead of demanding the false comfort of censorship.

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Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flag Outside Federal Courthouse

KOIN News reports that Friday's protest started out as a peaceful assembly but turned destructive at night with crowd members setting fires on the street in front of the federal courthouse.

Twitter user Ian Miles Cheong shared a video of demonstrators desecrating Bibles and the symbol of American freedom.

Cheong wrote, "Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland."

In a later thread, Cheong wrote, "I don't know what burning the Bible has to do with protesting against police brutality. Do not be under the illusion that these protests and riots are anything but an attempt to dismantle all of Western Civilization and upend centuries of tradition and freedom of religion."

News reporter Danny Peterson posted a video of protesters burning an American flag while chanting about the police.

Some in Portland have made an effort to rally without violence, but the unyielding activists who are determined to destroy anything that opposes their ideology remain in the area.

According to the Jewish Press, a severed pig's head wearing a police hat was placed on top of an American flag and set on fire at the city's Justice Center last Thursday night.

Following "repeated requests" from Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, the federal government agreed to begin withdrawing federal officers from Portland last week.

Brown argued that the officers "acted as an occupying force, refused accountability, and brought violence and strife to our community."

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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