I joined TRT World’s Nexus to discuss why the label “cancel culture” is meaningless, except as a political weapon to hinder and even bury discussion of important political and social issues.
I was invited by the program to discuss the term. Wary that it might be another click-bait attempt to rile — and thus attract — viewers, I accepted to try and focus attention on what really matters: discussion of matters from racism to discrimination to economic justice to LGBTQ rights.
Then I learned, just before going on air, that I would be alongside the right-wing commentator Andre Walker, who would certainly use “cancel culture” as a bludgeon.
So how to proceed?
"Cancel culture" is a meaningless term only "useful" in deflecting attention from issues@PiersMorgan "cancelled" himself w his polemics & his walk-off
And now we no longer have to deflect from issues by paying any attention to him…. https://t.co/uRBpyot5AB
— Scott Lucas (@ScottLucas_EA) March 10, 2021
“Cancel culture” is nothing new, at its core it’s just the perennial human habit of enforcing social conformity through shaming and sanctioning. What makes the Western — especially Anglo-American — one such a hideous iteration of it is that:
1. The values it upholds are worthless in the first place, and shouldn’t be enforced at all.
2. Technology in the form of social media now enables the lifting and magnifying of absolutely *anything* into a national issue, as long as enough people can be convinced to care about it. Things that in any other era wouldn’t even grace the local news can now potentially be the talk of the nation, because a collection of mentally ill & terminally online neurotics decided to make it the issue of the day. And that is not even done out of a misplaced or twisted sense of justice, it’s pure sadism wielding power to crush the other.
That’s how a country with ~330 million people, with poverty, countless murders, near infinite political corruption, etc… ends up having an entire news cycle dedicated to a kid smirking at an American Indian drumming in his face, to name just one example.
And why is it whenever progressives dismiss “cancel culture”, they always use an occasion involving a scandal caused by someone like Piers, Trump, or Rowling, who are well able and equipped to withstand it? Rhetorical question, of course. They never use an example of someone who has no recourse or ability to fight back; acknowledging that would make the phenomenon more difficult to dismiss.