You’re not Canceled, You’re just an Asshole
The Right’s obsession with “cancel culture” would be funny if they were a little less obnoxious and hypocritical about it.
Any time one of them gets disinvited from a speaking event, or has a media project canned, or they’re suspended from a social media platform, because they spread dangerous lies or promoted violence or instigated attempted coups, they are quickly driven into histrionics and compelled to whine on all the outlets remaining to them that their right to free speech has been violated. They decry their de-platforming as unconstitutional, failing to understand or care that unless a censor is a government actor, they are not bound by the Constitution.
The crackers who most commonly complain of canceling are among the most empowered people in society, wealthy white men of the right-wing political persuasion. The Right has long peddled the false narrative of their victimhood. They behave as though they are a persecuted minority with no sense of irony, and certainly no sense of empathy, for the ways this country and its institutions, both governmental and private, have persecuted actual minority communities. It’s absurd to hear these crackers bloviate about unfounded theories of how both traditional and new media, from television and news outlets to social media and search engines, are censoring their public presence and their views. They don’t seem to spare a thought to fathom the fact that they and their views are simply unpopular.
No one is hiding all the posts about what great, intelligent guys Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson are; the reason a majority of posts about them describe them as disgusting, moronic douchebags is because that is the majority opinion.
Any time the Right doesn’t get something their way, they cry conspiracy and censorship, when in reality the Left has far more often been the actual victims of actual conspiracies and censorship. There’s a big difference between being booted off Youtube and having representatives of the federal or a state government using every tactic of oppression and intimidation to harm and silence you. Complaining about receiving a social media penalty for violating one of their user rules, as if it’s some organized campaign against you personally, is pathetic. It happens to everyone. I’ve been penalized on social media for sharing certain stories, expressing certain thoughts, using certain words. I’ve been in “Facebook jail” for my casual use of the word, “crackers,” when discussing salty, fragile, white people.
While the Right is wailing about censorship and violations of their right to freedom of speech, they are actively working to force through legislation of actual censorship which really does violate people’s freedom of speech.
They’re passing laws preventing the teaching of “critical race theory” in schools, a subject that only like a dozen people had even heard of before right-wingers began making tirades against it. It could be regarded as silly and pointless to outlaw the teaching of a subject that was not being taught. But in their willful misunderstanding of the subject, and their conflation of it with any discussion of racism or the nebulous category of “divisive issues,” reactionary and neofascist legislators are effectively outlawing the accurate teaching of history and culture, and could by extension declare anything in a curriculum more controversial than arithmetic to be illegal.
The great hypocritical irony is that they are complaining of an imagined violation of their rights while inflicting literal violations on others. It is not an unconstitutional violation of your first amendment rights for Twitter to revoke your ability to lie about vaccines causing more deaths than the disease they prevent, or encourage people to kill someone, or shout the N word willy nilly. It is an unconstitutional violation for a state legislator to prohibit a teacher from giving their students a comprehensive and fact-based education. The Right complains about the actions of private companies, whom according to their purported principles they’d normally be championing and defending, and they are committing actual Constitutional crimes with the levers of government, which according to their purported principles they’d normally be opposing.
Such bold hypocrisy could be amusing, if not so despicable.