A proud leftist offers his insights about cancel culture
Drew Magary is a novelist and an in-house columnist for Medium's GEN magazine, which offers political and cultural news. He's contributed to Deadspin and GQ. He is a leftist with a voice. Recently, his voice led him to boast about the fact that cancel culture is not only successful, but a morally good thing.
In a smug article, Magary explained that there's no difference between a rapist and someone with whose policies he disagrees. In other words, if you want to understand the impulse driving cancel culture, Magary is a good starting point.
Magary opens his little exercise by attacking Ellen DeGeneres. It was, he says, inevitable that heads would roll once news leaked out that "DeGeneres herself is an awful person." In the very next sentence, though, we learn why Magary (and probably every other cancel culture person) hates DeGeneres. She is a person who must be destroyed because she went to a baseball game with George W. Bush. As Magary says with heavy sarcasm, "Hard to believe the friend of a war criminal would turn out to be a sour lady behind the curtain, but it's true."
Further evidence that DeGeneres deserves to be destroyed is the fact that Ted Cruz defended her!
Thankfully, our finest citizens quickly came rushing to Ellen's defense:
I don’t know Ellen, but this WaPo chronology makes the whole “scandal” look like an exercise in Cancel Culture trying to destroy her bc she wasn’t woke enough to throw Kevin Hart overboard or be hateful to George W Bush.
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) August 3, 2020
Today’s Left is deeply intolerant. https://t.co/Df1Wbu91wV
As far as Magary is concerned, "cancel culture's batting average is INSANELY high." The leftist mob only goes after those who deserve to be destroyed. And then he offers a clever list. The first few names are of people (almost all leftists, incidentally) who used their power to become sexual predators:
• Harvey Weinstein. Convicted rapist. RIGHT TO BE CANCELED.
• Bill Cosby. Convicted rapist. RIGHT TO BE CANCELED.
• Matt Lauer. Also a rapist. RIGHT TO BE CANCELED.
• Brian Singer. Child rapist. RIGHT TO BE CANCELED.
• Ryan Adams. Used his status in the industry to coerce women into sex, including possibly minors. Makes way too much music and steals a lot of it. RIGHT TO BE CANCELED.
• Louis CK. Took his dick out in front of women who didn't ask him to. Intimidated them into keeping quiet about it. RIGHT TO BE CANCELED.
My gosh! Magary's right! Cancel culture is saving America. Except...
Nick Cannon is on the list. Being Jewish, I'm no fan of Cannon. However, to his credit, he does seem to be trying to figure things out, and I believe in redemption. Magary doesn't, though. Or at least he doesn't believe in Cannon's redemption because Cannon's doing it wrong. Cannon, says Magary, "[a]toned for it by reading a book by f------ Bari Weiss. RIGHT TO BE CANCELED." In other words, as with DeGeneres, any association with someone who does not embrace Magary's politics must be destroyed. Even reading the wrong books (and we're not talking about Mein Kampf here) will justify canceling someone.
It's when we get to the last few names on the list that Magary's viciousness fully flowers:
• Adam Rapaport. Ran a terrible magazine that both stole from and lowballed its minority staffers. THE FLAVORS OF THIS CANCELLATION ARE SO DEAD ON.
• Steph Korey. Away CEO who turned out to be corporate America's foremost abuser-via-Slack. A WHOLE NEW PARADIGM OF JUSTIFIED CANCELLATION.
• Brandon Taubman. Houston Astros exec who openly taunted female reporters by cheering the signing of a wife beater in front of them. I'M SO F------ GLAD WE CANCELED TAUBMAN.
• Woody Allen. Such an awful man that you get canceled just for DEFENDING him.
• Alison Roman. The anchovy pasta lady who broke out a little Asianface during an interview to s--- on Marie Kondo. RIGHT TO BE CANCELED.
In Magary's world, you have to be personally destroyed because you were a rotten boss. You have to be personally destroyed because you've fallen out of cultural favor. And, in Alison Roman's case, you have to be personally destroyed because you called out Marie Kondo for hypocritically making money out of selling lots of objects to help even as she tells them to throw things out, and called out Chrissy Teigen for selling her content to the highest bidder.
To Magary, Roman's sin wasn't what she said; it was the targets of her words: Asian women. I'm willing to bet, though, that Magary is not bothered that Ivy League colleges routinely discriminate against Asians. For leftists, race is a tool to be pulled out as needed.
Having drawn the line — anyone that hard leftists don't like deserves to be canceled — Margary sounds the call for more cancelation:
We need to cancel MORE people and we need to make it stick. Thus far, the Internet has chosen its targets well. If, God forbid, we cancel one person who shouldn't be canceled, well that's still one person compared to the massive amount of human collateral damage the rest of The Canceled have left in their wake.
America used to operate on the "better ten criminals go free than one innocent man hang." Magary proves that the social justice warriors have a more Stalinesque view of things, which is that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
Image: Cancel Culture by Viarami on Pixabay, free for commercial use.