Among the most frustrating aspects of being involved in dissident politics these days is the pushback that often comes from one’s nominal allies. Perhaps the most common form of this internecine resistance is the refusal of many older Conservatives and Libertarians to acknowledge that their own side is being censored by the Left.
Tell a Mammon Mobster that something must be done about cancel culture, and he’ll avoid taking action by defining the problem out of existence. Censorship, a laissez-faire Reaganaut will insist, can only be imposed by government. If a private company wants to ban someone for any reason or no reason, that’s their affair. Don’t like how you’re treated on one platform? Find another one, or build your own.
Like most BoomerCon arguments for inaction in the face of mortal peril, this blanket exemption from public morality for megacorps is cowardice disguised as a principled stand. The giveaway is that it maintains the status quo of the Left facing no negative consequences for silencing those who share most of the MammonCons’ opinions. Viewed in terms of outcomes, doing nothing to stop cancel culture leaves the enemy free to use an effective tactic which will clear the field of all opposition if allowed to play out indefinitely.
In other words, standing on free market principles is, in this case, a suicide pact.
Decades of inaction have now enabled the ongoing, active purgation of straight, white, Christian men from the entertainment industry. Here’s a major author warning that literary agents will no longer represent books by people the Death Cult considers unclean. Here’s another who got canned by a game publisher for having unapproved opinions. The pattern can’t be unseen once noticed.
Somewhat less oblivious Conservatives who perceive corporate censorship as a threat, and rightly so, rush to point out the Left’s hypocrisy. The people censoring authors they disagree with are the same ones who shill for virtue signaling farces like Banned Books Week.
If those well-meaning Conservatives would dig a little deeper, they’d find that the folks behind Banned Books Week sued the government to make sure kids could have easy access to porn at public libraries. But such cases show that a) government isn’t always the problem and b) our enemies aren’t just sincere, but sincerely wrong, ideologues. And since NormieCons have no interest in using government power to further their goals, and no desire to learn the enemy’s true status as a hysterical death cult, they keep to the shallows.
As a case in point, it’s not mundane hypocrisy that moves normal-seeming people to whipsaw from denying that straight, white, men face discrimination to gloating about how it’s real and deserved.
Note to the slow kids: People who justify career-ending injustices against others based on sex and race with appeals to make-believe hobgoblins aren’t mere hypocrites. They’re primitive cargo cultists.
What Conservatives forget is that they’re still being censored, even if the ruling party is outsourcing censorship to megacorps. Whether the penalty for talking out of turn is federal prison or banishment from the banking system, the resulting silence is the same.
The glint of light at the end of the tunnel is that the Right has always been better at innovation and quicker to implement new solutions. Everybody forgets that the Left was slow to adopt the internet, much less capture it. Until the late aughts, most people you met online were PCU style Libertarians.
The Gen Z heirs to dying American Conservatism as pioneering workarounds to the Death Cult’s media and tech monopolies. There’s room to hope they’ll learn from their predecessors’ mistakes.
And one vital lesson of the culture war is don’t give money to people who hate you.
