OK, I've gotten a ton of requests to talk about console culture, so I want to dig into
it today and spend some time talking about this.
If you haven't heard of cancel culture, cancel culture is a term that's really all it is
to refer to what is essentially calling someone out for doing something objectionable.
Right.
Canceling your subscription, tweeting about it, telling an advertiser not to buy a product.
Telling Hollywood not to hire a certain actor or whatever the case may be.
It's a type of activism, essentially.
And I really want to repeat this because I think it's important for framing the entire
conversation.
We should not talk about cancel culture as the thing that is new.
What is new is that it's been named cancel culture and it's been dubbed by some a major
problem in society.
And then we can discuss whether it really is a major problem in society or not.
So my starting point for talking about cancel culture is first to ask, does this exist?
Is this really a thing that exists?
Then we ask questions like, is it widespread?
Is it growing for some particular reason?
At this point in time, once we figure that out, then we can say, well, is it a problem?
Is this a bad thing?
And then lastly, we discuss what, if anything, should be done about it.
Right.
We actually want to go through this in the right way as opposed to doing what some on
the right and maybe a few people on the left, but mostly on the right are saying cancel
culture has exploded among the WOAK left suppression of speech a little a.
OK.
We're not going to do it that way.
We're actually going to go through it.
So is cancel culture a real thing?
Yes, it is.
Sure it is.
It is true that sometimes people will boycott or try to get other people to boycott or try
to get advertisers to pull ads or get people to unfollow someone on social media or whatever
the case may be, because there is the belief or claim that a person has done or said something
objectionable.
People do things that are perceived as objectionable all the time.
Different people interpret it as objectionable or not.
And then some people decide to just go on with their day.
Others decide to tweet about it.
Others decide to call advertisers whatever it exists.
That is not new.
1933, maybe an extreme example.
The American Jewish Congress said Germany as an entity is now anti-Semitic.
Boycott Germany.
That is something which could be called cancel culture, supposedly starting in 1973.
Various LGBT groups said Coors Brewing Company has anti-gay hiring practices.
Do not buy Coors beer up.
Scary cancel culture, right?
I mean that we're talking about very similar things.
Now, later we'll get into.
We don't want this person speaking at our college.
We're gonna get to that.
OK.
But the point is, this is not new.
It's activism that's been around for a really long time.
Some people like it.
Some people don't.
Their second question.
Is it widespread and is it more widespread today, for example?
Well, that really depends on what you mean.
You'll hear people on the right who claim to be against council culture say, you know,
the hashtag, cancel whatever was used eleven D billion times or something.
Right.
OK, well, we have social media now.
It's bigger than it was three years ago.
It's bigger than it was six years ago.
The fact that a particular hashtag was used a bunch of times three months ago doesn't
really tell us in any empirical way whether cancel culture has reached epidemic proportions.
What I do see is people realizing that money is at the root of much of our economy and
using economic threats to try to do activism may be useful.
And that's where ad boycotts.
Come from and we can have a debate about whether that's a useful or effective type of activism.
What we have to point out is that just because something exists and you give it a name doesn't
mean that it's any more pervasive than it was before.
Social media may provide a more convenient means for people to say, don't buy this or
don't watch that show or whatever the case may be.
But just because we now have dubbed it cancel culture doesn't mean it's actually more of
a of an epidemic, so to speak.
I'll give you an example that many of you will remember the regressive left.
Remember when that term was floating around, you had some people on the left and the right
using this term regressive left than we did a very we did a deep dove video about it.
The left and right used the term differently.
The left, when they said regressive left, usually meant when when they when they want
to point to someone who claims to be on the left but is doing something that's not really
left.
So, for example, you might have leftism that is really authoritarianism, but it's being
hidden as leftism.
That would be an example of the left being regressive rather than progressive.
Now the right chord onto the term and started using it to refer to just anything they don't
like about the left.
They're like, oh, that's the regressive left.
Single payer health care.
That's the regressive left.
You know, reforming policing.
That's the regressive left.
So the reason regressive left is a good analogy.
Here is a liberalism on the left existed for a very long time.
At some point, the term progressive left was created.
And the fact that it was given a nice sounding name, made it in some people's minds seem
like it was more prevalent than it actually was.
A regressive leftism has been around for a long time.
Go to the early 20th century and you see plenty of regressive leftism in a number of authoritarian
countries around the world.
So you put a catchy name on it and all of a sudden you've got articles and interviews
and entire shows devoted to exposing the regressive left.
The reality was it always existed.
I've always called it out on the show.
You put a name on it doesn't really change it.
That gets us back to cancel culture.
Is cancel culture a problem or has it just been given a name?
Now, that is catchy.
And so a lot of people are writing about and talking about cancel culture.
Let me skip the name they're using for a moment.
Right.
Cancel culture implies that there is some widespread culture of canceling stuff, canceling
people, boycotting, you know, whatever the case may be.
The reality is this is called boycott activism.
That's what if we unload the term.
What we're talking about is boycott activism.
This is how capitalism and the marketplace of ideas works.
Advertisers can advertise on any show they want to for any reason.
They can tell us what the reasons are or not.
Viewers can choose to buy a product for any reason or choose not to buy a product for
any reason.
And if they want to tell the advertiser why they're doing it, they can.
They want to keep their mouth shut and just vote with their dollars.
They can do that as well.
Advertisers, if they start hearing, hey, you're advertising with Tucker Carlson, we're not
going to buy your stuff.
The advertiser is free to listen to those complaints or to ignore them.
And the advertiser is free to say we're going to buy more ads with Tucker or we're going
to cancel our ads with Tucker.
This is not coercion.
This is not oppressive.
You're going to hear some people pop up concern, trolling, saying, you know, when you email
a company and say, I will not buy your stuff if you do X or Y.
That's coercion because you're holding them economically hostage and their employees economic
lives.
Guys, come on.
It's speech.
There's no violence.
It's a marketplace.
This is literally what the free marketeers claim to want.
So that's like 98 percent of boycott activism, which some people call cancel culture.
It's just speech.
It's speech you might not like, but it's speech from people expressing how they believe others
should spend dollars or spend time on social media or go or not go to a movie based on
the actors or the producers or whatever the case may be.
That's 98 percent.
OK.
Then you get to the slice of cancel culture or boycott activism.
That can be problematic.
So there are instances where maybe somebody said something wrong, offensive, discriminatory
20 years ago and it comes out now and incomes an angry mob and says fire them, cancel them.
Where I come down on that slice is let's just be smart instead of stupid.
Let's use our judgment.
If someone said something stupid at some point and it now came out and they've apologized
and they don't stand by it, and it's a credible apology, and we believe based on their public
facing persona, that the thing they said 20 years ago is not representative of what they
believe today.
Then why would we go and try to get them canceled, so to speak?
There's no hard and fast rule here, right?
When Justin Trudeau was uncovered in blackface in a Facebook.
A school yearbook.
Rather not a Facebook.
A school yearbook from 30 years ago.
He apologized.
He said it was wrong to do it.
That it was immature.
His modern platform.
In Canada as a politician speaks for itself.
And it has nothing to do with somebody who believes blackface is OK.
So he did a dumb thing and he took responsibility.
Why would he go and try to cancel Justin Trudeau?
Contrast that with year after year after year of Tucker Carlson, kowtowing to xenophobes,
throwing out white supremacist red meat.
Immigrants make the country dirtier.
And, you know, I can't give you all the examples.
So there it makes sense to me.
Oh, this is a concerted this is a distinguishable pattern.
I can see why people would want to target his advertisers and say we won't do business
with you if you do business with this guy.
Now, let me deal with just one last part of this.
We've we've dealt with like 98 percent.
And then like another one and a half.
We've got like the tiniest sliver left.
The anti cancel culture crowd will often insist.
People's careers are being unfairly destroyed at the drop of a of a tweet, so to speak,
on a whim, because they said something not politically correct or not in line with the
current orthodoxy or whatever the issue might be.
This just rarely happens.
I mean, that's the reality, Trump is accused of dozens of sexual assaults.
He said he grabs them by the You-Know-What.
He became president of the United States.
Louis C.K., after having an incident of I believe it was masturbating in front of someone,
has a new project and is doing fine.
Serial accused domestic assaulter and musical artist Chris Brown continues to have a great
career.
If cancer culture were really so pervasive and so endemic to the modern mill, you, so
to speak, you would have way more people whose careers have been ruined by people tweeting
about them or calling their employer or whatever the case may be.
Now, I know some of you will say, yeah, but David, what about, you know, some someone
I've never heard of?
I don't deny that in a country of 330 million people.
You are going to have examples of everything when we point out.
Look at all these guns that are being misused.
The gun crowd says, well, when I am banned guns or really do much of anything because
of these few isolated incidents, we have the Second Amendment in this country.
Well, likewise, just because you can find someone who was unfairly damaged by a social
media shaming campaign or whatever, I may well be on your side on individual instances
of this.
But we have this thing called free speech.
Boycotts are a part of of liberal democracies.
And they have been for a very long time.
And there is no rash of every.
Tons of people having their careers ruined because of some off color comment they made
decades and decades ago or even more recently.
You can find examples.
But if this were actually pervasive, the way these people want us to believe, you would
have way more stories of that.
Cancel culture is a term much like regressive left that is often used to dismiss people
who are speaking their minds.
It reminds us the last thing I'll say on this Trump derangement syndrome.
OK, Trump derangement syndrome is a similar term used in online circles to dismiss criticisms
of Donald Trump as just that's irrational.
You have you're suffering from Trump derangement syndrome.
It's a way to dismiss the actual claims being made in the same way.
Cancel culture is mostly a term used to dismiss activism as just a concerted effort to ruin
people's careers for not being politically correct.
So let's you and I together look at specific examples of bad things.
Let's call them out and let's move on rather than going down the same rabbit hole we went
down with the entire regressive left situation.
I'm ready to hear from you about this.
We'll continue covering it on the show's Instagram page at David Pakman show.
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