the whole outrage over cancel culture is nothing more than Republicans trying to come up with something to get their base worked up.
It's not. Not the
whole outrage, or even if that's true about the outrage, it doesn't mean there is a real phenomenon at play to be concerned about. Right-wing ideologues will scream that anything is cancel culture, but that doesn't mean nothing is. It's not even a new phenomenon, but an old one we're getting back to with new tools that we have no experience using well. At its best it's a form of social accountability where regular folks actually wield some power against powerful people/entities too often immune from accountability, but at its worst It's essentially a medieval mob looking for a witch to burn.
I won't focus on celebrities at all, since most of them eventually find ways to bounce back. But there are way too many examples:
• A fan at College Gameday had a "need money for beer sign" which somehow got him over $1 million and a sponsorship from Anheuser Busch. Until a Des Moines Register reporter, for no real reason at all, found some decade old tweets of his and stirred up the twitter mob. Despite donating that 1mil to charity, he lost his endorsement, faced massive amounts of online and in person harassment, and then the reporter got fired from his job after the mob found old tweets of
his.
• People found old 'racist' comments on a google doc from one of the Parkland Shooting survivors (the only one that expressed conservative beliefs). The tweets came from years before the shooting event, at the hands of a young teenager, but nonetheless his Harvard admission was rescinded
• A black security guard at a school was fired at his job for saying the n-word, even though he only said it in the context of telling a student not to call him that. He was eventually re-instated due to the school catering to one mob creating another mob calling out how ridiculous the decision was, but spent however much time without employment and insurance, and had a family. Not to mention the amount of stress and anxiety brought on to a private citizen from the harassment of social media campaigns against you.
• A professor in New York has lost all the students in his classes and is under investigation by the university for not saying anything, but merely attending a pro-police rally. He didn't participate or hold a sign or say anything, he claimed he just wanted to hear what they had to say. Some students found out, painted him as anti-Black Lives Matter, demanded his resignation and instituted a school wide boycott of his classes, claiming his teaching is an unsafe space for minorities.
• Viral videos spread of Nicholas Sandmann and some other kids from Covington Catholic high school having an altercation with a native-american activist at the Lincoln Memorial. The media ran with them, painting the kids as racists that were harassing a native elder with intimidation, "build the wall" chants, and so forth. Social media activists ran with it, eventually doxxing all the boys. Their school shut down due to threats of violence, they received death threats, and were shamed by many including their state legislators (remember, these kids are all minors). Eventually it came out that the kids were more the victims than anyone, and the least aggressive party in the whole scenario, but the damage was done.
Just a few examples of how this can manifest not against the rich and the powerful but against normal people, for something as inane as standing in the wrong place at the wrong time or having a bad opinion about something years ago.
