I’ve heard a lot of “conservatives” whine about “cancel culture” recently when real boycotts with teeth sunk into Bud Light and Target. It’s always a big red flag to me if the minute you’re doing something effective someone on your side pipes up with “we don’t want to sink to their level,” “when did we embrace cancel culture?” or other similar complaints. Run from those people. But also, they’re wrong. I’ll tell you when I embraced cancel culture: the minute they did it to one of our own. The second that happened I became dark inside and I could see that the only way to win was to make them hurt as badly as they made us hurt (or worse) until they cried “uncle!” Only then could we all call a truce. Keep playing by the rules, conservatives, and–like the six-fingered man–prepare to die.
Cancel culture is much different than a consumer boycott, however. Cancel culture goes after an individual with such vitriol and mob hatred that some targets have committed suicide. One poor soul who comes to mind is Gavin Wilson. If you’ve never heard of him, let me remind you what a hero he was. I’ll never forget this man. Wilson was one of the first gay protesters of Drag Queen Story Hour way before Gays Against Groomers had an international presence. Before LGB started separating from the T, Wilson stood outside a library in Australia with a few other brave souls and said, “Drag queens are not for kids.”
Wilson was bullied so viciously online for being gay with conservative views that after that video went viral he took his own life the same night. It is a despicable example of what cancel culture really is. It is the weaponizing of an online mob against an individual that ends in ruination, job loss, humiliation, bankruptcy, and even death. What cancel culture is not is showing a corporation your feelings through your pocketbook.
Whoever decided to call consumer boycotts “cancel culture” is really reaching. Boycotts have been around forever. I imagine the first boycott probably happened around the time humans were trading in order to survive and Grok gave Mrawk some bad eggs in exchange for a stone axe. Mrawk’s wife made sure the entire village knew Grok traded bad eggs, and pretty soon they all stopped trading with Grok and he died (because all he had to eat were his own bad eggs). That’s not cancel culture, dopes. That’s consumers doing what consumers do: buy stuff from people we like and trust and turn our backs and shut our bank accounts to folks we don’t like and don’t trust.
Honestly impressive how the organizing principle of right-wing outrage went from ‘let’s complain about cancel culture’ to ‘let’s cancel everything’ and no one on the right even batted an eye pic.twitter.com/m1SjMKFEql
— Lis Power (@LisPower1) May 31, 2023
The tweeter above works for Media Matters, which is about to become very relevant, and it’s interesting she’s trying to pin “cancel culture” on conservatives. Do you know who perfected cancel culture? If you answered Media Matters through advertiser boycotts, you win for paying attention. When Media Matters organized an astroturfed campaign to target Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers in order to pull the rug out from under him, it was completely illegitimate. No one disliked the advertisers’ products! The advertisers had done nothing wrong to upset their customers. The faked campaign made the advertisers falsely believe that they would lose business if they continued to advertise on Limbaugh’s show. This was not true, but it seemed true because Media Matters and whoever else was involved faked a huge number of calls from someone’s basement (probably) that looked like they were coming from hundreds of thousands of people when it was really about ten chicken tendy-eating neck-beards with nothing better to do who told people they were on the front lines of a war.
Now, even though this is far closer to “cancel culture” because it’s so deviant and not at all driven by customer demand it’s still legitimate to use against our enemies if we have to. It’s distasteful, but you have to admire the left’s ability to get into the sewer to fight their enemy. We could learn something from them…and if we don’t…well, look around. How’s that working out?
I’m saying it right now: I believe in cancel culture. It works. Cancel them all. Once a few of theirs face homelessness and ruin for pissing us off maybe they’ll offer a truce. You can’t fight cancel culture when only one side gets it. You have to be for it before you can be against it, in other words. But consumer boycotts—when American paying customers get angry at some dumb woke marketing campaign and decide to take their dollars elsewhere—will never be “cancel culture.” It’s called FREE MARKETS. Get it right, conservatives. And the boycotts that are happening now might be supported by popular conservatives and popular conservative sites, but they’re not organized in any way. We’re just jumping in to tell you what’s happening and what you can do about it. We’re not getting dark money from George Soros to pay some low-IQ dummies $10 an hour to make phony phone calls all day. (Though, Elon, I’m into it. I can make that happen. Hit me up.)
Cancel culture is when you get a pregnant nurse fired for taking her bike back from a group of thugs
Cancel culture is NOT me deciding to spend my money elsewhere when I see major corporations targeting my children
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 31, 2023
And speaking of boycotts, if you heard you have to boycott Modelo, the answer is not yet (if you’re in the U.S.). More on that below. I clear up all the fake news for you. You’re welcome.