How White Religious Conservatives Invented Cancel Culture
It’s time to toss that broken record into the trash. It’s played out. It’s fake news.
Jeremy Helligar
Sep 4, 2020·6 min read
George Burroughs (1652 –1690) reciting the Lord’s Prayer before his execution at Witches Hill, Salem, Massachusetts, on August 19, 1690, after being accused of witchcraft in the Salem witch trials. Photo: Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Atthe Republican National Convention in August, President Donald Trump and his cast of sycophants returned to a familiar refrain: “Cancel culture” is the devil, possibly the single greatest hurdle to making America great again. It must be stopped.
For those unfamiliar with The Great American Threat, “cancel culture” is a phenomenon of
the “Karen” era, likely to be cited by the type of person who’d be called a “Karen.” (It’s also a term that originated in the Black community, which, I suspect, has a lot to do with how conservatives react to it — but that’s a subject for another story.)
If you’ve been shamed on social media or rendered unpopular and possibly unemployed for committing an unpardonable offense (
R. Kelly, Roseanne Barr, Megyn Kelly, and Chick-fil-A), you’ve been canceled. It’s Americans doing what Americans have always done well — judge others — only social media allows everyone to join the mob and wield a degree of influence.
Trump, who has experienced cancel culture from both sides, has turned it into a political grenade against Democrats because, well, isn’t everything their fault? His entire family echoes him, painting themselves and their conservative Republican flock as victims of a liberal scourge previously known as “political correctness.” Never mind that while they’re complaining about the lefties who try to shut them up, they are doing the same thing in return.
They’ve employed it at various times throughout U.S. history, and they are quite happy to revive it today whenever it benefits them.
It’s the sort of astounding hypocrisy and contradiction that has defined America since its founding fathers declared all men equal while preaching the morality of White supremacy. Today, conservatives play victims of cancel culture supposedly created by liberals while straight White conservatives have been cracking that whip (figuratively and literally) for the country’s entire history. It’s time to toss that broken record into the trash. It’s played out — to use one of their other favorite phrases that evokes a specter of their own devising, it’s fake news. Actual history, not the rewritten stuff conservatives like to peddle, proves that the sort of White conservatives who trumpet Trump are the real architects of cancel culture.
They’ve employed it at various times throughout U.S. history, and they are quite happy to revive it today whenever it benefits them. Just take a look at their responses to recent events:
Black Lives Matter protests, Trump’s cancellation of the World Health Organization, Democratic governors, and
the U.S. Postal Service.
Not convinced? Have a seat. Let’s backtrack.
More:
https://level.medium.com/white-conservatives-invented-cancel-culture-da69c0beaf3
