Cancel Culture

“Cancel Culture” is a term of art hyped by Republicans specifically, but also white supremacists and neo-Nazis in general, and, of course, ordinary QAnon koolaiders. Their object is to counter reality-based assaults on morally ugly things that formerly decent people (quaintly) found unacceptable or insane. We’ve dropped a long way, Baby. Unacceptable and insane are now political aspirations in some circles.

A likely candidate for the categories unacceptable and insane would be Republican congressman, Paul Gosar, who seems to have given himself wholly over to his worst instincts and impulses as if he were the, perhaps, most known literary example of poor life choices, namely the hell-bound Dr. Faustus. Even members of his family have cut him off (or cancelled him if you prefer). And who would know a man’s base instincts better than a brother or sister?

Gosar spoke recently at AFPAC (America First Political Action) conference, an organization that may fairly be called a white nationalist organization. AFPAC, in fact, could easily stand for Aryan First Political Action. What he spoke of was “cancel culture” and how big tech was pinching the stream of right wing fairy tales. After his riff on the un-American tendency of the left to deal with actual facts and realities (for the most part; pure virtue being a casualty of all politics, regardless of party); and the danger to white America (by implication only, of course) such reliance on truths posed. Gosar left the podium with a cynical “God bless you, and God bless the United States America!”

At that point AFPAC’s organizer, Nick Fuentes, assured the crowd that “white people are done being bullied” —as if white people had not been on the big-bully side of US history almost unanimously since the first slaves debarked from the hold of some miserable slave-packed square rigger. “America needs to protect its white demographic core,” Fuentes said. And, considering Gosar’s earlier remarks about cancel culture, that could not have been a more fitting statement. After all, white supremacists of the now fully Trumpian Republican party are now in a fever pitch to cancel the potential votes of millions of people of color by a strategy of voter suppression on the state level, from our purple mountain’s majesty, from sea to shining sea. —Jim Culleny. 3/5/21