Cancel What?

Mark Greathouse

(6/2021) I’d hoped to send hugs and kisses from Pepé Le Pew, but the wee little skunk is cancel-culture roadkill.

The news media labels it ‘cancel culture.’ It’s better known as censorship. Cancel culture tears at the fabric of our Constitution. Its sinister web is complicated. It thrives inside a bubble of ignorance. Trying to help folks understand what’s going on today is like going back into a burning building to rescue someone only to have them resist while demanding evidence that the building is on fire while the flames lick their feet.

Since we live in a culture rampant with labeling, I’ll refer to the cancel culturalists as ‘Controllers’ and ‘Erasers.’ Controllers include academia, government, politicians, big tech, librarians, celebrities, and pseudo-journalists. Erasers are the elements that actually do the cancelling: rioters toppling statues, social media mobs demanding boycotts, politicians seeking to silence dissent, media moguls suspending accounts, professors threatening student free speech, neighbor turning on neighbor, fact checkers determining ‘community standards,’ and librarians withdrawing or deleting books they disagree with. It’s about artificial walls and divisions being embedded into our culture.

George Orwell is surely laughing from his grave. The Ministry of Truth, Newspeak, Doublethink…all the manifest contradictions embedded in his dystopian novel 1984 have come to roost. ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’ Pick a dystopian film, and you’ll find elements of the Controllers and Erasers. The Matrix…Fahrenheit 451…Soylent Green…The Fifth Element…Hunger Games…and more.

Cancel culture isn’t new. Only speed and methods have changed. Ever-lurking fear is its medium of exchange, its monétaire du jour. Roman Emperor Nero seeking scapegoats for his largesse cancelled Christians. Old west settlers cancelled Native Americans. Abraham Lincoln cancelled habeas corpus. Josef Stalin cancelled images in photos of enemies he’d eliminated. Adolf Hitler cancelled Jews. Make no mistake, cancel culture fully leverages fear to exact control.

Controllers. Erasers. It’s not about cartoons and statues, not about films and books, it’s about a fundamental amorality seeping through our society. It’s about control of what we see, hear, and do; controlling minds and thus erasing anything that certain self-appointed elitist elements – both politically far left and far right – deem offensive for not toeing along some ill-defined ideological line. The Controllers seek power through control of the masses, while the Erasers are the useful idiot byproducts of education system indoctrination run amok.

The USSR epitomized cancel culture. I recently listened to an elderly woman’s story of escape from Communist East Germany in the 1950s. She tearfully told of her own father stealing the money she’d saved to help bribe her way to escape. He reported her to authorities. By sheer luck, she won a lottery to accompany a diplomatic delegation to Berlin. There, she managed to escape to freedom and eventually to the United States. She’s horrified by what she sees in her adopted country today. Her story could as well be that of a rafter escaping Communist Cuba, a refugee from Communist Venezuela slipping across the border to Columbia…but wait…there’s a common thread here. These folks are desperate to escape from totalitarian Communist government control. They’ve suffered under cancel culture on steroids.

Why should cancel culture concern us in the United States? Where is it headed? How might we best counter it? At risk of being labelled some sort of whacko right-wing McCarthy-style extremist, I contend that America is inexorably moving toward full-blown socialism and its inevitable slide toward totalitarianism. I fully believe that every American should read and be able to discuss Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, to gain a fuller understanding of the crisis our nation faces. Marx wrote the playbook, Alinsky put it into play, and Hayek called them out. By understanding them, we learn that cancel culture is only a piece of a broader agenda. Cancel education, family, religion, private property…uh-oh, that’s Marx’s playbook. For an eye-opener based upon hard evidence, read Dr. Paul Kengor’s Dupes, which traces Communism in America over the past century. Little wonder that our international enemies are using our own manufactured divisiveness to bring us down.

On the political side, we seem to be experiencing a vindictiveness that transcends common sense. I call it systemic leftism. Politicians actually call for blacklisting anyone associated with former President Trump. How can that be!? Americans don’t create lists toward cancelling folks we don’t like or don’t agree with. Do we? It reeks of the USSR, Nazi Germany, or Communist China. How about college speaker invitations rescinded per student protest, speakers shouted down, or social media accounts cancelled?

One common thread that runs through cancel culture is disinformation. This is as opposed to misinformation which is purely accidental. The Russians are exceptionally good at disinformation, or dezinformatsiya, the lie aimed at achieving a political end. But the United States is catching up. Journalists and politicians are ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies aimed to mislead the public. An example of cancellation via disinformation is the 1619 Project now being foisted on many of our public schools. It claims that our nation began when 20 slaves were brought to Virginia. First, the United States hadn’t even been envisioned in 1619, and second a pirate ship traded 20 slaves to the Jamestown settlers. Jamestown didn’t support slavery so made the 20 slaves indentured servants who eventually earned their freedom. Bottom line: if history can be canceled, it can be rewritten to suit a particular narrative.

Have you heard the Alinsky-inspired phrase ‘never let a crisis go to waste?’ It works in parallel with ‘divide and conquer.’ This thinking pervades cancel culture by orders-of-magnitude greater than mindlessly toppling statues or erasing athletic team names. Conjure treasonous international plots or predictions of environmental disasters. How about a legitimate COVID-19 pandemic crisis with vast world-wide reach coopted by political forces to cancel a successful economy. Let the people suffer ostensibly for something camouflaged as a greater good, but actually aimed at greater government control. Spew disinformation…move the goalposts. Cancel a sitting president, cancel jobs, cancel peaceful citizens, etcetera, etcetera. China builds a huge military while America tears down statues and cancels its economy. Ask yourself why our leaders take no action against Controllers and Erasers? Dare we let disinformation get in the way of truth? Heaven-forbid the inconvenience of opposing viewpoints lest you be cancelled or doxed.

Cancel culture boils down to a fundamental erosion of respect for our nation and its people. Disrespect? Check out 2 Timothy 3:2-13 defining disrespect in calling out self-love, parental disobedience, treason, slander, corruption, deception, and more. Arguably, history shows that godless societies ultimately fail, as morality – and with it, mutual respect – becomes undefinable and thereby lost. Our nation is dying from a thousand cuts. Our Constitution must be defended, our military strengthened, and religion brought back to the public square. I believe that white supremacists, antifa rioters, campus censors, big-tech black-listers, and their ilk can only be defeated and our Constitution protected from the Controllers and Erasers by a return to the respectfulness found in strong faith-based morality. As communities thrive in facing up to the same risks and desiring the same rewards, the inherent risks and fears of divisiveness will disappear. We must show cancel culture for the contrivance that it is by refusing to yield to it. America and our freedoms are at stake. Truth sets us free.

Just sayin’.

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