Among the most frustrating aspects of being involved in dissident politics these days is the pushback that often comes from one’s nominal allies. Perhaps the most common form of this internecine resistance is the refusal of many older Conservatives and Libertarians to acknowledge that their own side is being censored by the Left.
Tell a Mammon Mobster that something must be done about cancel culture, and he’ll avoid taking action by defining the problem out of existence. Censorship, a laissez-faire Reaganaut will insist, can only be imposed by government. If a private company wants to ban someone for any reason or no reason, that’s their affair. Don’t like how you’re treated on one platform? Find another one, or build your own.
Like most BoomerCon arguments for inaction in the face of mortal peril, this blanket exemption from public morality for megacorps is cowardice disguised as a principled stand. The giveaway is that it maintains the status quo of the Left facing no negative consequences for silencing those who share most of the MammonCons’ opinions. Viewed in terms of outcomes, doing nothing to stop cancel culture leaves the enemy free to use an effective tactic which will clear the field of all opposition if allowed to play out indefinitely.
In other words, standing on free market principles is, in this case, a suicide pact.
Decades of inaction have now enabled the ongoing, active purgation of straight, white, Christian men from the entertainment industry. Here’s a major author warning that literary agents will no longer represent books by people the Death Cult considers unclean. Here’s another who got canned by a game publisher for having unapproved opinions. The pattern can’t be unseen once noticed.
Somewhat less oblivious Conservatives who perceive corporate censorship as a threat, and rightly so, rush to point out the Left’s hypocrisy. The people censoring authors they disagree with are the same ones who shill for virtue signaling farces like Banned Books Week.
If those well-meaning Conservatives would dig a little deeper, they’d find that the folks behind Banned Books Week sued the government to make sure kids could have easy access to porn at public libraries. But such cases show that a) government isn’t always the problem and b) our enemies aren’t just sincere, but sincerely wrong, ideologues. And since NormieCons have no interest in using government power to further their goals, and no desire to learn the enemy’s true status as a hysterical death cult, they keep to the shallows.
As a case in point, it’s not mundane hypocrisy that moves normal-seeming people to whipsaw from denying that straight, white, men face discrimination to gloating about how it’s real and deserved.
Note to the slow kids: People who justify career-ending injustices against others based on sex and race with appeals to make-believe hobgoblins aren’t mere hypocrites. They’re primitive cargo cultists.
What Conservatives forget is that they’re still being censored, even if the ruling party is outsourcing censorship to megacorps. Whether the penalty for talking out of turn is federal prison or banishment from the banking system, the resulting silence is the same.
The glint of light at the end of the tunnel is that the Right has always been better at innovation and quicker to implement new solutions. Everybody forgets that the Left was slow to adopt the internet, much less capture it. Until the late aughts, most people you met online were PCU style Libertarians.
The Gen Z heirs to dying American Conservatism as pioneering workarounds to the Death Cult’s media and tech monopolies. There’s room to hope they’ll learn from their predecessors’ mistakes.
And one vital lesson of the culture war is don’t give money to people who hate you.
One of the biggest tells to how boomercon advice is nothing more than dressed up cowardice is how it only applies when it helps the left.
For example, take the “cancel culture doesn’t exist because companies can do whatever they want” canard. In theory it should justify conservative companies doing proper gatekeeping and throwing out leftist infiltrators. But no, in that case you’ll get a speech about how we should have a higher commitment to free speech. If we ban people from our private sites we will be just as bad as the left. If our views are righteous we’ll be able to convert all the leftist infiltrators to our side by owning them with logic, etc.
You summed up the main thesis of this post in a more succinct manner than I did. Thank you!
I think honest people still concerned about “conspiracy theories” are going by analogy to Guy Fawkes and the gang getting together specifically in order to blow up Parliament. That sort of thing can’t happen on a global scale, they say, and they have a point.
But what we are looking at is less like that than it is like a nasty clique. And a clique doesn’t need to brew an elaborate scheme to be two-faced and insular and cultish and constantly seek out ways to rub outsiders’ faces in the dirt. They do those things automatically.
I just do not get how the need to cut ties with these institutions does not sink in for a lot of people.
I’ll say: “the people running/working at this places hates you and everything you stand for.”
They’ll say “yeah, they do.”
I say: “I don’t want to do business with them when they are okay with mutilating and raping children.”
“Whoa, let’s not go that far. Yeah, they believe in that, but NOT giving them money…?”
If someone is gagging you and beating you and threatening to torture your kids, the least you can do is not hand him your money every month. I haven’t been 100% successful in divesting myself, but I have jumped through so many hoops to do as much as I could as soon as I could. Can’t Normies just, you know, click a handful of buttons a month to cut a cord or two once and a while?
The Fichtean-derived training to breakdown the instinctive connection between knowledge and reality, and between different segments of knowledge and each other, seems like it has to be reaching its maximal social conclusions. The results will be quite dark, but I do think the subsequent flowering is something to be hopeful for.
If normies could easily reject the current zeitgeist, they wouldn’t be normies. That’s not to say that they can’t change at all, but they will not easily accept any idea that goes against the current norms. And one of the biggest unspoken norms in society is “the way you get entertained is by giving money to large corporations.” When you say something like “just stop using streaming services” you’re going to be viewed as the equivalent of someone in the 90’s saying that you should throw out your TV.
The only way you can have any practical success is by taking little steps and building on them. A good place to start with a lot of normies is “are there any streaming services you are currently paying for, but haven’t used all month? Why not cancel those?” You can also seize on moments where the low level of quality becomes obvious, ex. if you are invited to watch something on a streaming service and end up watching menus being browsed for half an hour due to a combination of poor UI, poor recommendations, and expired licenses. In that situation it’s not hard to ask “why are you paying for this?”
Now normies can be receptive to the message that you shouldn’t pay for any service from people who hate them, but only when they’ve already cancelled services for other reasons. Most of them live in a world where everything they buy is from someone that hates them. So when you say to stop doing that, they hear it as “never engage in any form of entertainment again, and perhaps starve to death.” Only after they cancel some individual services and realize that they can live without them will they be able to see that they can get rid of the others too.