Partisan Condemnations of 'Cancel Culture' Are Simply Hypocritical
Feckless concern for free speech protections have become just another political weapon used to further one's own party, and this is particularly true on the right.
One of the primary strategies of today's Republican Party is to try and portray themselves, along with America itself and its supposed democratic values, as being under assault. There's a significant amount of their momentum that's leaning directly into the habit of fetishizing self-victimization. Their main target of finger pointing that fuels this delusional, aghast outrage is, of course, the vague blob of "Cancel Culture."
It's a phrase that rightly makes many Americans roll their eyes by now, but GOPers wouldn't be using it if it couldn't cut further into the artificially imposed national divide. What allowed them to take this route, and what makes it somewhat effective is that there have undoubtedly been instances of individuals being cancelled from networks and platforms that have been outrageous affronts to diversity of thought and to free speech. But there's a distinct difference between Gina Carano and Rosanne Barr on Ambien. There have also been plenty instances where the cancellation was less an attack on an ideology or a fundamental right, but rather directed at completely indefensible actions like, for instance, viscerally exhibited racism or crimes of sexual assault.
However, the problem with the idea of the "culture war" is that all the stances on "cancel culture" are strictly aligned with the partisan divide— what's an example of someone being unjustly cancelled to one group is wholly justified to the other. When the GOP calls out cancel culture, it's when doing so furthers their narrative and their support.
This silly partisan incongruity regarding the issue of cancelling and deciding to pick and choose what is and isn't an attack on free speech is, in fact, an overall hinderance of the values of First Amendment protections. It's flat-out hypocrisy and it continues to keep the American public divided on frivolous matters that really don't even effect their daily lives rather than highlighting that bigger circle that undoubtedly exists around all everyday Americans in the form of the collective enemy of economic inequity in this oligarchical nightmare.
Of course, many Democrats sought to cancel controversial personalities, like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones, in an impulsive manner that never stopped to think about the implications of simply normalizing the ability to deplatform or cancel someone that expresses opinions that fall outside the norm and what it might mean for left-leaning voices down the road. Don't misconstrue that statement— Yiannopoulos is an attention-seeking contrarian troll, and Alex Jones is a stream-of-consciousness blabberer with borderline schizophrenia— both of them are not defensible in the overwhelming majority of what they say, but shutting down their right to say it puts other more reality-based dissident voices in the path of the same kind of authoritarian control on information.
While Republicans were outraged at the cancelling of said individuals and others, they were never doing it as a defense of the First Amendment— feckless concern for free speech protections became just another political weapon used to further one's own party.
If the Republican Party really cared about the unequivocal imperativeness of protecting First Amendment rights in all situations, regardless of which group is involved, then we would have seen them all on their feet applauding a recent ruling by a Federal Judge in Georgia. . .
. . .But of course, they didn't. . . Because it didn't further their cause. . .
This particular case involves journalist Abby Martin who, in February 2020, was set to be a keynote speaker at the International Critical Media Literacy Conference before her invitation was rescinded and the event was cancelled. The reason: her refusal to sign a pledge saying she is not in support of a boycott of Israel.
The pledge stems from a Georgia law that was signed in 2016. It prohibits the state from signing contracts or entering agreements with companies or entities involved with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. To ensure this protection of Israel, the law requires a pledge of oath that indicates the signatory is not and will not support a boycott of Israel. It is one of many such anti-BDS laws signed into law in a total of 35 states.
In September 2019, Martin received a "memorandum of agreement" requesting that she certify that she is not and will not engage in any efforts to boycott Israel. According to the lawsuit, Martin's email reply stated:
"As I’m sure you know, a lot of my work advocates the boycott of Israel … [and] I cannot sign any form promising to not boycott Israel."
After the cancellation of the event the Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund filed the suit in January 2020. The suit claimed that Martin's invitation to speak depended on her "agreeing in writing to abandon her First Amendment-protected journalism about and political advocacy for the rights of Palestinians." Both Martin's First and Fourteenth Amendment rights were being violated, and the suit asked the federal court to issue an order to refrain from enforcing the anti-BDS law and to declare it unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable.
On Monday, Martin announced that Judge Mark Cohen ruled Georgia's anti-BDS law unconstitutional and unenforceable, writing in his ruling that the law "prohibits inherently expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment."
This was a major win for pro-Palestine advocates and activists, but moreover, it was a major win for anyone who legitimately cares about the right to free speech and expression. However, it's funny, there wasn't a peep out of Tom Cotton, or Josh Hawley, or Ted Cruz, or any of those knucklehead champions of "free" speech.
In fact, one of those cretins was directly associated with another piece of recent news regarding free speech. Yeah, that pencil-necked scoundrel, Tom Cotton, played an integral part in the firing of an Associated Press journalist.
Emily Wilder, a recent graduate of Stanford University, started a gig at the AP as a news associate in Maricopa County, Arizona at the beginning of May. Just weeks into the job, she was fired. Why? Because of social media posts from her college days advocating for Palestinian rights and condemning Israeli oppression.
Critics of her past behavior noted that she accused Israel of ethnic cleansing, lead a protest against birthright citizenship in New York, called influential pro-Israel casino and media mogul Sheldon Adelson a "naked mole rat," and referred to Ben Shapiro a "little turd."
When attention of the criticism grew and the AP spontaneously contacted her about her alleged social media "violation" committed within her time at the outlet, Wilder asked them to indicate what the violating post was. They didn't, and went through with letting her go.
It began with a tweet from Stanford College Republicans condemning the hiring of Wilder after "discovering" past social media posts that the AP and Wilder had discussed during the process of being hired, and posts that, frankly, any eleven year-old with a smartphone could have tracked down:
The initial tweet from the Stanford College Republicans was reminiscent of another off-putting tattletale style of attack: The New York Times' Taylor Lorenz's attempt of calling out a Silicon Valley guy for using "the r-word" on Clubhouse even though he never even uttered it and the person who did was using it as a direct quote from the self-proclaimed "retard revolution" on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit back in January.
Following the Stanford GOP's tweet, The Washington Free Beacon continued the assault on these opinions that differed from the Conservative status quo, calling the newly-hired Wilder an anti-Israel activist whose hiring illustrated that the AP's "objectivity is in question."
The momentum grew with such prominent conservative, pro-Israel voices like Ben Shapiro and Sen. Tom Cotton retweeting it in another episode of Republicans screaming bloody murder in the right-wing echo chamber.
The Senator from Arkansas must have certainly felt like a knight in shining armor for his defense of First Amendment protections after such a stunt. That's been his shtick, anyway— fighting back against cancel culture as perpetrated by the left who, as he said at his 2021 CPAC speech, "hate America"— and he's stuck to it since his largest moment of clout last summer.
Recall last June when Senator Cotton wrote an op-ed for The New York Times urging the president to "call in the troops" on the protests flaring in cities nationwide in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. In the aftermath of the op-ed's publishing, the paper's staff voiced considerable disdain for Cotton's piece. As a result, the editorial page editor resigned days later, the deputy editorial editor was reassigned, and an apology was issued to the staff, noting "a significant breakdown in our editing processes."
That meltdown also resulted in The Times choosing to preface the online version of the op-ed with a self-condemning editor's note as well as the decision not to put it into the print version of the paper. Despite more attention being gained from the fiasco than had nobody said anything about the piece, Cotton was adamant that he and his op-ed were the victims of an attempted cancellation at the hands of "the woke mob."
All of it, from The Times to Cotton, was a complete debacle and a damning illustration of the zero-sum game of the "culture war." That's especially true now in the wake of Cotton leading the way of cancelling a journalist for her views on Israel and Palestine despite the fact that journalist was assigned as an associate in Arizona. That's what cancel culture is in modern politics: bad when the other side does it, and just fine when your side does it.
Surely, the way to combat bad or harmful speech is with better speech. That is presumably the free and equal way. That's also the theory behind why straight up cancelling Yiannopoulos and Jones was ultimately a bad move: sure, both of them feed on many bad and false ideas, but shutting down ignorance with attempted obliteration is not a reasonable way to go about it. In reality, it's merely the initiation of a takedown of voices of dissent. Those fringe voices represent a pernicious side of dissident voices— a misinformed, mangled world view. However, the majority of dissident voices are not of that ilk, and many of these outside-the-establishment outlets and personalities are the only individuals left willing to continue criticizing centralized power. Cancelling Yiannopoulos and Jones was the beginning of the slippery slope of normalizing the abrupt cancellation of any voices that exist outside the status quo.
However much it is true that the Democrats have exhibited bad responses to rhetoric and opinions they don't agree with, the Republicans are very clearly just as guilty.
Not only did Cotton and other prominent Republicans not pay any attention to the Abby Martin lawsuit in Georgia and how ruling the anti-BDS law unenforceable was a win for America's First Amendment Protections, they are also primarily responsible for these exact kinds of laws. Of course, many, many Democrats are, too— such laws exist in states like New York and California— but it is notable that of the handful of Congress members that have condemned Israeli apartheid and supported Palestinians, none are members of the GOP.
The dangers facing free speech due to these laws are completely ignored by all the partisan free-speech "advocates" because Israel is where the partisan split ends overlap.
As previously mentioned, 35 states in the country have anti-BDS laws similar to Georgia's. CAIR has filed lawsuits regarding these laws in several states like Arkansas, Arizona, Kansas, Maryland, and Texas. All of the laws are supported and lobbied for by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in an attempt to stall growing public recognition and condemnation of Israel's aggressive efforts to ethnically cleanse the area. The first of these kinds of laws passed in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Illinois back in 2015, and since then, 32 other states have followed through since.
Israel's propaganda war has been keen on shutting down the BDS movement, mainly through smear campaigns (like we saw against Wilder) and through the weaponization of antisemitism. Characterizing any anti-Israel stance as antisemitic has been their most reliable tool, but it's starting to lose steam recently. Despite that, these pieces of legislation, enacted around 35 states and widely supported by lawmakers, serves as surreptitious methods to thwart the right to freely express any opinion that critiques Israel.
As Gov. Andrew Cuomo put it in 2016: "If you boycott Israel, New York State will boycott you."
These laws— which have flown under the radar among many circles until very recently— are establishment protections of the status quo regarding Israel. They are also simultaneously impediments to free speech. They don't inherently seek to stand up for what's ultimately right in terms of basic human rights, rather they utilize the strong arm of the law to silence protests and maintain a propagandized version of the occupation as the norm. Even when they are so clearly caught redhanded in the attempt to support Israel in spite of the suffering of millions of Palestinians, they find ways to get around it.
In 2017, Texas Governor Greg Abbot signed HB89 into law, which prohibited Texas from signing contracts or entering business agreements with companies or entities involved with the movement to boycott Israel so as to ensure that no public funds go to any companies supporting BDS.
As a result of this law, Bahia Amawi, a school speech therapist lost her job. It happened as Amawi, an independent contractor and not an employee, went to sign another contract for the next school year at the district she had worked with for years. In addition to the typical contract, Amawi was also asked to sign a pledge vowing that she "does not" and "will not" engage in any form of boycott of Israel, a stipulation of the new anti-BDS legislation.
As Glenn Greenwald wrote at the time for The Intercept:
"In order to continue to work, Amawi would be perfectly free to engage in any political activism against her own country, participate in an economic boycott of any state or city within the U.S., or work against the policies of any other government in the world — except Israel."
Amawi was baffled that the United States was so bent on protecting "another country's economy versus trying to protect our constitutional rights."
After losing her job, Amawi sued the state of Texas. The court ruled in her favor, citing the law was "a viewpoint-based restriction intended not to combat discrimination on the basis of national origin, but to silence speech with which Texas disagrees."
Texas modified the law, limiting the application to companies that have at least 10 full-time employees and contracts of $10,000 and more. And following the modification, when CAIR filed a suit against it, the law was upheld. And there was barely any outcry from Washington.
It has become clear that these lawmakers' intent is not to stand up for free speech or any other basic rights, but to persistently stand up for speech that protects and upholds their world view— the same world view that maintains their power and allows it to expand. It's not an intention to uphold freedom, it's an intention to uphold established ways of political thought, and that means hypocritically suppressing voices and opinions that differ from one's own established, partisan ideology.
While The Huxleyan intends to remain free to the public, there are paid subscription offers (which would be more of a donation than receiving access to anything in particular) at $5/month, or $45/year. As always, donations are welcome and appreciated via Venmo (@john-pongratz). Again, as those are just options, everything remains free. Thank you for reading and be sure to subscribe, comment, and share!
