Beckman: Cancel Culture? No Kidding

By Hank Beckman - 

Progressives are finally waking up to the fact that they are in serious danger from the monsters they’ve helped create.

Seeking refuge in the reliably leftist pages of Harper’s Weekly, 153 mostly left-leaning public intellectuals—with some libertarians sprinkled in—signed a letter decrying the cancel culture currently metastasizing throughout the nation like terminal cancer.

Apparently people all over the country being fired from their jobs and driven from public life for the mildest deviation from “woke” doctrine is getting their attention.

Agreeing to run a opinion piece by a sitting U.S. Senator cost the New York Times opinion page editor his job; a headline with the title “Buildings Matter, too” has the executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer also looking for work; Drew Brees didn’t get kicked out of the NFL for disagreeing with kneeling before the national anthem, but he had to apologize several times.

The number of people being punished for getting on the bad side of the leftist mob is too long to list here; a long magazine article would be needed to do the subject justice.

Displaying a firm grasp of the obvious, the letter reads “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.”

While no one who cares about free speech would argue with that sentiment, the letter makes no bones about the fact that the real concern is the free flow of leftist ideas being constricted.

The writers—apparently as many as 20 contributed to the effort—give the game away near the beginning when they describe Donald Trump as a “real threat to democracy.”

They think that attacks on free speech are to be expected from the “radical right;” they worry that “right-wing demagogues” are already exploiting the situation.

If these people had even a token commitment to honesty or the slightest bit of self-awareness, they would admit that conservatives have slowly but steadily been cancelled from the national conversation for a long time.

Name the institution that contributes to the national conversation and unless its raison d’etre is to promote the conservative point of view, it has been taken over by the political Left.

While the national media has reached new levels of shamelessness in reporting on the Trump administration, it has been trending left for decades. No honest person can argue Republican presidents or presidential candidates were not treated more harshly than their Democratic opponents. Who can forget Candace Crowley fact-checking Mitt Romney during his 2012 debate with Barack Obama?

The media doubled down on their commitment to leftism after George W. Bush snuck by Al Gore with the help of the electoral college. Convinced that the 2000 election was stolen from their candidate, the media dropped the pretense of objectivity, the dishonesty going so far that Dan Rather used forged documents in an attempt to lift John Kerry into the White House.

And it’s only gotten worse in the last decade, as witnessed by the softball coverage of the Obama administration and the disgraceful collusion with Democrats in the Russian collusion fairy tail. They’ve even shamelessly given their friends Pulitzers for promulgating complete nonsense about the Russia hoax; see the House Intelligence Committee’s records released on the orders of Ric Grennell for verification.

American universities have long been a bastion of liberal thought and activism, but at least there were some old school Democrats around when I first attended a community college in the early 70s. Now it is evident that conservatives have been essentially cancelled from our modern institutions of higher learning.

After leftist Boomers started becoming tenured faculty in the 80s—tenured radicals, as a saying goes—the multicultural emphasis, along with area studies, began to make itself felt in a big way. Chants of “hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go,” became familiar rallying cries for trust fund brats hiding out on college campuses before heading out to the real world.

Today, large areas of modern universities are barely recognizable as being located in the United States. Speech codes, lack of due process for males accused of sexual misconduct and outright physical assaults on conservatives are regular features of campus life in the modern age.

Public K-12 education is not much better. Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, a Marxist interpretation of our history, one that is found lacking by many liberal historians, is required reading in at least some of our nation’s high schools. And with an estimated 2 million copies in print, the impact Zinn has had on social studies educators is significant, although hard to quantify.

Hollywood and television has done its fair share of indoctrination over the last several decades, and it hasn’t been accomplished by giving conservatives a fair hearing.

Television used to produce entertainment for the entire family, shows that inspired and entertained at the same time. But the days of “All in the Family,” “Happy Days” and “Family” are over. Then, even shows that leaned left gave the right a fair hearing without demonizing them. Otherwise, Archie Bunker wouldn’t have emerged as a lovable, sympathetic character.

Now we are treated to shows that are essentially extended liberal OpEd pieces, like “The West Wing,” “Madame Secretary,” and “30 Rock.”

Late night television, once the province of politically-neutral people like Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, is now a contest between C-level comedians to see who can hate Donald Trump the most; professional sports leagues, where people once went to forget about politics, are turning their product into social justice platforms, where spoiled millionaires lecture the rest of us on how to we should live.

This trend toward cancelling any opinion the left found offensive didn’t begin the day before yesterday.

Several decades ago, Al Campanis and Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder were exiled from major league baseball for remarks that were admittedly stupid and racially insensitive, but hardly as bad as some of the vicious rhetoric we hear from the Left; Ben Shapiro wrote about the leftist bias in Hollywood almost a decade ago; liberal Arther Schlesinger and conservative Dinesh D’Souza wrote about liberal bias in education decades ago.

In order to be aware of the bias against conservative speech, leftists would have had to venture outside the progressive bubble in which they find such comfort in information that confirms their worldview. They would have had to read articles and books by Kimberly Strassel, Mollie Hemingway, Mary Katharine Ham and Guy Benson. They would need to read web sites like the National Review Online, Lucianne or the Wall Street Journal editorial page—and read them with an open mind.

To get a conservative perspective on current events, it might have even been a good idea to-gasp!—watch Fox News once in a while.

And, let’s be honest, assuming that the average leftist that signed their name to the letter is innocently unaware of the leftist bias of these institutions is giving them the benefit of the doubt.

More likely most are perfectly aware of the situation and are only pleading for tolerance now because the leftist mob is coming after them.