Juno News - Cancel culture needs to be cancelled

In this episode, I talk about public figure personalities who are constantly under fire for saying something they should not have said, and how we need to stop joining the mob and do what needs to be done about it.

00:00:00.000 I never join calls for people to be fired, for them to step down, for them to lose things that

00:00:10.980 are valuable to them. Maybe I should in some cases, but I don't do it as a matter of principle,

00:00:15.500 even if they are people who I really disagree with, even if I don't agree with the things that

00:00:20.040 they have said. My reasons, well, there's a few of them. I think if they're public office holders,

00:00:24.560 I think that it's up to the people to just vote them out the next time around. If they are some

00:00:29.720 sort of author, television host, what have you, well, I think you can just stop listening to them.

00:00:34.800 You could ignore them. They can slowly lose their audience if what they've done is actually not

00:00:38.600 appealing to individuals. And if they've done something truly heinous, truly horrible,

00:00:42.840 it's probably illegal and the law is going to step in and do what needs to be done. I just don't like

00:00:47.940 joining the mob, but I like it even less right now because I feel like the threshold, the barometer

00:00:53.840 for what gets people axed from a position or what gets them sort of trending such that we've got to

00:00:59.400 say, oh, off with their heads and get rid of them. It's getting smaller and smaller.

00:01:04.820 A lot of times it's about taking a statement a person has said that is not an aggressively

00:01:09.300 offensive statement, but if you kind of rearrange it, if you project onto it to see what you want

00:01:13.860 to see, well, then you can determine that it's uglier than maybe the person intended it to be.

00:01:18.480 And by the way, clearly the person's intentions, we're told this day and age, don't even matter.

00:01:23.400 I think the original example was the Don Cherry incident. You'll remember with that sentence that he

00:01:28.300 said. A lot of people spent time unpacking going, well, he meant this. No, actually he meant that

00:01:32.360 and so forth. Well, if you move this word here and you move that word there, well, hold on a second.

00:01:36.520 The simple fact that we even have to debate the nuts and bolts of what he even said suggests that

00:01:41.120 he did not say something clearly out there outrageous, but I digress. That is now water under

00:01:46.440 the bridge, but we're seeing a lot of this happen right now. Almost every day, there's some sort of

00:01:50.920 public figure personality who is under siege for saying something not perfect. Look, if you've

00:01:57.580 got some Michael Richards tape out there and you are just viciously unleashing venom on people,

00:02:02.060 well, then I think you're going to get what's coming to you and you're going to get you just

00:02:05.240 desserts. But a lot of this, I think, is very small beans and it's upsetting that the threshold

00:02:11.120 is so small. It's going to make a lot of people out there reluctant to just talk to their friends,

00:02:16.500 talk to co-workers, go out and talk to a neighbor and a stranger. It's like we can no longer trust

00:02:22.200 each other. We just don't know what the new fault lines are, what the landmines are. It's going to be

00:02:26.900 unnerving for a lot of people and I think that's unfortunate. I want to cut people slack and like I

00:02:32.300 said, I do that even if I know they hold different views than me, if I know that I don't like that

00:02:36.740 person to begin with. When there's a real offense out there, when someone's done something, said

00:02:41.460 something truly awful, I mean, we all know it. It's all clear. I think we should stop trying to

00:02:47.440 destroy people's lives every opportunity we get.

Juno News - June 12, 2020

Cancel culture needs to be cancelled

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