Cancel culture needs to be cancelled
Episode Stats
Words per minute
216.61029
Summary
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.
Transcript
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I never join calls for people to be fired, for them to step down, for them to lose things that
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are valuable to them. Maybe I should in some cases, but I don't do it as a matter of principle,
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even if they are people who I really disagree with, even if I don't agree with the things that
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they have said. My reasons, well, there's a few of them. I think if they're public office holders,
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I think that it's up to the people to just vote them out the next time around. If they are some
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sort of author, television host, what have you, well, I think you can just stop listening to them.
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You could ignore them. They can slowly lose their audience if what they've done is actually not
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appealing to individuals. And if they've done something truly heinous, truly horrible,
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it's probably illegal and the law is going to step in and do what needs to be done. I just don't like
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joining the mob, but I like it even less right now because I feel like the threshold, the barometer
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for what gets people axed from a position or what gets them sort of trending such that we've got to
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say, oh, off with their heads and get rid of them. It's getting smaller and smaller.
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A lot of times it's about taking a statement a person has said that is not an aggressively
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offensive statement, but if you kind of rearrange it, if you project onto it to see what you want
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to see, well, then you can determine that it's uglier than maybe the person intended it to be.
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And by the way, clearly the person's intentions, we're told this day and age, don't even matter.
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I think the original example was the Don Cherry incident. You'll remember with that sentence that he
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said. A lot of people spent time unpacking going, well, he meant this. No, actually he meant that
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and so forth. Well, if you move this word here and you move that word there, well, hold on a second.
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The simple fact that we even have to debate the nuts and bolts of what he even said suggests that
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he did not say something clearly out there outrageous, but I digress. That is now water under
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the bridge, but we're seeing a lot of this happen right now. Almost every day, there's some sort of
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public figure personality who is under siege for saying something not perfect. Look, if you've
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got some Michael Richards tape out there and you are just viciously unleashing venom on people,
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well, then I think you're going to get what's coming to you and you're going to get you just
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desserts. But a lot of this, I think, is very small beans and it's upsetting that the threshold
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is so small. It's going to make a lot of people out there reluctant to just talk to their friends,
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talk to co-workers, go out and talk to a neighbor and a stranger. It's like we can no longer trust
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each other. We just don't know what the new fault lines are, what the landmines are. It's going to be
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unnerving for a lot of people and I think that's unfortunate. I want to cut people slack and like I
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said, I do that even if I know they hold different views than me, if I know that I don't like that
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person to begin with. When there's a real offense out there, when someone's done something, said
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something truly awful, I mean, we all know it. It's all clear. I think we should stop trying to
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destroy people's lives every opportunity we get.