The Auron MacIntyre Show - February 24, 2023


Cancel Culture Is Good for Democracy？ ｜ 2⧸24⧸23


Episode Stats


Length

57 minutes

Words per minute

167.71461

Word count

9,718

Sentence count

702

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

28

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Rolling Stone's Ernest Jones has an article about why cancel culture is good for democracy and why you should be worried about a "so-called mob" who will judge you if you don't agree with them. This is a piece written for the left-wing publication Rolling Stone.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:01:29.980 Hey everybody, how's it going?
00:01:33.820 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.
00:01:35.720 Sorry about the delay.
00:01:37.020 Very serious business.
00:01:38.780 Couldn't be avoided. 0.92
00:01:40.280 So, Rolling Stone came out with a particularly ridiculous article this week.
00:01:46.620 Now, it's always really hard to tell at this point what is satire and what is real.
00:01:51.680 But Rolling Stone did come out with the article about why cancel culture is good for democracy.
00:01:57.620 Again, I had to check several times to make sure that this was a real article, that this was not some kind of joke.
00:02:03.380 But it does seem to be very real.
00:02:04.380 But it does seem to be very real and we're going to look at the language being used, the frame being used, the rhetoric, who this is for, why they're saying what they're saying as we go through this. 0.90
00:02:16.820 Now, Rolling Stone, of course, is a very ridiculous publication. 0.66
00:02:19.940 It's been insane even since I was young. 0.73
00:02:23.620 It hasn't been about music for a very long time.
00:02:25.740 I don't think anyone reads it.
00:02:27.280 It's just a boomer rag at this point.
00:02:29.200 It's there for the few people who still fondly associate it with some kind of discovering the Beatles or the Doors or something.
00:02:41.800 It's all about radical politics at this point.
00:02:44.320 And so having an article about this in there is not surprising at all.
00:02:50.660 But Ernest Jones here has a piece about why cancel culture is good for democracy.
00:02:58.140 So let's just go ahead and dive in and we'll stop and talk about what he's doing here in just a minute.
00:03:04.660 So for many years, cancel culture has been despised or misconstrued as a new phenomenon that's caused havoc on free expression and speech.
00:03:13.500 We're supposed to know or supposed to now assume that we can't say or do anything without an angry mob instantly judging us and preparing to end our careers before they start.
00:03:25.040 In fact, we are the people who make up the so-called mob and we have control of our own actions.
00:03:31.520 So the first thing you want to notice is the fact that of who this is being written for right now.
00:03:38.740 Rolling Stone, again, solidly lib mag, rapidly lib.
00:03:43.420 So right there's not some kind of mixed audience.
00:03:45.680 It doesn't have to appeal to anyone.
00:03:47.060 This is preaching directly to the choir.
00:03:49.000 And you can tell throughout this that he's not going to be making any appeals for persuasion.
00:03:54.360 This whole piece is here to kind of justify the actions that the left already want to take.
00:04:00.800 The left never cared about free speech.
00:04:02.840 No matter what people tell you, no matter what even some of the refugees from the left bought into.
00:04:08.260 The truth is that the left was never interested in free speech.
00:04:11.560 But what they were interested in was power.
00:04:13.180 They wanted a way to break into America's institutions, force their arguments and their ideas into the public square, and then shut out any of the competitors.
00:04:23.860 Now that the left is in power, they're more than fine with slamming the door behind them.
00:04:29.180 They're not going to hold to some principle of free speech that they never cared about in the first place.
00:04:34.160 So what you see here is he makes the assertion that, oh, well, we're supposed to be worried about angry mobs.
00:04:38.740 They'll instantly judge us and, you know, get rid of our jobs and everything.
00:04:42.040 Well, actually, they do.
00:04:43.460 They do that all the time.
00:04:44.520 That's very common.
00:04:46.120 The people who don't have to be worried about that are, of course, people who work for the left, work for left-wing magazines, have their articles printed in the Rolling Stone.
00:04:55.600 Those are the people who don't have to care about that.
00:04:57.340 You notice that he says, we are the so-called mob.
00:05:00.520 Well, you are.
00:05:01.580 You're the so-called mob.
00:05:02.940 Not anyone who's going to be attacked by you.
00:05:05.440 None of them are going to have any control over this.
00:05:07.420 None of them are going to be able to limit the power of the mob.
00:05:10.600 So it's easy for you to say, well, we can just control our own actions.
00:05:14.480 No, you'll be in control of the mob.
00:05:16.820 The people you're attacking won't have any input.
00:05:20.060 Cancel culture has leveled the playing field for those who can't always rely on the government to protect them.
00:05:26.240 This part here is particularly rich.
00:05:28.720 Ready for this.
00:05:29.580 Right now, bigots are protected under the First Amendment.
00:05:33.180 Oh, no.
00:05:34.020 Not the bigots.
00:05:35.520 Under the First Amendment to fuel disgusting rhetoric without state-sanctioned consequences.
00:05:43.880 So this is just a direct call for the state to completely shut down speech, right?
00:05:52.060 Like, this is just a direct call of can you believe that people think free speech means that the state shouldn't be able to have direct consequences meted out by its arm, its law enforcement arm or something, to people who have wrong think, right?
00:06:08.440 So we're getting right into it here, right?
00:06:11.360 We have to have cancel culture because the First Amendment has failed minorities or whatever protected class he's going to be going on about here.
00:06:20.940 The America that tolerated white supremacy, there we go, watch word, it's always the key, in their policies and laws is the same country that wants to remind us how such forms of hate are still legal via free speech.
00:06:36.600 So again, you're allowed to have opinions, right?
00:06:40.600 Like, you're allowed to hate things.
00:06:43.160 Again, you can disagree with people hating things.
00:06:45.940 You can say that they shouldn't be doing that.
00:06:48.000 You can disagree with their behavior, but this guy is just directly calling for wrong think penalties, right?
00:06:54.420 How could you possibly have the right to hate people, to have a discussion?
00:06:59.120 Now, of course, he hates you, right?
00:07:01.660 That's the great thing about these pieces.
00:07:04.180 The lefties that are writing these things, they hate these people.
00:07:07.520 They hate the people they're writing about.
00:07:08.840 They hate the people they want to cancel.
00:07:10.260 They want to destroy them.
00:07:11.760 They hate Red America. 0.77
00:07:12.880 They hate Republican voters.
00:07:14.100 They hate Donald Trump.
00:07:15.520 They really do.
00:07:16.540 And so they're more than fine with hate, of course.
00:07:19.200 When they say hate, they mean you're not allowed to disagree about the holiness of different protected groups or different people that we want to bolster in our voting coalition, right?
00:07:29.720 That's what they mean in that sentence.
00:07:32.120 Cancel culture is the poison to those in power that have benefited from unchecked free speech.
00:07:38.660 Again, another really interesting turn of phrase.
00:07:40.940 So, as many people have noted, I won't be the first one to come to this conclusion, but speech that is popular does not need protection.
00:07:50.820 The speech of the powerful does not need the protection of the First Amendment or the benefit of free speech.
00:07:56.960 They're the powerful.
00:07:58.040 If you have any understanding of the proper way that power works, you know that no speech that is popular needs this kind of protection.
00:08:09.880 The powerful speech is always protected.
00:08:13.360 So the idea that free speech or the First Amendment is there to protect the speech of the powerful is absolutely insane.
00:08:20.080 Of course, it's there to do exactly the opposite.
00:08:22.540 We can debate whether or not it does a good job with that, but the point is that obviously the powerful do not need the First Amendment.
00:08:29.480 They are the powerful own the institutions, the powerful own the corporations, the powerful own the enforcement mechanisms that otherwise would punish people, the powerful own the platforms on which the speech would take place.
00:08:41.640 It's those that do not have power that would require this protection in the first place.
00:08:46.540 But he can't admit that the left are the powerful.
00:08:50.260 The author can't admit that they're the ones in charge, that they're the ones that control these things, that their very ability to wield cancel culture shows that they have the power and their victims don't.
00:09:02.520 So instead, he inverts it saying free speech and the First Amendment are actually tools of the powerful, the ruling class.
00:09:10.060 When conservatives on Fox News declare that this is a free country and that cancel culture is un-American, they forget that speech works two ways.
00:09:19.060 It allows for discourse to take place, but grants that all voices can be heard.
00:09:25.940 In other words, straight white men, you know, I'm told that this is Marxism or that this is some kind of very complicated dialectic.
00:09:37.060 I don't know. It seems pretty, it seems pretty clear to me.
00:09:41.080 It seems pretty clear what the target is and who is to blame for the people who write these.
00:09:47.380 They say it repeatedly. They don't stutter.
00:09:49.700 They don't seem very confused about who they're trying to attack.
00:09:54.060 And other people with power aren't used to getting pushback for the ways they conduct themselves.
00:09:59.300 Yeah, certainly no straight white man in 2023 has ever heard any kind of pushback.
00:10:04.680 That's certainly not happening in the public square constantly.
00:10:09.140 And cancel culture has reset the way society can react.
00:10:13.000 Yes, it's justified the complete destruction of people that you don't like in the public square.
00:10:18.720 Those who fear cancel culture may claim they fear suppression of speech, but it's accountability they want to avoid.
00:10:25.840 And of course, accountability will be the watchword we'll see here.
00:10:28.640 When British media personality Pierce Morgan publicly attacked Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex.
00:10:36.100 Okay, so let's enjoy this here for a moment.
00:10:39.280 So we're talking about the ability of the powerful to control the powerless, right?
00:10:44.760 That's the whole frame of this thing.
00:10:45.980 That's what cancel culture is for. 1.00
00:10:48.180 It's to control, it's for the powerless to regain power over the powerful, right?
00:10:55.040 And the first example that we're going to get is a rich TV host and literally royalty.
00:11:04.860 Someone who is literally part of the royalty who has an amazing amount of money, fame, all this stuff.
00:11:14.680 This is going to be the very first example he's going to use to show the battle between the powerful and the powerless.
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00:11:36.700 On a March 2021 episode of Good Morning Britain,
00:11:43.540 he didn't expect the immediate backlash or that he'd soon be exiting the show.
00:11:50.540 Morgan slammed Markle for seeming to criticize the royal family
00:11:53.900 and complaining about the bigotry she faced within the family from the British press.
00:11:58.240 Many viewed Morgan's comments as insensitive to Markle's mental health.
00:12:04.620 So again, if you just create a mental health issue, all of a sudden you're the powerless.
00:12:09.820 It doesn't matter if you're a rich actress who married into a royal family, you're actually powerless now.
00:12:18.220 And racially insensitive, of course, given the often racist coverage she faced from the British tabloids as a black woman.
00:12:25.040 The station had received over 57,000 complaints regarding Morgan's comments from disappointing views,
00:12:32.580 including one from Markle herself.
00:12:34.300 Public pressure is speculated to have played a role in Morgan's abrupt leaving of Good Morning Britain after nearly six years.
00:12:42.560 So again, the very first example we get is the example of an incredibly powerful person using cancel culture
00:12:52.240 to cancel another very powerful and rich person.
00:12:55.940 And here we see what this is actually about.
00:12:58.300 Wokeness, cancel culture, is being used here as a form of inter-elite conflict.
00:13:03.960 A credit to where it's due to Malcolm Shunes for this point.
00:13:10.060 This is a particularly powerful weapon inside kind of elite circles in the West, particularly America,
00:13:16.980 but obviously extends places like Britain as well.
00:13:19.860 And appealing to this allows one set of powerful people to cancel or destroy other powerful people.
00:13:26.780 So this allows you to climb the elite ladder, get rid of your enemies, move past things that otherwise you wouldn't be able to
00:13:33.640 by out-jujitsu-ing your opponent using wokeness, using cancel culture.
00:13:38.700 Of course, this inter-elite conflict is the first example our author uses when it comes to the powerless battling the powerful.
00:13:47.940 Just two incredibly rich privileged people disagreeing with each other.
00:13:52.380 Prior to social media and civil rights advancements, men like Morgan would likely have gone unchallenged.
00:14:00.280 This is a really interesting pairing.
00:14:02.000 Prior to social media and civil rights advancements, what civil rights advancement happened with social media?
00:14:08.020 What's the connection there?
00:14:10.140 I mean, I know the answer, but I would be interested in the author's response since he grouped them together.
00:14:17.820 The civil rights advancement here is the ability to take lawsuits or other forms of punishment through what has become America's second constitution,
00:14:28.460 the civil rights revolution, and apply it directly to the person through the mass public.
00:14:34.680 You don't have to wait for the courts anymore.
00:14:36.400 You don't have to wait for some kind of legal remedy.
00:14:39.040 You don't have to wait for some kind of law or something being passed.
00:14:43.260 Instead, you can use social media to directly mete out the punishment that your civil rights revolution is meant to level on your target.
00:14:55.440 You can just aim the public and their disdain at someone rather than needing the legal system.
00:15:02.440 And that's the whole point of this.
00:15:03.480 You'll notice it'll constantly be about how the legal system is lagging behind,
00:15:07.180 and there needs to be some other way that people can manipulate the public in order to punish those they disagree with.
00:15:14.620 Cancel culture, as we consider it today, feels new because of the digital platforms we have at our disposal.
00:15:21.660 Previous generations were canceling, but the road to accountability was paved with many barriers,
00:15:28.080 both technologically and socially.
00:15:32.200 So this is interesting and somewhat true, right?
00:15:34.520 Every civilization has cancel culture.
00:15:38.900 This is something that the right needs to understand just as well as the left, okay?
00:15:43.080 Because actually the phrase cancel culture is very bad for the right.
00:15:46.040 It doesn't actually point out the real problem.
00:15:50.180 Every, a lot of people, especially those who are kind of like in the middle, the IDW folks, 1.00
00:15:55.340 or kind of the leftist refugees who come over to the right after they get canceled on the left,
00:16:01.040 they want to return to some kind of neutral scenario where no one is ever canceled.
00:16:05.640 Everyone speaks their mind all the time.
00:16:08.940 That never existed.
00:16:10.040 It didn't happen.
00:16:11.620 There are preferable levels of free speech, to be clear.
00:16:15.180 Like, there are preferable levels of people being able to speak their mind.
00:16:20.060 And right now, I don't think we have it.
00:16:21.660 But there is never some magical area where there is no judgment,
00:16:25.180 where social institutions and culture have nothing to say about how people conduct themselves.
00:16:32.860 The only thing is right now, it's all rabidly progressive, right?
00:16:36.720 And so when conservatives talk about cancel culture,
00:16:39.920 and then they turn around and want to stop, say, like a drag queen story hour,
00:16:44.460 or some, you know, all ages drag show where trans strippers are exposing themselves to minors, 0.77
00:16:51.380 all of a sudden, the left just comes back with,
00:16:53.460 I thought you guys were against cancel culture.
00:16:55.300 And the answer is, we're for canceling evil stuff, and we're against canceling good stuff.
00:17:00.780 That doesn't work in a society where you have two groups that have just fundamentally opposed views
00:17:06.480 on what that is, which is where we're at,
00:17:09.160 which is why the attempts to return to some kind of neutral scenario doesn't exactly work.
00:17:14.460 All right.
00:17:15.580 So it was hard to fully cancel something when you weren't granted the same civil rights as your opponent,
00:17:23.300 even more so when you could face even more persecution and exile for doing it.
00:17:29.220 So you couldn't fully cancel something.
00:17:31.900 What does that mean?
00:17:32.720 You couldn't completely shut people down because you didn't have civil rights.
00:17:36.620 So civil rights in this context is the ability to shut down and cancel people.
00:17:41.740 It's a really interesting way.
00:17:43.700 And I think, unfortunately, a very honest way to express what most people mean by this,
00:17:50.160 what most people who are using this want to use it for.
00:17:54.400 Civil rights are not some kind of equal thing everybody has access to and everybody gets to use.
00:17:59.440 It's a very specific tool that allows very specific people to completely shut down, cancel, get rid of, silence, ostracize the kind of people they want.
00:18:10.120 And only certain people have access to it and other people don't, which is why it's so important for these kinds of advancements to happen.
00:18:17.980 Right.
00:18:18.100 Once the Internet began to take off in the 1990s, society began to see a shift in how the public could consider canceling with less gatekeeping.
00:18:27.480 In 1997, what does that phrase even mean?
00:18:31.800 Could consider canceling with less gatekeeping.
00:18:35.400 What do you think canceling is?
00:18:37.780 Again, what they mean in this case is my group couldn't silence people.
00:18:43.260 My group didn't have all the power necessary to shut people down.
00:18:46.440 And so I don't want others who had the power to gatekeep me away from my ability to destroy other people.
00:18:53.480 It really is just pure friend-enemy distinction.
00:18:56.860 It's just my friends should have the ability to cancel you and your friends should never have the right to speak.
00:19:03.760 That's really all that's being said here.
00:19:07.260 And of course, you could face some kind of persecution or exile for doing so.
00:19:12.840 So if you try to persecute someone, you might get persecuted back.
00:19:16.440 Really funny.
00:19:17.260 We just had to hear about actually how this is about the consequences of speech and holding people accountable.
00:19:22.180 When you're held accountable for your speech and your attempts to cancel people, that's persecution.
00:19:28.040 But when I hold you accountable for your speech, now I'm righteous.
00:19:33.480 Right now, this is just the power of the unheard.
00:19:35.480 Again, it's just all friend and enemy at every point.
00:19:39.220 In 1997, the Supreme Court acknowledged this major shift when it dealt with the first internet-related First Amendment case.
00:19:45.460 The court wrote at the time that any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox.
00:19:55.160 Those who fear cancel culture may claim that they fear suppression of speech, but it's accountability that they try to avoid.
00:20:01.020 Now, again, this is very interesting because this is something that the left hates.
00:20:05.840 They hate that the internet lets us do this right now.
00:20:09.220 They hate that the internet lets Joe Rogan or other people have powerful podcasts that challenge the mainstream.
00:20:16.840 In fact, they explicitly say this on a regular basis.
00:20:20.680 There's whole exposés coming out of major media organizations about disinformation, the dangers of mis- and disinformation.
00:20:29.880 There's some study in air quotes going around on Twitter last week with a chart and a graph about the percentage of how much disinformation exists on some of these podcasts.
00:20:44.920 They're trying to generate metrics and trying to show scientifically, which is so adorable, about how all these things are full of misinformation.
00:20:55.100 So they hate that the internet gives a democracy of speech, that it gives a place where people can have this discussion.
00:21:04.060 They hate that about the internet.
00:21:06.900 But of course, at the moment, the internet is letting him say something that he wants, which is we should cancel people.
00:21:13.600 So for this moment, the voice on the internet is fine.
00:21:16.400 For this moment, the fact that everyone can be heard is good.
00:21:19.180 If you take it in any other context, it's bad.
00:21:22.040 It's evil.
00:21:22.440 It's a terrible attack on democracy.
00:21:24.120 But just for this moment, it's okay.
00:21:27.560 Cancel culture is a way for a new generation of people to practice free speech, except for the ones who are getting canceled, I guess.
00:21:35.040 The way that we cancel today is more advanced because of our rights as people and our access to digital communications.
00:21:41.620 What right gave you an advantage to cancel people?
00:21:45.580 That's a very interesting right.
00:21:47.200 I would like to see that formulated somewhere.
00:21:49.780 What opponents of cancel culture get wrong is the act itself.
00:21:54.060 It's not that what we're doing is new.
00:21:56.140 It's how we're canceling that's different.
00:21:58.200 Again, that part is true. 0.68
00:21:59.760 He is right about this, right?
00:22:01.280 It is not new.
00:22:02.660 The cancel culture is not new. 1.00
00:22:04.740 It's not anything different.
00:22:05.700 This exists in every society.
00:22:07.480 It's the degree to which and the level of vitriol with which it can be leveled at people.
00:22:15.280 Again, the internet allows it to completely and totally destroy someone's life in a way that simply didn't exist before.
00:22:21.800 At least that part is true, even if we disagree about how good that is.
00:22:27.340 It's not the fault of the general public that society is more progressive than in previous decades.
00:22:33.240 Well, that's also true.
00:22:34.620 It's not the fault of the general public.
00:22:36.620 It's a very specific effort brought about by a class of ruling elites that wants to make sure that it can keep its political formula intact.
00:22:46.260 So he's right.
00:22:47.120 It's not the general.
00:22:48.160 Remember, most of this stuff is not popular.
00:22:50.920 Cancel culture is not popular.
00:22:52.780 The things that people cancel in the name of, like trans kids or something, is not popular.
00:22:58.420 These things are not popular.
00:22:59.640 These things are pushed top down onto the population.
00:23:05.880 And they are made prominent by media organizations, by the law, right?
00:23:11.280 A lot of this stuff gets enshrined in the law.
00:23:12.980 Joe Biden is just trying to do an executive order here that will enshrine diversity, equity, and inclusion into every part of the federal bureaucracy as if it wasn't already.
00:23:23.740 And so, yeah, it is true that it's not the general public's fault that society is more progressive.
00:23:28.940 It is a very specific class of people who have decided to do this and to push this for the purpose of expanding the power of the government and the ability of the managerial elite to forward their agenda and the progressives that have grafted themselves onto it.
00:23:48.320 In fact, that should be the goal of democracy.
00:23:52.480 So, again, the goal of democracy is to make society more progressive, which, again, doesn't make a lot of sense, right?
00:23:59.300 If you have if it's the general public's will is what's supposed to make things more progressive or if it's the general public's will that's supposed to determine democracy, but also the general public didn't make society more progressive.
00:24:11.400 What does that mean? If the general public is supposed to work through democracy to exercise its will and they don't want wokeness, they don't want cancel culture and yet society keeps getting more progressive and cancel culture becomes more invasive.
00:24:26.560 Then what do we have? Because then it isn't a democracy or or, you know, you guys know I'm a huge fan of democracy, so there'll be plenty of there'll be plenty of critique there as well.
00:24:38.660 But if we're going with what is supposed to be the theoretical basis of democracy, popular sovereignty, then obviously the voice of the people pushing against something that's unpopular should have the impact.
00:24:49.160 But in fact, we see exactly the opposite. And now we see that his definition of democracy is that which makes society more progressive, perhaps the consequence of more democratic or progressive society.
00:25:02.100 Again, we just immediately conflate those terms. Right. Which is why when they say democracy, they mean our democracy.
00:25:08.080 When they use the word democracy, what they really mean is the advancement of our agenda. Democracy is progressivism. Progressivism is democracy.
00:25:16.500 And there is actually some truth to that. For those who want to understand that better, I do have a video on why Cthulhu always swims left, why institutions don't remain neutral, why a democratic process always brings about a leftward movement.
00:25:35.860 And so if you want to check that out, I don't want to rehash that whole video here in the stream, but if you want to check that out, you can and to get more information on why this part is true, even if not in the way that they think it is.
00:25:49.080 More democratic or progressive society is for the most powerful to recognize the limits and control they once had.
00:25:57.440 It's a direct call to get better or do better and to be better for communities that are often marginalized, says activist Preston Mitchum.
00:26:07.880 Okay, so here's the thing.
00:26:10.940 Again, if you believe in democracy, if you believe in popular sovereignty, if you believe that the people are in charge and they should be determining these things, and those people are marginalizing a community.
00:26:24.600 Again, I'm not agreeing with this language, but let's just go, let's just take their own premise, their own frame for a second.
00:26:30.900 Then doesn't that mean that the will of the people has decided that that community is to be marginalized and unheard?
00:26:37.620 If you don't think that's true, then you're against democracy, right?
00:26:42.600 You're against the will of the people.
00:26:43.940 And this is the thing about democracy.
00:26:45.260 It's always a Schrodinger's democracy, right? 0.95
00:26:48.200 It's good when we're looking at it or it's bad when we're not.
00:26:52.500 Democracy is good when it does the things we want it to do.
00:26:55.240 It's bad when it's not.
00:26:56.800 And it doesn't really matter what the people want, as long as if the people are doing what we want, then go, you know, go democracy.
00:27:04.080 If not, then we need more of the voices of the unheard in the democracy to somehow shift the thing, even though we're specifically saying these are communities that are marginalized.
00:27:12.180 They didn't have the influence.
00:27:13.640 They're not the majority.
00:27:14.780 I thought the whole point of the democracy was to have the people's voices heard, the majority opinion be the one that leads the discussion.
00:27:22.300 But obviously, that's not the case.
00:27:23.600 Unfortunately, sometimes this must be done publicly to gain outgoing support and get the point across that what happened was unacceptable and for accountability to be achieved.
00:27:35.480 So, again, the purpose is public whippings.
00:27:38.280 That's the thing.
00:27:39.160 We will beat you in public until everyone knows better than to disagree with us.
00:27:45.500 That's the purpose. 0.91
00:27:46.500 That's what it's for.
00:27:48.080 There's our author, Ernest Owens, there, I guess.
00:27:50.100 All right, before we are calling it cancel culture, society got caught up in the term political correctness.
00:27:59.280 And this is true, right?
00:28:00.940 This is nothing new.
00:28:02.720 Again, it's weird that you have kind of the center left folks, the IDW folks, the radical centrists are always pretending that this just started.
00:28:12.380 This is a recent thing.
00:28:13.560 But, of course, it's not, right?
00:28:15.020 This has been going on for a very long time.
00:28:17.860 This is central to the American experience for the last, you know, how many decades? 0.99
00:28:23.400 So, pretending like it just started when your buddy got thrown out of, you know, his professorship at Yale or you lost your position at some Fortune 500 company is really dumb.
00:28:34.400 But they do this all the time and they pretend because they like the vast majority of political correctness. 0.90
00:28:39.180 The vast majority of these people are fine with political correctness.
00:28:42.340 They were fine with people getting their lives destroyed for the last iteration of the speech codes.
00:28:47.820 It's just the current ones they don't write, don't like.
00:28:50.300 The current ones transgressed on something that they care about.
00:28:54.520 And so that's the reason that all of a sudden they're on the outs.
00:28:57.840 What started as an inside joke of a phrase in the late 1980s became all the rage within the media in the 1990s as political pundits and public figures began to bash the term in pop culture.
00:29:07.760 Again, not so much bash as completely in force, right?
00:29:11.860 Once again, we're seeing this treated as some kind of outside movement.
00:29:16.820 But, of course, it wasn't.
00:29:18.260 The reason that political correctness had power in the first place is it was supported by the powerful.
00:29:23.440 The powerful had the power to cancel.
00:29:25.800 Political correctness was being enforced because the powerful were the ones who were meeting out the consequences.
00:29:31.280 This is not a tool of oppressed people.
00:29:33.180 This is not a tool of those out of power is a tool of the powerful, but we're flipping the narrative to make it seem like, you know, all the powerful people just pick this up as some kind of joke.
00:29:43.860 No, all the people who were being attacked by it picked it up as a joke. 0.87
00:29:46.820 And that was their stupid decision because now it rules them in the same way that so many on the right or, you know, discount this stuff today. 1.00
00:29:54.380 Oh, these people are crazy. 1.00
00:29:55.400 No, these people aren't crazy. 0.98
00:29:56.360 These people own you.
00:29:58.100 Okay.
00:29:58.740 And if they own you, you should probably think about why. 0.92
00:30:02.020 Crazy people don't rule you like this. 0.82
00:30:04.180 Like, their ends might be crazy. 0.98
00:30:05.540 We might look at their value system and say, that's insane.
00:30:08.580 Right?
00:30:09.840 But at the end of the day, these people are the ones in power.
00:30:13.940 They own the institutions.
00:30:15.100 They meet out the punishments that you are now abiding by.
00:30:18.180 So they did something right.
00:30:19.640 Probably best not to laugh at that.
00:30:21.220 Probably best to pay attention.
00:30:24.300 Same thing is happening now.
00:30:25.860 Powerful people are trying to suggest that they're being suppressed by the new ways that everyday people are reacting to their behavior.
00:30:32.880 No.
00:30:33.440 Like, average people who have okay jobs are getting destroyed.
00:30:38.500 Okay.
00:30:39.020 Yeah, sure.
00:30:39.580 Like, the Papa John's guy gets hit.
00:30:41.700 Right?
00:30:41.880 And, you know, this is why I'm always really hesitant.
00:30:46.400 I don't like it when all of the conservatives rush to, you know, like, cartwheel in front of Bill Maher every time he says something quasi-reasonable.
00:30:54.300 Because Bill Maher's never getting canceled.
00:30:56.480 I mean, look at this guy, right?
00:30:57.780 He's still got this show on HBO forever.
00:31:00.540 Like, he's going to be fine.
00:31:02.880 It's the guy.
00:31:03.740 It's the average person who's getting destroyed by this stuff.
00:31:07.020 They're the ones losing jobs and not able to feed their kids.
00:31:10.380 But those aren't the people that we're rushing to protect.
00:31:12.820 It's these people who are already powerful.
00:31:14.780 Again, this is inter-elite competition for the most part for a lot of these people who aren't actually getting hurt by it.
00:31:20.980 The only place where this is relevant is when it's powerful people, powerful liberals attacking other slightly less liberal people.
00:31:29.860 It has nothing to do with, you know, the powerful complaining about them being held accountable in general.
00:31:38.520 Just like how political correctness was initially an inside joke that ran rampant, so cancel culture taken off as a phrase. 0.52
00:31:48.140 Once those in power had a hand on the term cancel culture, they attempted to redefine it as a pejorative phrase.
00:31:54.320 It is a pejorative phrase.
00:31:56.660 It's literally about canceling people.
00:31:59.200 Stripping away its craftiness and mischaracterizing its intentions.
00:32:03.000 No, its intentions are very clear.
00:32:04.740 To cancel people.
00:32:06.540 It's not a super complicated mechanism, right?
00:32:09.880 You want to destroy people who disagree with you.
00:32:12.760 It's not particularly clever or witty or, you know, has some kind of other hidden intention.
00:32:19.860 It's like any cool phrase that gets taken too seriously and blown out of proportion by a cranky uptight parent who isn't hip to modernity.
00:32:28.780 Yeah, I can always tell people are hip because they use the phrase hip to modernity.
00:32:33.900 I might use the phrase modernity, but I know I'm not hip.
00:32:37.060 So it's kind of hilarious to have someone trying to pretend like this is just old people out of touch with what the cool kids are doing.
00:32:47.440 Cancel culture.
00:32:48.420 Oh, also for a moment.
00:32:49.600 Let's stop there for just a second.
00:32:51.020 Anyway, also for a moment, if the cool kids are doing it, it's because the powerful want them to, by the way.
00:32:58.800 The cool kids do what's powerful.
00:33:01.680 This is, again, like one of those very, one of those, a lot of confusion that people don't understand because they look at teenage rebellion or what cool kids are doing.
00:33:12.340 And they say, oh, they're fighting against the system.
00:33:15.620 I mean, I don't think a lot of people say it anymore, hopefully.
00:33:17.800 But, but this is, this is always the perception that was pushed, right?
00:33:21.160 That, that people that, you know, like this are pushing against the system.
00:33:25.140 No, they're not.
00:33:26.040 No, they're not.
00:33:26.560 These people are aligning themselves with power.
00:33:28.900 They're, they're abandoning.
00:33:30.480 There's a cultural revolution underway and they're abandoning the hierarchy of their parents who are losing cultural power.
00:33:36.140 To absorb the culture power of people who are rising in prominence.
00:33:42.180 So, actually, this is just people following power.
00:33:45.320 It's not people fighting against it.
00:33:49.160 Some suggest a rebranding.
00:33:51.020 In terms of cancel culture, I think it's misnamed, said famed host and actor LeVar Burton.
00:33:56.400 Jordi LaForge, why did you do this to me, man?
00:33:59.140 Why, why have you done this?
00:34:00.260 During an April 2021 interview, six on the view, there's a misnomer.
00:34:08.420 There's a, that's a misnomer.
00:34:10.300 I think we have a consequence culture and that consequences are finally encompassing everybody in society.
00:34:16.100 Whereas they haven't been ever in, whereas they haven't been ever in this country.
00:34:22.840 See, reading Rainbow, I should have paid a little more attention there.
00:34:26.060 But yeah, no, again, this idea that this is a tool of the powerless.
00:34:29.480 No, it's not.
00:34:30.500 You don't have the tool, you don't have the power to cancel people if you are powerless.
00:34:35.320 If you are wielding popular opinion, if you are wielding the law, if you are wielding media,
00:34:42.560 if you are generating headlines and creating outrage through the media apparatus, you are not powerless.
00:34:49.640 This is not a voice of the powerless.
00:34:51.360 It is the voice of preferred classes to cancel people who are not preferred by those in power.
00:34:57.620 That's what it is.
00:34:59.480 He further argued, I think it was, I think it has everything to do with a new awareness on people who were simply unaware of the real nature of life in this country for people who have been other, othered since this nation began. 0.99
00:35:14.040 I believe in reframing cancel culture as consequence culture is the right answer. 0.78
00:35:21.160 Rather than run away from the term cancel culture, we should embrace it. 0.61
00:35:26.140 Again, this is, remember, the audience of this is the choir, right?
00:35:32.840 This article doesn't exist to convince you or me or anyone in the middle, even those on the moderate left.
00:35:43.860 It's rolling stone.
00:35:45.580 It's here to justify what radicals want to do anyway.
00:35:50.040 So you have a dialectic.
00:35:52.220 Is it too far?
00:35:53.640 Is it too much?
00:35:54.880 The answer is already chosen.
00:35:56.640 The answer is no.
00:35:57.380 And we should stay with this and we should embrace this and we are justified and righteous in our cause.
00:36:02.620 That's the audience this is for.
00:36:04.820 This is to tell the choir, you're doing a good job.
00:36:07.860 Keep it up.
00:36:08.780 Stay strong, right?
00:36:10.560 Rather than run away from the term cancel culture, we should embrace it. 0.61
00:36:14.480 Instead of changing the name of cancel culture, we should set the record straight about what it really is.
00:36:19.160 And this is another thing that the left does really well.
00:36:22.660 You got to give them credit for this, okay?
00:36:26.300 What the left does all the time is it takes a definition.
00:36:29.780 It freezes it and forces it into public consciousness.
00:36:32.540 And then the minute people attack it, the minute people go about trying to dismantle it or bring some kind of rationale against it,
00:36:41.220 they immediately say, oh, no, no, no, no. 1.00
00:36:42.580 You're just too stupid. 1.00
00:36:43.500 You don't understand. 1.00
00:36:44.520 You don't understand what the term means, right?
00:36:47.840 And so we do a lot of code switching.
00:36:49.380 We switch the terms constantly or we redefine them or we parse them just infinitely until there's nothing left because they own the original term, right?
00:36:59.320 And that's something you have to be very careful about when you get in the battle of the left.
00:37:03.140 You need to understand the power of public definitions, okay?
00:37:06.480 If a word has a public definition that is completely under the control of your enemy, you shouldn't use it, right? 0.97
00:37:13.680 This is why, like, the, you know, the Dems are the real racist is always a stupid argument from the right because everyone knows that the left controls the power of the word racism. 0.92
00:37:25.580 Now, that may be true technically that the Democratic Party or people on the left, progressives, have racial hatred. 0.99
00:37:33.400 They most certainly do, right?
00:37:35.540 But the people who own the mechanism for punishment of racial hatred or even the accusation, even if racial hatred doesn't exist, the people who can still punish you even if you don't actually have any real racial hatred are the left.
00:37:49.080 They control all the mechanisms that actually meet out consequences for that term.
00:37:55.740 So when the right tries to use it, it has no power because the right doesn't have a way to cancel anyone for racism unless it's their own guys, right?
00:38:05.220 Unless they're canceling people on their own side for alleged racism against protected classes of the left, right?
00:38:12.780 But there's no mechanism for the right to punish you for being racist.
00:38:19.240 They don't have it. 1.00
00:38:20.500 And so the only thing that they can do when they say the Dems are the real racist is just go, oh, these people are hypocrites. 0.97
00:38:26.980 And then the left is like, yeah, but actually race is like power plus privilege or whatever, you know, within the formula they redefine it to. 0.98
00:38:36.000 And then prejudice plus privilege or whatever.
00:38:39.220 And then they're just out of it, right?
00:38:41.920 They've just escaped.
00:38:42.740 They redefine the word and it doesn't mean anything anymore.
00:38:45.100 You can't hold them to it.
00:38:48.220 Let's see, where were we?
00:38:49.760 Holding the most powerful people accountable is never going to be a desirable or appealing thing to them.
00:38:56.680 Sure.
00:38:58.080 It's like paying taxes.
00:39:00.240 Whether you call it an annual payment or a compulsory financial charge, it's still a sum of money being pulled out of your account, the IRS.
00:39:08.060 All right.
00:39:08.980 So we're going to equate cancel culture with the IRS.
00:39:13.380 I'm comfortable with this.
00:39:16.100 I'm actually pretty comfortable with that connection.
00:39:21.420 Semantics often breed sensitivity.
00:39:24.040 And when we consider who's the most alarmed by the language surrounding cancel culture, it's always those who are experiencing the brunt of it.
00:39:31.240 To hell with their feelings.
00:39:32.340 Cancel culture is here to stay. 1.00
00:39:33.560 This is a really fascinating piece of logic, okay?
00:39:38.300 So semantics often breed sensitivity when we consider who's the most alarmed by the language surrounding cancel culture.
00:39:45.680 Okay.
00:39:45.880 So if you're the target, you'll be most alarmed.
00:39:52.560 If you're the one, here, let's break it.
00:39:55.380 It's always those who are experiencing the brunt of it.
00:39:57.980 So it doesn't matter what your feelings are at the end of the day.
00:40:02.420 It doesn't matter how this actually makes you feel because just because you're the target of it, you're the one who's going to get sensitive about it.
00:40:09.460 Of course, you can't apply this to anything on the left, right?
00:40:11.860 They get sensitive about every piece of language.
00:40:15.180 And that's always their only justification for why you should stop using it, why you should be punished for using it.
00:40:22.040 Did you use language that offended me?
00:40:23.520 Did you use language that made me think for a moment that I might be denigrated?
00:40:28.600 Did you use language that's actually perfectly innocuous but I can in some way construe as offensive?
00:40:33.600 Then you must stop.
00:40:36.000 But of course, actually, that's not the case at all.
00:40:39.420 The left understands that you should not care at all what your opponent thinks about your language.
00:40:44.400 And that you should just slam people in the face with your terminology whenever and however you would like.
00:40:50.120 They don't care about the feelings at all.
00:40:52.180 They only care about the victory involved in using the phrase.
00:40:55.420 History has shown us that there's never going to be a proper way to demand change from those who are invested in dictating our lives.
00:41:04.260 Funny, I would say the same thing about the left.
00:41:07.280 There's never going to be a proper way to tell the left to stop destroying the lives of children.
00:41:13.140 There's never going to be a proper way to tell the left to stop letting hundreds of thousands or millions of illegal migrants pour into your borders to depress the wages of people in the United States, making it possible for them to get homes or jobs, increase criminality. 0.94
00:41:30.020 There's never going to be a proper way to tell the left to stop sending all of our money overseas to fight proxy wars so they can line the pockets of defense contractors and their other friends while letting people in middle America just suffer in the middle of an ecological disaster.
00:41:50.920 There's never going to be an easy way to demand it.
00:41:52.580 And there's never going to be a proper way to demand that.
00:41:54.920 So interesting that you might put it that way.
00:41:56.880 Respectability politics will always make society, especially marginalized people, believe that they could be spared from harm if they only appeal to the oppressors in a particular way.
00:42:07.060 Again, it's amazing how much of this rhetoric you can just turn around if you understand the actual power dynamic, right?
00:42:15.100 The only reason he's using this rhetoric is he thinks that the right is in power or conservatives are in power.
00:42:22.460 But actually, all of this rhetoric could be directly applied to the left, because if you sit around waiting for them to be impressed by your arguments, if you sit around waiting for them to respect you, to respect your needs, it's never going to happen.
00:42:39.280 So fair enough.
00:42:40.460 This is a good lesson on power.
00:42:41.980 It's just he doesn't understand the way power is actually arrayed.
00:42:45.700 Or maybe he does, and he still just needs to lie to his audience about it.
00:42:50.660 Interesting thing.
00:42:51.760 A lot of people, again, remember that your opponents are not completely cynical.
00:42:57.980 They believe this stuff because they need to.
00:43:01.800 Okay?
00:43:02.200 So he probably does believe that the left represents marginalized communities.
00:43:06.900 He probably does believe that the left is the one out of power, and it's the right wielding all the power.
00:43:10.740 Maybe not.
00:43:11.280 Now, you might say some of these people truly are just completely Machiavellian, craven political actors.
00:43:18.060 But really, a lot of them, they just believe in this stuff.
00:43:20.660 They believe the political formula they're spewing.
00:43:22.560 They really do.
00:43:23.260 As insane as it is, as obvious as it would be to any of us who's in charge and who has power in this scenario, they really believe it.
00:43:30.120 They believe every word, a lot of them.
00:43:32.260 It's simply not true.
00:43:33.280 Whether one described same-sex marriage as marriage equality or love is love, bigots will be mad.
00:43:40.040 Love is love.
00:43:40.660 That's gone in an interesting direction here from the left.
00:43:43.400 Hard to predict, I guess.
00:43:45.660 The current conversation on how to rename or reframe cancel culture is a distraction from its very intention.
00:43:52.480 The fact that people, both powerful and less so, have been put on notice, notice that whatever move they make can now be checked,
00:44:00.240 not only by the courts, law enforcement, or government, but by the people, means cancel culture has essentially won the culture war.
00:44:06.340 Again, fascinating insight there.
00:44:09.300 Cancel culture has already won the culture war.
00:44:12.760 So we're already in power.
00:44:15.260 It's in a mission right here.
00:44:17.600 We already won.
00:44:18.800 We already own you.
00:44:20.120 We already wield the tools.
00:44:21.600 We already have the power.
00:44:23.160 We're the ones in charge.
00:44:25.240 And yet, let's talk about marginalized communities the whole time.
00:44:29.300 Talking about the powerless versus the powerful.
00:44:31.980 Again, the only example he really gave this whole time.
00:44:35.720 I had forgot.
00:44:37.480 I thought he gave another example in this article, but it looks like he doesn't.
00:44:40.520 The only real example he gives is a super rich woman who married a prince versus another super rich TV celebrity.
00:44:50.040 That's the only real example he gave.
00:44:53.500 And that's supposed to be the example of the powerless versus the powerful.
00:44:58.060 But we see, actually, no, culture war is already won.
00:45:02.780 Cancel culture is already victorious. 0.96
00:45:04.460 We already own the mechanisms of power.
00:45:06.760 So he's admitting it right here.
00:45:09.380 So maybe he does already know that he's in power.
00:45:11.620 But he's still just going to use the framing of powerlessness anyway.
00:45:16.700 Although still rich and influential, the most powerful people have been humbled by the digital accessibility of everyday people whom they once could simply dismiss or silence.
00:45:26.960 And again, you can tell that these people are never under any real threat because they remain rich and powerful.
00:45:34.360 Oh, Piers Morgan is canceled.
00:45:35.720 What does that mean?
00:45:37.400 It means he's got another job in two months making more money, right?
00:45:40.660 He's never get canceled any more than Bill Maher is going to get canceled.
00:45:43.460 This isn't real cancel culture.
00:45:45.260 That's why you don't see this guy picking out examples of some average guy losing his job and his wife divorcing him and taking the kids because he can't pay the bills, right?
00:45:57.140 That's not the example he's using because he knows what that looks like.
00:46:01.180 The only example he's going to give is these two people battling out in the court of public opinion over something that doesn't matter to rich people who have nothing to really lose in this scenario.
00:46:13.360 He's never going to show any other sides of canceled culture.
00:46:16.380 For a society and democracy to evolve, we've needed new ways to further free speech, civic participation, and collective action.
00:46:26.200 Again, interesting that democracy is going to evolve by punishing speech.
00:46:29.900 I mean, I think that is actually a function of democracy.
00:46:34.080 But if you're a fan of democracy, then that's probably not the way you want to explain the evolution of democracy.
00:46:41.360 Cancel culture has given a voice to the voiceless at a time when other aspects of our democracy have been threatened.
00:46:48.220 Today, the voting rights we once thought were protected are under attack.
00:46:52.180 So, yeah, again, of course, rights are under attack.
00:46:55.680 We're losing power.
00:46:56.820 Why?
00:46:57.180 Because you might have to show an ID to vote.
00:46:59.640 Because you might actually have to show up to the polling place to vote.
00:47:03.600 Had Curtis Yarvin on yesterday.
00:47:05.380 And he had a lot of things to say about Ron DeSantis, things that he didn't like.
00:47:09.940 But he said the one thing that Ron DeSantis did correct, the thing that he praised him for that no one else did, was he fixed the voting system in Florida.
00:47:18.860 And surprise, surprise, Ron DeSantis won by a landslide in Florida.
00:47:22.180 Now, Ron DeSantis is a pretty popular governor.
00:47:24.600 And I think he did have a lot of personal popularity in Florida.
00:47:27.980 But I think he's absolutely right to point out that fixing the voting system was the most important thing DeSantis did to ensure that he retained power.
00:47:36.060 Because it meant the left couldn't rig these elections the same way.
00:47:39.860 And same thing here.
00:47:41.740 You know, we're going to complain about Republican leaders bitter over the presidential cancellation of Donald Trump.
00:47:46.800 That's an election?
00:47:47.760 Okay.
00:47:48.460 Now want to make it harder for marginalized communities to vote.
00:47:51.700 No, they just actually want you to have to vote legitimately.
00:47:55.040 But whatever.
00:47:55.980 That's not the point.
00:47:57.340 They know what they have.
00:47:58.600 They know the machine they've built.
00:47:59.720 They know the advantage that they've gained through this.
00:48:02.400 And they're certainly not going to give it up without a fight.
00:48:05.160 But it's a fight that the Republicans should be engaging in.
00:48:09.440 Rather than focusing on how many billions of dollars we can ship over to Ukraine, maybe we should fix our electoral system so we can have legitimate elections in our theoretical democracy.
00:48:19.780 Such bold acts of intimidation harken back to Jim Crow.
00:48:23.380 Of course they do.
00:48:24.420 Everything does.
00:48:25.240 Everything's Jim Crow. 0.98
00:48:26.460 When powerful white men threaten the freedoms of black people. 0.98
00:48:29.380 That's it. 0.82
00:48:30.240 That's the entire narrative at the end of the day.
00:48:33.040 It's the whole thing.
00:48:33.960 It's all they've got.
00:48:34.960 Again, even though the only example we had was one rich black actress canceling one rich British guy. 0.94
00:48:44.460 That's all they've got.
00:48:45.880 Now, these acts are called out more publicly on social media, influencing everyday people to call on companies and other leaders to take a stand more boldly.
00:48:56.500 This is also great.
00:48:57.460 Okay, imagine this level of delusion.
00:48:59.760 In April 2021, hundreds of Fortune 500 companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook signed a statement opposing any discriminatory legislation that would negatively impact people's ability to vote.
00:49:12.720 So, you think you're the downtrodden.
00:49:17.640 You think you're the exploited minority.
00:49:21.680 You think that you're the marginalized voice.
00:49:24.100 Which is why hundreds of Fortune 500 companies like Apple, Amazon, and Facebook sign a pledge to be on your side.
00:49:32.220 Right?
00:49:33.000 You're the minority.
00:49:34.780 You're the downtrodden.
00:49:36.200 You're the ones out of power speaking truth to power.
00:49:40.040 But every company just happens to be on your side.
00:49:43.420 All of these evil global capitalist corporations that you spent, you know, decades and decades to crank just happen to line up on your side.
00:49:51.620 What a coincidence.
00:49:52.980 And all of a sudden, you're not so interested in shutting them down.
00:49:56.080 Huh.
00:49:56.840 Weird.
00:49:57.780 Wonder how that happened.
00:50:00.240 Regardless of our...
00:50:01.460 Sorry.
00:50:01.880 Where's the...
00:50:02.380 He starts the...
00:50:04.040 Regardless of our political affiliation, reads the statement, which ran as a two-page ad in the New York Times and Washington Post, we believe that the very foundation of our electoral process rests upon the ability of each of us to cast our ballot for a candidate of choice.
00:50:17.820 Such a surprisingly bold move from powerful companies would have never happened if it had not been for the collective accountability of many of their customers.
00:50:27.040 Or the fact that you're actually the ones in power.
00:50:29.460 Actually, you're the ones who own the HR departments.
00:50:32.360 You're the one that own all of the college professorships.
00:50:35.760 You're the ones that own the media.
00:50:37.720 You're the ones that drive the narrative.
00:50:40.140 And actually, that's why these corporations dance to your tune.
00:50:43.220 Because you run the cathedral.
00:50:44.640 You've got the sense-making apparatus.
00:50:47.500 You're the ones that distribute the ideas to the people below.
00:50:50.800 It's progressivism that dominates.
00:50:53.220 You're not fighting against power.
00:50:54.540 You are the power.
00:50:55.960 You have cancel culture power because you're the ones who have control of everything that would wield it.
00:51:02.640 Everyday citizens who signed digital petitions protesting outside...
00:51:06.160 Protested outside of state buildings and used their social media platforms to shame a lack of response from those they held in high regard.
00:51:13.940 There's a little bit left, but it's not particularly interesting.
00:51:17.500 So I'll go ahead and wrap that up here.
00:51:20.960 But just to say, guys, look, again, these people know what they're doing.
00:51:26.540 They understand...
00:51:27.840 Let me bring that up just so we can get the reference in case people have questions.
00:51:31.760 These people know what they're doing.
00:51:33.200 They understand that they are the one...
00:51:37.340 Even if they have this story about how they're protecting the oppressed, at the end of the day, they're the ones wielding power.
00:51:43.620 They're the ones that have control.
00:51:45.340 They want to use this mechanism.
00:51:46.900 And this whole thing about cancel culture is good for democracy.
00:51:52.400 Its whole purpose is just to preach to the choir.
00:51:54.500 It's to tell radical progressive activists who already are on board with destruction of their enemies that you're actually the good guys.
00:52:01.660 You're the ones who are doing the good job.
00:52:03.480 Keep it up.
00:52:03.920 All right.
00:52:05.460 So I think we had a few super chats here.
00:52:08.460 Let me grab them real quick.
00:52:13.180 Formusul, I hope that's the right...
00:52:15.020 Or Formusus2, maybe.
00:52:17.400 Sorry if I'm not pronouncing that correctly.
00:52:18.960 For $5.
00:52:19.640 Thank you very much.
00:52:20.820 Legacy publications like Rolling Stone have very few readers.
00:52:25.280 I've heard from conservatives that they'll die for over 20 years.
00:52:28.660 How do they keep the lights on?
00:52:29.720 Okay.
00:52:30.120 Excellent question.
00:52:30.940 This is actually a really good question.
00:52:32.500 You're right for so many decades, right?
00:52:34.940 We've heard and you still hear this.
00:52:36.640 You still hear people say this.
00:52:38.000 Go woke, go broke, right?
00:52:39.660 Go woke, broke, go broke.
00:52:41.760 But of course, that's not what happens at all, right?
00:52:46.160 These publications that legitimately do have very few readers.
00:52:50.620 No one's reading Rolling Stone, right?
00:52:52.400 But the few people who do read Rolling Stone are very powerful.
00:52:56.320 And that's the key, right?
00:52:57.620 Yeah, sure.
00:52:58.160 You're seeing these publications lose overall market share.
00:53:01.880 And that's a good thing in general.
00:53:03.420 Don't get me wrong.
00:53:04.380 But the reason they still exist is from, in many ways, they're often just propped up by
00:53:10.100 investors who own them as like trophies, right?
00:53:14.040 Something that the left does, that the right does not do and never does, is that the left
00:53:19.060 will sponsor people.
00:53:21.080 The left will sponsor, you know, they will fund someone just to keep them around.
00:53:28.720 They do this all the time, right?
00:53:30.220 That's like the entire college system at this point.
00:53:32.540 It's just one giant jobs program for leftists that otherwise would be entirely useless.
00:53:37.780 The left is willing to be patron, you know, to these people.
00:53:41.800 They believe in patronage.
00:53:43.340 We will create a class of artists and activists.
00:53:47.180 We will spend our money and we will get nothing in return at the moment to eventually wield
00:53:52.800 incredible power.
00:53:53.980 And that's something the right just doesn't understand.
00:53:55.900 You cannot believe how difficult it is to get people who are theoretically right wing,
00:54:00.140 who have millions or billions of dollars to invest in really simple stuff to like further
00:54:06.200 their cause.
00:54:06.980 They just won't do it.
00:54:07.620 They can only see elections and that's why like one problem with the obsession with democracy
00:54:14.200 on the right, all they can see is the election.
00:54:16.680 All they can see is getting the next guy into office and then nothing happens.
00:54:19.700 They don't understand why.
00:54:21.200 They understand that the left has an entire network of people who are constantly being
00:54:24.980 paid to fight you at every moment, to gum up every institution, to dominate you in every
00:54:29.800 single way.
00:54:30.580 And this is all they do.
00:54:31.760 They don't have other jobs, right?
00:54:33.280 Like this is their job.
00:54:34.520 They're not doing this in their free time.
00:54:36.280 This is what they get paid to do.
00:54:38.640 They have a legion of these people that they can unleash on people at any moment.
00:54:41.880 That's why cancel culture works because there's a swarm that can be sent to destroy any person
00:54:47.000 who disagrees with the left.
00:54:49.000 But the right doesn't get this.
00:54:50.300 The right doesn't understand the value of this.
00:54:51.920 If it doesn't turn a profit, if it doesn't immediately yield something you can take back
00:54:57.660 and say, oh yeah, I got this guy in office and he lowered my taxes, then it just didn't
00:55:03.280 matter, right?
00:55:04.120 And this is something the left understands all too well.
00:55:07.400 They understand the power of patronage, the power of paying people just to be on your
00:55:12.760 side, just to say the things that you want them to say.
00:55:15.960 And they do it and it works.
00:55:17.480 And that's why these things are around.
00:55:18.700 Prog Skeptic for 499.
00:55:24.120 Thank you very much, sir.
00:55:25.780 For progressives, the three forms of government are democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy.
00:55:30.660 They're populism, Hitler, democracy, and Hitler, respectively. 0.68
00:55:35.680 Yeah.
00:55:35.920 So that's very true.
00:55:38.340 There's, you know, you either have democracy or you have populism.
00:55:42.540 And what's the difference between populism and democracy?
00:55:45.000 Democracy is popular sovereignty we like, and populism is popular sovereignty that we don't
00:55:52.120 like.
00:55:52.480 And if you have popular sovereignty that you don't like, of course, you will get a mid-century
00:55:57.700 German painter every time, right?
00:55:59.700 That's their contention for sure.
00:56:02.540 And so these people are constantly railing against popular sovereignty, as long as it's
00:56:08.520 kind of the one that they don't want.
00:56:10.540 There's, of course, no standard.
00:56:13.280 There's no quality, nor will there ever be.
00:56:15.080 And you shouldn't expect it because they know, again, exactly what they're doing.
00:56:19.860 All right.
00:56:20.120 I think we've got everything there.
00:56:23.540 All right, guys.
00:56:24.500 Well, that's the Rolling Stone article.
00:56:26.220 Like I said, it is insane, but it does have some important points I wanted to break down
00:56:31.560 for you.
00:56:32.460 It does look like parody to us, but you have to understand what these people are justifying
00:56:36.720 to themselves.
00:56:37.460 And you need to understand their delusions about power, right?
00:56:39.980 They really do think that you're the ones in power.
00:56:43.240 They really do think that conservatives are the right or whatever in control.
00:56:47.580 They really do have this delusion that they are fighting against power for, you know, marginalized
00:56:54.980 communities or whatever, even if it means wielding a massive cancellation apparatus that can
00:56:59.800 destroy anyone.
00:57:00.400 Even if it means all the corporations are on their side, that doesn't occur to them that
00:57:05.280 that means that maybe they aren't the little guy anymore.
00:57:08.640 I mean, there are some people that do, but there are those completely cynical actors.
00:57:12.960 But again, for most people, they really do believe this stuff.
00:57:16.800 All right, guys.
00:57:17.140 Well, thank you so much for coming by.
00:57:19.020 I really appreciate your questions and you hanging out.
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00:57:50.780 That really helps out.
00:57:52.100 So thanks for coming by, guys.
00:57:54.320 And as always, I'll talk to you next time.