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.
00:02:04.380But 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.
00:02:16.820Now, Rolling Stone, of course, is a very ridiculous publication.
00:02:19.940It's been insane even since I was young.
00:02:23.620It hasn't been about music for a very long time.
00:02:29.200It's there for the few people who still fondly associate it with some kind of discovering the Beatles or the Doors or something.
00:02:41.800It's all about radical politics at this point.
00:02:44.320And so having an article about this in there is not surprising at all.
00:02:50.660But Ernest Jones here has a piece about why cancel culture is good for democracy.
00:02:58.140So let's just go ahead and dive in and we'll stop and talk about what he's doing here in just a minute.
00:03:04.660So for many years, cancel culture has been despised or misconstrued as a new phenomenon that's caused havoc on free expression and speech.
00:03:13.500We'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.
00:03:25.040In fact, we are the people who make up the so-called mob and we have control of our own actions.
00:03:31.520So the first thing you want to notice is the fact that of who this is being written for right now.
00:03:47.060This is preaching directly to the choir.
00:03:49.000And you can tell throughout this that he's not going to be making any appeals for persuasion.
00:03:54.360This whole piece is here to kind of justify the actions that the left already want to take.
00:04:00.800The left never cared about free speech.
00:04:02.840No matter what people tell you, no matter what even some of the refugees from the left bought into.
00:04:08.260The truth is that the left was never interested in free speech.
00:04:11.560But what they were interested in was power.
00:04:13.180They 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.
00:04:23.860Now that the left is in power, they're more than fine with slamming the door behind them.
00:04:29.180They're not going to hold to some principle of free speech that they never cared about in the first place.
00:04:34.160So what you see here is he makes the assertion that, oh, well, we're supposed to be worried about angry mobs.
00:04:38.740They'll instantly judge us and, you know, get rid of our jobs and everything.
00:04:46.120The 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.
00:04:55.600Those are the people who don't have to care about that.
00:04:57.340You notice that he says, we are the so-called mob.
00:05:35.520Under the First Amendment to fuel disgusting rhetoric without state-sanctioned consequences.
00:05:43.880So this is just a direct call for the state to completely shut down speech, right?
00:05:52.060Like, 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?
00:06:08.440So we're getting right into it here, right?
00:06:11.360We 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.
00:06:20.940The 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.
00:06:36.600So again, you're allowed to have opinions, right?
00:07:16.540And so they're more than fine with hate, of course.
00:07:19.200When 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?
00:07:29.720That's what they mean in that sentence.
00:07:32.120Cancel culture is the poison to those in power that have benefited from unchecked free speech.
00:07:38.660Again, another really interesting turn of phrase.
00:07:40.940So, 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.
00:07:50.820The speech of the powerful does not need the protection of the First Amendment or the benefit of free speech.
00:07:58.040If you have any understanding of the proper way that power works, you know that no speech that is popular needs this kind of protection.
00:08:09.880The powerful speech is always protected.
00:08:13.360So the idea that free speech or the First Amendment is there to protect the speech of the powerful is absolutely insane.
00:08:20.080Of course, it's there to do exactly the opposite.
00:08:22.540We 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.
00:08:29.480They 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.
00:08:41.640It's those that do not have power that would require this protection in the first place.
00:08:46.540But he can't admit that the left are the powerful.
00:08:50.260The 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.
00:09:02.520So instead, he inverts it saying free speech and the First Amendment are actually tools of the powerful, the ruling class.
00:09:10.060When 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.
00:09:19.060It allows for discourse to take place, but grants that all voices can be heard.
00:09:25.940In other words, straight white men, you know, I'm told that this is Marxism or that this is some kind of very complicated dialectic.
00:09:37.060I don't know. It seems pretty, it seems pretty clear to me.
00:09:41.080It seems pretty clear what the target is and who is to blame for the people who write these.
00:09:47.380They say it repeatedly. They don't stutter.
00:09:49.700They don't seem very confused about who they're trying to attack.
00:09:54.060And other people with power aren't used to getting pushback for the ways they conduct themselves.
00:09:59.300Yeah, certainly no straight white man in 2023 has ever heard any kind of pushback.
00:10:04.680That's certainly not happening in the public square constantly.
00:10:09.140And cancel culture has reset the way society can react.
00:10:13.000Yes, it's justified the complete destruction of people that you don't like in the public square.
00:10:18.720Those who fear cancel culture may claim they fear suppression of speech, but it's accountability they want to avoid.
00:10:25.840And of course, accountability will be the watchword we'll see here.
00:10:28.640When British media personality Pierce Morgan publicly attacked Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex.
00:10:36.100Okay, so let's enjoy this here for a moment.
00:10:39.280So we're talking about the ability of the powerful to control the powerless, right?
00:14:10.140I mean, I know the answer, but I would be interested in the author's response since he grouped them together.
00:14:17.820The civil rights advancement here is the ability to take lawsuits or other forms of punishment through what has become America's second constitution,
00:14:28.460the civil rights revolution, and apply it directly to the person through the mass public.
00:14:34.680You don't have to wait for the courts anymore.
00:14:36.400You don't have to wait for some kind of legal remedy.
00:14:39.040You don't have to wait for some kind of law or something being passed.
00:14:43.260Instead, you can use social media to directly mete out the punishment that your civil rights revolution is meant to level on your target.
00:14:55.440You can just aim the public and their disdain at someone rather than needing the legal system.
00:17:43.700And I think, unfortunately, a very honest way to express what most people mean by this,
00:17:50.160what most people who are using this want to use it for.
00:17:54.400Civil rights are not some kind of equal thing everybody has access to and everybody gets to use.
00:17:59.440It'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.
00:18:10.120And 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.
00:18:18.100Once 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.
00:18:27.480In 1997, what does that phrase even mean?
00:18:31.800Could consider canceling with less gatekeeping.
00:19:17.260We just had to hear about actually how this is about the consequences of speech and holding people accountable.
00:19:22.180When you're held accountable for your speech and your attempts to cancel people, that's persecution.
00:19:28.040But when I hold you accountable for your speech, now I'm righteous.
00:19:33.480Right now, this is just the power of the unheard.
00:19:35.480Again, it's just all friend and enemy at every point.
00:19:39.220In 1997, the Supreme Court acknowledged this major shift when it dealt with the first internet-related First Amendment case.
00:19:45.460The 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.
00:19:55.160Those who fear cancel culture may claim that they fear suppression of speech, but it's accountability that they try to avoid.
00:20:01.020Now, again, this is very interesting because this is something that the left hates.
00:20:05.840They hate that the internet lets us do this right now.
00:20:09.220They hate that the internet lets Joe Rogan or other people have powerful podcasts that challenge the mainstream.
00:20:16.840In fact, they explicitly say this on a regular basis.
00:20:20.680There's whole exposés coming out of major media organizations about disinformation, the dangers of mis- and disinformation.
00:20:29.880There'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.
00:20:44.920They're trying to generate metrics and trying to show scientifically, which is so adorable, about how all these things are full of misinformation.
00:20:55.100So they hate that the internet gives a democracy of speech, that it gives a place where people can have this discussion.
00:22:34.620It's not the fault of the general public.
00:22:36.620It'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.
00:22:59.640These things are pushed top down onto the population.
00:23:05.880And they are made prominent by media organizations, by the law, right?
00:23:11.280A lot of this stuff gets enshrined in the law.
00:23:12.980Joe 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.
00:23:23.740And so, yeah, it is true that it's not the general public's fault that society is more progressive.
00:23:28.940It 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.
00:23:48.320In fact, that should be the goal of democracy.
00:23:52.480So, again, the goal of democracy is to make society more progressive, which, again, doesn't make a lot of sense, right?
00:23:59.300If 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.
00:24:11.400What 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.
00:24:26.560Then 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.
00:24:38.660But 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.
00:24:49.160But 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.
00:25:02.100Again, we just immediately conflate those terms. Right. Which is why when they say democracy, they mean our democracy.
00:25:08.080When they use the word democracy, what they really mean is the advancement of our agenda. Democracy is progressivism. Progressivism is democracy.
00:25:16.500And 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.
00:25:35.860And 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.
00:25:49.080More democratic or progressive society is for the most powerful to recognize the limits and control they once had.
00:25:57.440It's a direct call to get better or do better and to be better for communities that are often marginalized, says activist Preston Mitchum.
00:26:10.940Again, 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.
00:26:24.600Again, 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.
00:26:30.900Then doesn't that mean that the will of the people has decided that that community is to be marginalized and unheard?
00:26:37.620If you don't think that's true, then you're against democracy, right?
00:26:42.600You're against the will of the people.
00:26:43.940And this is the thing about democracy.
00:26:45.260It's always a Schrodinger's democracy, right?
00:26:48.200It's good when we're looking at it or it's bad when we're not.
00:26:52.500Democracy is good when it does the things we want it to do.
00:26:56.800And 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.
00:27:04.080If 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.
00:27:14.780I 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.
00:27:23.600Unfortunately, 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.
00:27:35.480So, again, the purpose is public whippings.
00:28:02.720Again, 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.
00:28:15.020This has been going on for a very long time.
00:28:17.860This is central to the American experience for the last, you know, how many decades?
00:28:23.400So, 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.
00:28:34.400But they do this all the time and they pretend because they like the vast majority of political correctness.
00:28:39.180The vast majority of these people are fine with political correctness.
00:28:42.340They were fine with people getting their lives destroyed for the last iteration of the speech codes.
00:28:47.820It's just the current ones they don't write, don't like.
00:28:50.300The current ones transgressed on something that they care about.
00:28:54.520And so that's the reason that all of a sudden they're on the outs.
00:28:57.840What 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.
00:29:07.760Again, not so much bash as completely in force, right?
00:29:11.860Once again, we're seeing this treated as some kind of outside movement.
00:29:25.800Political correctness was being enforced because the powerful were the ones who were meeting out the consequences.
00:29:31.280This is not a tool of oppressed people.
00:29:33.180This 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.
00:29:43.860No, all the people who were being attacked by it picked it up as a joke.
00:29:46.820And 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.
00:30:41.880And, you know, this is why I'm always really hesitant.
00:30:46.400I 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.
00:30:54.300Because Bill Maher's never getting canceled.
00:33:01.680This 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.
00:33:12.340And they say, oh, they're fighting against the system.
00:33:15.620I mean, I don't think a lot of people say it anymore, hopefully.
00:33:17.800But, but this is, this is always the perception that was pushed, right?
00:33:21.160That, that people that, you know, like this are pushing against the system.
00:34:59.480He 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.
00:35:14.040I believe in reframing cancel culture as consequence culture is the right answer.
00:35:21.160Rather than run away from the term cancel culture, we should embrace it.
00:35:26.140Again, this is, remember, the audience of this is the choir, right?
00:35:32.840This article doesn't exist to convince you or me or anyone in the middle, even those on the moderate left.
00:36:49.380We 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?
00:36:59.320And that's something you have to be very careful about when you get in the battle of the left.
00:37:03.140You need to understand the power of public definitions, okay?
00:37:06.480If a word has a public definition that is completely under the control of your enemy, you shouldn't use it, right?
00:37:13.680This 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.
00:37:25.580Now, that may be true technically that the Democratic Party or people on the left, progressives, have racial hatred.
00:37:35.540But 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.
00:37:49.080They control all the mechanisms that actually meet out consequences for that term.
00:37:55.740So 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?
00:38:05.220Unless they're canceling people on their own side for alleged racism against protected classes of the left, right?
00:38:12.780But there's no mechanism for the right to punish you for being racist.
00:38:20.500And 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.
00:38:26.980And 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.
00:38:36.000And then prejudice plus privilege or whatever.
00:38:39.220And then they're just out of it, right?
00:39:00.240Whether 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.
00:39:24.040And 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.
00:39:45.880So if you're the target, you'll be most alarmed.
00:39:52.560If you're the one, here, let's break it.
00:39:55.380It's always those who are experiencing the brunt of it.
00:39:57.980So it doesn't matter what your feelings are at the end of the day.
00:40:02.420It 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.
00:40:09.460Of course, you can't apply this to anything on the left, right?
00:40:11.860They get sensitive about every piece of language.
00:40:15.180And that's always their only justification for why you should stop using it, why you should be punished for using it.
00:40:22.040Did you use language that offended me?
00:40:23.520Did you use language that made me think for a moment that I might be denigrated?
00:40:28.600Did you use language that's actually perfectly innocuous but I can in some way construe as offensive?
00:40:36.000But of course, actually, that's not the case at all.
00:40:39.420The left understands that you should not care at all what your opponent thinks about your language.
00:40:44.400And that you should just slam people in the face with your terminology whenever and however you would like.
00:40:50.120They don't care about the feelings at all.
00:40:52.180They only care about the victory involved in using the phrase.
00:40:55.420History 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.
00:41:04.260Funny, I would say the same thing about the left.
00:41:07.280There's never going to be a proper way to tell the left to stop destroying the lives of children.
00:41:13.140There'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.
00:41:30.020There'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.
00:41:50.920There's never going to be an easy way to demand it.
00:41:52.580And there's never going to be a proper way to demand that.
00:41:54.920So interesting that you might put it that way.
00:41:56.880Respectability 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.
00:42:07.060Again, it's amazing how much of this rhetoric you can just turn around if you understand the actual power dynamic, right?
00:42:15.100The only reason he's using this rhetoric is he thinks that the right is in power or conservatives are in power.
00:42:22.460But 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.
00:45:09.380So maybe he does already know that he's in power.
00:45:11.620But he's still just going to use the framing of powerlessness anyway.
00:45:16.700Although 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.
00:45:26.960And again, you can tell that these people are never under any real threat because they remain rich and powerful.
00:45:45.260That'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?
00:45:57.140That's not the example he's using because he knows what that looks like.
00:46:01.180The 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.
00:46:13.360He's never going to show any other sides of canceled culture.
00:46:16.380For a society and democracy to evolve, we've needed new ways to further free speech, civic participation, and collective action.
00:46:26.200Again, interesting that democracy is going to evolve by punishing speech.
00:46:29.900I mean, I think that is actually a function of democracy.
00:46:34.080But if you're a fan of democracy, then that's probably not the way you want to explain the evolution of democracy.
00:46:41.360Cancel culture has given a voice to the voiceless at a time when other aspects of our democracy have been threatened.
00:46:48.220Today, the voting rights we once thought were protected are under attack.
00:46:52.180So, yeah, again, of course, rights are under attack.
00:47:05.380And he had a lot of things to say about Ron DeSantis, things that he didn't like.
00:47:09.940But 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.
00:47:18.860And surprise, surprise, Ron DeSantis won by a landslide in Florida.
00:47:22.180Now, Ron DeSantis is a pretty popular governor.
00:47:24.600And I think he did have a lot of personal popularity in Florida.
00:47:27.980But 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.
00:47:36.060Because it meant the left couldn't rig these elections the same way.
00:47:59.720They know the advantage that they've gained through this.
00:48:02.400And they're certainly not going to give it up without a fight.
00:48:05.160But it's a fight that the Republicans should be engaging in.
00:48:09.440Rather 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.
00:48:19.780Such bold acts of intimidation harken back to Jim Crow.
00:48:45.880Now, 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.
00:48:59.760In 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.
00:49:36.200You're the ones out of power speaking truth to power.
00:49:40.040But every company just happens to be on your side.
00:49:43.420All of these evil global capitalist corporations that you spent, you know, decades and decades to crank just happen to line up on your side.
00:50:04.040Regardless 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.
00:50:17.820Such 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.
00:50:27.040Or the fact that you're actually the ones in power.
00:50:29.460Actually, you're the ones who own the HR departments.
00:50:32.360You're the one that own all of the college professorships.
00:50:55.960You have cancel culture power because you're the ones who have control of everything that would wield it.
00:51:02.640Everyday citizens who signed digital petitions protesting outside...
00:51:06.160Protested outside of state buildings and used their social media platforms to shame a lack of response from those they held in high regard.
00:51:13.940There's a little bit left, but it's not particularly interesting.
00:51:17.500So I'll go ahead and wrap that up here.
00:51:20.960But just to say, guys, look, again, these people know what they're doing.