Tim Blair: Cancel culture works both ways
Supporters of cancel culture, aimed at marginalising conservatives, might not feel so triumphant when they start copping cancellations of their own, writes Tim Blair.
Life’s pretty damn sweet when you can stomp all over people and face absolutely no adverse consequences.
China, for example, rounds up ethnic minorities to use as slave labour, crushes Hong Kong in a practice run for taking over Taiwan and, just by the by, kills more than two million people worldwide with some kind of lab virus.
The consequences?
Well, US President Joe Biden last week forbade government agencies from using phrases like “China virus” or “Wuhan flu”, for fear they’d generate terrible racism. Take that, Beijing.
(More impressively, the Ball mason jar company in Kempsey, NSW, has now told customers it is “phasing out as many Communist Chinese-made products as we can”. This will not exactly shatter China’s $16 trillion economy, but it’s a principled step.)
Their ABC lately drew fire for equating Australia Day with “Invasion Day” and will no doubt trash Australians for the rest of 2021.Then they’ll be given more than $1 billion.
Happens every year, regardless of how very few involuntary ABC donors actually watch or listen to the ABC.
And now we’ve got Big Tech, supported by a censorious woke army, deleting accounts and otherwise silencing people whose politics they find disagreeable.
Big Tech is in a strong position to do so.
It’s not as though the silenced can build their own internet and thereby dodge bannings, de-platforming and other elements of the ongoing purge.
And it is not as though Big Tech is suffering much in the way of criticism, because our cultural gatekeepers tend to agree with the online realm’s anti-conservative stance.
As an example, consider the case of American neonatal nurse Cara Dumaplin, who runs a popular Instagram account promoting online baby sleep courses ranging in price from $100 to $420.Nobody has any complaints about Dumaplin’s Taking Cara Baby courses — most reviews are very favourable — but online journal Vox recently discovered something shameful and frightening about Dumaplin and her husband.
They are Donald Trump voters.
More terrifying still, they donated money to the former President’s campaign.This was altogether too much for new mother Katelyn Esmonde, who told Vox that although Dumaplin’s programs were abundantly helpful to her, “it’s really hard for me to separate what I know about her now from the sleep advice that she gives”.
Never mind that the advice works. It comes from a Bad Lady, and must now be disregarded. Wake those babies, wokelings.Other satisfied customers also decided they were now dissatisfied, demanding refunds and boycotting Taking Cara Baby.
Better to endure a sleepless, screaming infant than deal with someone who voted wrong.
And people wonder why the “shy conservative” factor always skews polling.
Woke folk believe themselves to be immune from any similar criticism or action. After all, they’re the good guys.
Who’d want to hurt a business that supports, say, the Trump-opposing Democrats or Black Lives Matter?
(Apart from, of course, Black Lives Matter, whose year-long US-wide festival of destruction and death was rewarded last week with a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. The last time an organisation destroyed that many black livelihoods, they were wearing sheets and carrying burning crosses.)
But our intolerant friends ought not to feel so secure. Now that they’ve established a cancel culture, everyone else can also play by those rules.
It might be that smug urban leftists and cashed-up tech types are more dependent upon working class deplorables than they realise.
This theory suggests a possible plan.
“If Monster Tech can aggressively de-platform businesses and individuals for expressing forbidden opinions,” a chap going by the name of Buck Throckmorton recently wrote, “then maybe it’s time for skilled tradesmen to respond in kind against the woke left.”
Posting at the excellent Ace Of Spades blog, Throckmorton continued: “The tradesmen I know are swamped with business right now, so it might be a good time for them to establish their own ‘terms of service’ enabling them to deny services to advocates of cancel culture.
“We’ve learned from Monster Tech that all you have to do is declare someone’s speech to be ‘hateful’ or state that their speech might ‘incite violence’ to banish someone from receiving service.
“If a deplorable can be targeted as hate-filled for simply supporting Trump, then a tradesman’s terms of service can in turn declare that any visible support for Democrats constitutes hate speech.
“Broken down on the side of the road with a Bernie or Biden bumper sticker?
“Sorry — you’re going to have to find a wrecker that employs all 57 genders and declares all their pronouns.
“But Earl’s 24-Hour Wrecker won’t be towing your car today. Terms of service, you know …
“It’s a shame about that plumbing leak, but your hate-filled ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ sign is a violation of Jones Plumbing’s terms of service. If you’ll just open your backdoor, the leaking water will find its way out.”
Australians have previously coped with woke outbreaks in this manner. A couple of decades ago, when logging protesters swarmed Bega in NSW, stores around town refused service to “ferals”.
And Queensland hotels along the route of Bob Brown’s 2019 hilarious anti-Adani mine convoy declined to serve the ex-Greens leader’s adoring followers.
If it’s cancel culture the left wants, it’s cancel culture they will get.
Conservatives can get by without Facebook or Twitter, but imagine the wailing from leftists when nobody will fix their fridge.
