Right-Wing Cancel Culture & Anti-Intellectualism
"If you hire clowns, you should expect a circus" - Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times
The heyday of left-wing cancel culture on the old Twitter, made anti-intellectualism mainstream and enabled the regime change.
What started as a rightful exposure of power abuse, sexual misconduct, and racial discrimination by the rich and powerful spiraled out of control. Anonymous social media mobs, consisting of people who in the real world were voiceless, invisible, didn’t have the opportunity or know-how to take advantage of life, grouped together on Twitter, fueled by moral outrage, and loudly demanded their targets to become like them – invisible, voiceless, and forgotten. Many times, they got what they wanted, even if their assertions were half-true or unproven.
Individual members of an angry social media mob are powerless. It requires no courage or competence to anonymously make bold assertions about some public figure and attack their virtue from the safety of home. In a live public debate, their harsh language would sound unconvincing, and they probably wouldn’t be as confident. But on platforms with anonymous connectedness, driven by algorithms optimized for engagement, righteous anger and personal attacks could easily gain momentum and kill careers.
Social media mobs only have the power people ascribe to them. Characters written on a keyboard only hold subjective significance, even if the words are hateful and injurious. The problem was that corporations caved in to the social media mobs with deference. To protect their brand value, the companies established comprehensive DEI policies (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), routinely asked new employees for their pronouns, and marketed themselves with rainbow-colored flags. They aggressively fired anyone who was indicted in the kangaroo courts on social media without due process. Because these firings were based on corporate fears and internet vibes, I call them anti-intellectual.
Now, the pendulum has swung far in the other direction. Cancellation attempts and social justice complaints by keyboard warriors from the far political left no longer take up column space in the press and are not boosted by the algorithm on the reformed Twitter/X. Today, cancel culture is not driven from the bottom-up, but from the top-down, not from the far left, but from the far right, and not by a distorted sense of social justice, but by a war on intellectualism.
Trump recently held the stupidest speech in UN history. For the far-right, anti-intellectualism, prejudice, bias, and cruelty are worn as a badge of honor, and anyone attacking their right to ignorance enshrined by the First Amendment is a threat to their power and are thus at risk of cancellation. University professors, lawyers, scientists, entertainers, journalists, schoolteachers, politicians, and judges are especially vulnerable. Where left-wing cancel culture targeted the rich and powerful, right-wing cancel culture targets intellectuals. The former now seems to have disappeared into the dark void from which it came, while the latter has been elevated to Presidential status. We can only hope that it will fail to turn Americans into mindless consumers in an AI-driven pariah state - just like left-wing cancel culture radically failed at restoring a sense of social justice. In a screen-based, post-literate society (Reference: The dawn of the post-literate society by James Marriott), where people increasingly depend on technology to think, no longer ask critical questions, but mindlessly consume empty calories for the brain and body, the risk of a dictatorial takeover is legitimate.
Right-wing cancel culture has now grown so strong and secure that it threatens to cancel the US government in the face of democratic resistance. The anti-intellectual elite in the US profoundly refuse to understand the limits of their delegated power. They even think they can control politics and laws in foreign jurisdiction. An example I want to bring forward is their beef with the EU’s Digital Services Act - a legislative Act in a foreign jurisdiction which the American anti-intellectuals perceive as a threat to their privileges. They want to cancel the Digital Services Act for trying to censor illegal content on their “digital town squares”. I don’t think it’s appropriate to argue why they are wrong, because logic and common sense do not resonate with anti-intellectuals, just like it didn’t work on social media mobs.
Let me just say that social media are not digital town squares. They are the breeding grounds for anti-intellectualism. By granting equal speaking rights to all and increased distribution to edgy and polarizing posts, the American platforms provide a global megaphone to fools and propagandists who either don’t know what they are talking about or intentionally try to mislead the public. The only way to win against anti-intellectuals is to let the madness play out on the “digital town squares”, while coordinating democratic resistance off the platforms. The platforms are governed by right-wing cancel culture and anti-intellectualists.
