In an article for The Spectator, Brendan O’Neill asks ‘when did Trump supporters become fans of cancel culture?’
“A rock band’s tour cancelled after one of the band members made a tasteless joke. A working-class cashier sacked from her job at the behest of an online mob who were horrified by something she said on Facebook. A schoolteacher suspended after being dogpiled for a daft remark she made online. Has the left-wing digital mob been on the rampage again? Actually, no – this time it’s right-wingers who are furiously demanding the scalps of everyone who offends them.”
“There has been a frenzy of cancellation in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. People who’ve made tawdry comments about the shooting are being hunted, doxxed, shamed, sacked. Most decent folk will think it is wrong to make wisecracks about an incident in which a presidential candidate was targeted for death and an ordinary citizen was killed. I do. But should it be a cancellable offence, a reputation-shattering crime? I’m not sure it should.”
“Consider the headline-grabbing case of Tenacious D. This is the comedy American rock band made up of Hollywood star Jack Black and his bandmate Kyle Gass. On Sunday they were performing in Sydney. It was Glass’s 64th birthday. Black brought a cake on stage and told Glass to make a wish. You can probably guess what he said. Yep: ‘Don’t miss Trump next time.’”
“Crass? Yes. Too soon? Sure. But a speechcrime of such epic proportions that Tenacious D must now consider its future? That’s an overreaction, surely? And yet following a tsunami of media rage, the band has cancelled the rest of its tour, Gass has been dumped by his talent agency, and Black says ‘all future creative plans’ are on hold. All that over a five-word quip made in the heat of the moment at a sweaty gig?”
“We cannot cancel all art and comedy that makes light of the shooting of Trump. Believe me, there’s going to be a lot of it. Trump-supporting right-wingers have a choice: they can either mimic the intolerant left they claim to hate and rage until they’re hoarse against everyone who says something off-colour about this terrible incident, or they can chill out and understand that occasionally hearing offensive things is the price you pay for living in a free society. What a small price for liberty!”
“Jack Black will be fine. He currently has three movies in post-production. Kyle Gass might be fine too, eventually. The same cannot be said for the unfamous people, the little people, who’ve also been swept in the post-shooting purge. Like the middle-aged cashier for the American hardware store Home Depot, who has been given the heave-ho for writing ‘Too bad they weren’t a better shooter!’ on her private Facebook page.”
O’Neill continues, “there is video footage of a man confronting the cashier at her place of work. It makes for horrible viewing. I know we’re meant to be disgusted by the woman, but I found myself far more disgusted by the man barking at her as she was just trying to earn an honest crust. She looks normal, unassuming, nervous, completely undeserving of this ritualistic shaming being visited on her by a bloke who hated what she said online.”
“His video was later shared by the ‘anti-woke’ social-media group, Libs of TikTok, where it got tens of thousands of likes. It blew up and the lady was sacked. For a throwaway comment hardly anyone would have read had it not been so feverishly shared by Trump fans online. This was a witch-hunt, pure and simple, indistinguishable from those carried out by the hateful left. Only where the left goes after blasphemous women who deviate from the gender ideology, the right goes after sinful women who engage in Trump-bashing. Same result, though: women lose their reputations and even their livelihoods courtesy of the virtual pitchforks of a perma-furious mob.”
“Mob vengeance is a far greater threat to reason and decency than a daft joke could ever be. The urge to devastate an individual’s life over something he said is infinitely more alien to me than the cracking of a sick joke. I have done the latter – we all have, right? – but I would never dream of doing the former. No matter how offended I felt.”
“So this is what we have to look forward to if Trump ousts Biden? Four more years of cancel culture? Those of us whose commitment to free speech is principled rather than contingent, who think everyone from JK Rowling to the Home Depot lady should enjoy the liberty of expression, really do have our work cut out for us.”
O’Neill rightly demonstrates that advocates for freedom of speech must be aware of the threats posed by both the right and the left to freedom of speech. After all, woke censorship is one form of a far greater danger. Conservatives are not immune from the impulse to shut down speech they disagree with.
