The right have been
in government for over a decade.
They enjoy a stranglehold
on print news media
and most of the political stories
that you’ll hear about in broadcast
have their origins in right-wing news media.
So why are they complaining
about being silenced all the time?
This is about someone
who had an opposing viewpoint
that has been silenced and sidelined
and thrown away.
What the mob have tried to do
is to prevent me
from going out campaigning.
I remember sitting there,
having them message me
and telling me,
"because of your politics
you can't be on our site anymore"
and thinking,
how am I going to
pay the bills next month?
Our culture is so universally attacked
by this very screamy
and very angry little minority of people.
An influential minority of extremists
has intimidated people into silence.
We're all getting scared
to say what we think.
These kind of woke millennials -
they are the establishment.
We are now the rebels
if you see what I mean.
I think you're talking about
Owen Jones aren't you?
-Exactly. He's been cancel culture's
witchfinder general.
The window of what
you can acceptably say -
that's getting narrower and narrower
and it's shifting further and further leftwards.
People who start to assault
all of the representations of the past
will start on people next.
We're actually in a very very dangerous period.
It's now become almost a pandemic.
Look we all know prestige media
likes nothing more than to
spend time talking about itself.
But what about me, Marge?
But were you to take
a quick glance at the timelines
of Andrew Neil or Piers Morgan
or Bari Weiss you would be forgiven
for thinking that the real scourge
to humanity during a pandemic
was left shitposters on Twitter
being overly censorious and moralising.
So where does this idea
of being cancelled come from?
Like most things which have been ruined
through overuse by columnists
it has its origins in black Twitter.
When someone who was famous or once popular
is seen to have done something which is fucked
up,
hypocritical or inauthentic
it would be said that xyz person was cancelled.
Now this was as much a joke about accountability
as it was an expression of it.
Obviously you can't really cancel someone
the way that you would a Netflix subscription,
all you can do is drive along
a bit of social media scandal
and enjoy it while you can.
Now that is very different to what
Andrew Neil thinks being cancelled is.
Where in his view it’s when
Owen Jones comes on your show
and is insufficiently deferent.
Your smears and lies about me
are not going to be dealt with tonight.
-I will finish what I was going to say
about the Spectator.
-Not you won't.
Or Bari Weiss’s definition
where being cancelled means
that you voluntarily quit
your well-paid job at the New York Times
because your colleagues don’t rate your
work.
I’ve been trying to get Aaron Bastani
cancelled for five years.
Or Times columnist James Marriott
who complains about being cancelled
every time people learn of his existence.
So how did a concept
from the deep dark pit of ‘stan Twitter’
manage to haunt the halls of prestige media?
You were cancelled
before cancelling was a thing.
-Before it was a thing.
This woke thing is out of control.
Liberals have become
completely intolerant, illiberal.
They want us all to lead their lives
and if you don't you have to be
shamed, abused, cancelled and so on.
Well 1) there’s nothing the media likes
more
than trying to sustain a conversation about
itself
until sweet extinction comes for us all.
And 2) it speaks to an interesting
modern day phenomenon
in which people who’ve got access to wealth,
power and platform
the likes of which most people in society
will never experience,
present themselves as the most victimised
amongst us.
No. No. Well, I mean...
And why is that?
Well to find out a bit more
I went to talk to someone you might have heard
of
because he’s the main character on Twitter
most days.
Many of them fear what they see
as this hoard of young millennial woke barbarians
who are banging at the gates
and waiting just pour in
and destroy all the values that they hold
dear.
And they saw the 2019 election
as them putting that generation back in their
box.
For many of them it was this idea
of putting woke politics back in the box
or what they call "identity politics" -
the idea of anti-racism, LGBTQ rights
and all the rest of it.
What's been very aggravating is that hasn't
happened
and indeed the emergence of Black Lives Matter
as a global anti-racism movement
was just one example
of how what they thought
was a triumphalist 'we have won
and given that generation
and their values a good battering'
just isn't the case.
Woke culture might be so vaguely defined as
to be almost meaningless.
Man you see how woke I was?
I called you out.
Well you say you're woke
but the companies you work for,
I mean unbelievable.
Apple, Amazon, Disney.
But what it does speak to is the fact that
young people who tend to hold progressive
values are able to shape and determine culture
through informal kinds of power.
The worker sinks to the level
of a commodity.
Ew, he's a capitalist.
Eww!
Mm, it's the remix.
So, what that means is
what’s often dismissively referred to
as identity politics
is actually quite powerful
on the cultural terrain,
even if that power hasn’t been translated
into material socio-economic justice
in terms of race or gender equality.
And a particularly shallow
and bastardised version of identity politics,
one which is obsessed with victimhood
and less concerned with questions of power
is actually really amenable
to those who have power
but feel that their platforms are under threat.
People are hurtful to me all the time.
Try being an old woman.
I mean, for goodness sake.
I'm not about to walk on eggshells.
Where once upon a time
intersectionality referred to
the specific experience
of being both black and a woman,
now it refers to being
both white and a columnist.
The cancel culture moral panic
has nurtured a sense of victimhood
amongst the well-paid denizens
of the media class,
and that means that if criticism
comes from outside the bubble,
it’s a form of social violence.
And not just what happens
when you put your opinions
out for a living and people
share their opinions back.
Wait a minute, wasn’t that called
the marketplace of ideas?
Now I’m not saying everything
that comes out of social media is good,
but the sense of threat
that’s being identified by many
of these writers, journalists and columnists
is the fact that social media
has been a partial democratisation
of the public sphere.
Now your reader doesn’t just
look at your column,
sit there and absorb it, they talk back.
And it’s just an unfortunate fact of life
that if one is able to make a good living
spouting idiotic opinions in the pages
of a broadsheet newspaper,
a similar right to free expression
should be enjoyed by someone
doing the same for free on social media.
Maybe the all pervasive sense of victimhood
amongst prestige media outlets
isn’t because cancel culture
is a threat to democracy.
It’s because ca ncel culture
is democracy in action.
