The Morning Briefing: Cancel Culture Almost Canceled Itself on Tuesday Then Canceled That Idea

Stephen Kruiser | 4:53 AM on July 08, 2020

Cancel Culture Eats Its Own

2020 continues to impress, finding new ways to throw weird stuff at us and make us question if any of us ever were sane. For the record, I am currently a firm “No” on that at this point. I have been writing about cancel culture a lot this past year, most recently at the end of last month. Prior to even looking at today’s news I talked about cancel culture for much of my latest podcast episode, which is in today’s VIP section.

So it’s on my mind a lot.

Tuesday was shaping up to be one of the more interesting days in the cancel culture wars but — as with almost everything in 2020 — it quickly went right off of the rails.

Brian wrote post yesterday about the need for cancel culture to be canceled, which we here at the Briefing have been pushing for a lot. In it he detailed how even the beloved musical Hamilton is in the wokescolds’ sites:

“…less-woke era…” Hamilton isn’t the 1939 classic Gone With the Wind (which has also faced a cancel threat from HBO). It came out in 2015! And it has made many non-white American actors and theater folks very rich. It has sparked renewed interest in American history. But now some hard leftists who cannot abide anything impure by their own reckoning existing want it canceled.

One of the most anticipated streaming events of this year was the release of the Hamilton movie on Disney+ last weekend. Until these past couple of days, it was one of the most woke entertainment choices one could make. It’s rather disturbing how quickly a few of the scolds can get the social media rage mob moving even on a previously acceptable lefty target. Cancel culture comes at you fast.

cancel culture — (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File)

Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda gave a halfhearted defense of the play, which was disappointing, but not unexpected:

Appreciate you so much, @brokeymcpoverty. All the criticisms are valid. The sheer tonnage of complexities & failings of these people I couldn’t get. Or wrestled with but cut. I took 6 years and fit as much as I could in a 2.5 hour musical. Did my best. It’s all fair game. https://t.co/mjhU8sXS1U

— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) July 6, 2020

Things began taking an interesting turn on the cancel culture front Tuesday when Harper’s published a letter that found me agreeing with lefties like Noam Chomsky and Vox’s Matt Yglesias.

Tyler has more:

On Tuesday, Harper’s released a powerful open letter denouncing cancel culture and celebrating open debate. Even far-left anti-capitalist Noam Chomsky signed the letter.

“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter warns. “While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”

The signatories lament that “it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.”

It’s Christmas in July! We’re going to have conversations and cancel culture is about to be canceled by people on the side of cancel culture! OK, I did feel super awkward about being on the same side as Chomsky — I kind of wanted a Silkwood shower — but, not to worry, the Kumbaya moment didn’t last long. No sooner had the news about the Harper’s article begun to get a lot of attention than many of the enlightened co-signatories decided that some of the company was too icky for them to be associated with.

Just like that, cancel culture was back on.

Twitchy aggregated some of the disgruntled responses. Here’s an example:

I did not know who else had signed that letter. I thought I was endorsing a well meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming. I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company.

The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.

— Jennifer Finney Boylan 🐕 (@JennyBoylan) July 7, 2020

It’s spineless liberal cancel culture at its petulant nadir. The gist was that they were all on board when they thought it was just about a bunch of liberals posturing about tolerance and doing away with cancel culture. Once they found out they would have to actually encounter people who thought differently, the plan was off. These are bitter people who don’t encounter anyone outside of their homogeneous thought bubbles.

Cancel culture is here to stay for a while it would seem. And while I’m not always a fan of playing by their rules I think that the only way we can stop this nonsense is if we bring a little cancel culture to the cancel culture crowd. For now we will just have to revel in the glorious few hours when cancel culture came for itself.

Just Curious

Does Clarence Thomas have an alibi? https://t.co/HY165YzodE

— SFK (@stephenkruiser) July 8, 2020

That Escalated Quickly

Texas orders schools to offer in-person classes this fall or lose state funding https://t.co/s636L3Qhvm pic.twitter.com/NPzgRZnQ6T

— The Hill (@thehill) July 8, 2020

Bee Me

Gavin Newsom Alerted To Illegal Activity By The Sound Of Children’s Laughter https://t.co/UMEnERXkba

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 7, 2020

The Kruiser Kabana

pic.twitter.com/w3bvKA7BNy

— Archillect (@archillect) July 8, 2020

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PJ Media Senior Columnist and Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.” His columns appear twice a week.

For media inquiries, please contact [email protected].

PJ Media senior columnist and associate editor Stephen Kruiser is a professional stand-up comic, writer, and recovering political activist who edits and writes PJ's Morning Briefing, aka The Greatest Political Newsletter in America. His latest book, Straight Outta Feelings, is a humorous exploration of how the 2016 election made him enjoy politics more than he ever had before. When not being a reclusive writer, Kruiser has had the honor of entertaining U.S. troops all over the world. Follow on: X, MeWe, GETTR.