The Left Sowing:

‘Yes, yes censorship and cancelling! This is how we get revenge on society for being the bullied losers in school! We are the cool kids now! You’re cancelled, you’re fired! No one will ever be made uncomfortable by words ever again when we abolish all bad things to protect victims everywhere!’

The Left Reaping:

‘Wait no, tyranny, censorship, how could I have known the culture of civic repression and empowering HR in society I took part in for a decade could one day revert back to the neoconservative and evangelical pro-Israel militancy from which it first spawned? What about my rights to dissent and not be fired for diverging from mainstream institutional thought?’

I always have despised the impact on public discourse by the Israel Lobby. Not one to enjoy taking part in ethnic strife halfway around the world in which I have no attachment to either side, I deeply resent the most effective group organization at entwining my country into a dispute which I think it should not be involved in at all. Israel is, of course, correct to follow its own interests in curating American support. But the United States is not correct in assuming its interests and those of Israel are the same, particularly since the end of the Cold War.

But I cannot help but laugh at the hole leftist activists have dug for themselves. Anyone with even a modicum of (fairly recent) historical knowledge knows that cancel culture in its modern form was pioneered by right wing Christians and their often-allies in AIPAC in a process that began in the 80s and continued without interruption through the 2000s. The left, subsumed by its own evangelical revivalist religion of wokeness, adopted all of these tactics for its own increasingly unhinged goals starting in the early 2010s. In a country where everything except some of their economic and socially libertarian ideas was deeply unpopular, this was always going to create a backlash. The question was simply when. As the former proper social justice causes of erasing legal inequalities got replaced by more and more ever-escalating demands which invaded people’s lives in the most horrifying of panopticons (workplace surveillance, censorship, ideological motivated firings, college campuses eschewing open inquiry for rigid conformity, victimhood grievance as the pinnacle of progressive activism, mandatory pronouns on work signatures, etc) a turn against the left-puritans was not only necessary, but inevitable. The linear-progressive view was such a blinker that it blinded the left activists to this obvious reality just as much as the same world view has blinded centrist liberals to the dangers of financial globalization and liberal internationalist diplomacy. It is dangerous to believe there is such a thing as a ‘Right Side of History.’

Ron DeSantis, or as I prefer to call him, Meatball Ron, was the first big figure to really exemplify this pivot back to the old pre-Occupy normal. A censorious culture warrior who governed an entire state seeking national media headlines, he pioneered (if not successfully for his own personal campaign so far) the return to right wing cancel culture by building off the very untenable situation created by the North American left. Even now he and that absolute horror show Nikki Haley are demanding mass censorship of universities and public spaces to defend the feelings of pro-Israel students. Cancel culture for me, but not thee. The right’s posture against censoriousness was always a canard.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone. The left absorbed and regurgitated the right’s old bugbears of sex entitlement, sex panic, the idea that people can become morally corrupted by entertainment media, and the cosmic battle of good vs evil to bring about the End Times. It merely repackaged them for different audiences. So why shouldn’t the right learn from professional managerial class and activist cancel culture? One form of slave morality meeting another in an Ouroboros of victimhood and cancellation.

I lament the canary in the coal mine that is mass censorship targeting critics of the U.S.-Israel alliance and will always advocate for the freedom to dissent from the establishment, as I always have. But I can’t help but laugh when it targets the American activist left. If anyone deserves this, it is them. Those of us who have remained consistent on these issues get nothing but our own peace of mind. But those others who are so insecure they are threatened by mere words will never know the confidence and satisfaction we feel to explore the world around us unburdened by their insecurities.