What Cancel Culture Actually Looks Like

If you ever want to know what actual cancel culture looks like and not the whiny, candyass, fictional wingnut version of it you see all over the internet like track marks on RFK Jr -- 

-- someday buy an OG Liberal blogger a beer and ask them what it was like to publicly question the wisdom of George W. Bush' Iraq Clusterfuck back when that was not a popular opinion.  

Welcome to Pariah Town!

But the willingness of media gatekeepers to snap their fingers and banish Liberals to the cornfield if they step out of line has a long and storied history in the country.  Like, for example (From Looper, December 2023)...

The Smothers Brothers Show Wasn't 'Canceled,' They Were Fired - That's Important

The death of Tom Smothers, 86, on December 26 has put the Smothers Brothers back in the spotlight. The comedy duo that consisted of him and his brother, Dick, starred on CBS' "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" from 1967 to 1969. The trendy show soon became known for skits and content that actively made fun of the powers that be, including criticizing the Vietnam War. "We were moderate. We were never out there," Dick Smothers told the Associated Press. "But we were the first people through that door. It just sort of crept in as the '60s crept in. We were part of that generation." 

This approach earned the show a pair of Primetime Emmys, but it also painted a target on its back ... and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the controversial show came to a sudden end in 1969. However, the Smothers Brothers made it known that their show never actually got canceled — instead, they insisted that they were fired. They were pretty clear about this in a 1982 interview on "Late Night with David Letterman" when Letterman brought up the subject. "We were fired. We left under duress," Tom told the host in no uncertain terms. This wasn't a throw-off line, either — he used the same term onstage when he received an honorary award at the 60th Primetime Emmy Awards.

The determined distinction between being canceled and getting fired is understandable considering the way the show ended. Instead of officially canceling the show, CBS alleged that its censors hadn't received an episode of the show on time and used this to unexpectedly pull the plug on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour." The Smothers Brothers weren't happy — and the law eventually sided with them, as they won $775,000 in the ensuing court case...

This is the skit that finally got them sacked.  CBS cut this skit from an episode of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour that was to be broadcast in April 1969.  Then, CBS decided to fire Tommy and Dick Smothers and censored the entire episode, even after this skit was deleted.  Which, in turn, led to the 1970 lawsuit mentioned in the Looper article.

And, just for fun, this is from a 1970 NBC-TV special, "The Return of the Smothers Brothers", in which David Steinberg and the Smothers Brothers crack wise about TV Censorship. The video is wreck, but the audio is still good.

 

As I have mentioned many times on this here tiny blog 'o mine, the problem with the media is absolutely not and never has been the "cancelling" of toxic conservative opinions and lies. As you may have noticed, we are practically drowning in toxic conservative opinions and lies.   Elmo Mush spent 44 billion dollars just to make sure that the madness and treason of MAGA degenerates and traitors would have yet another route to roar unimpeded through the American media.

No, the real problem with the legacy media is and always has been "Shelter Culture".

Shelter Culture (tm) is my trademarked antonym for "Cancel Culture" -- to describe organizational cultures which actively protect smarmy always-wrong hacks who definitely would have been sacked for incompetence long ago in any other enterprise.  Personally, I prefer “Cultured Pearl Clutching Culture” (tm) but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, or “Cloister Culture” (tm) but too many people have no idea what “cloister" means.

So Shelter Culture (tm) it is shall be...

 

Update:  Reader Anon reminds us that the biggest example of cancel culture in modern American history are Conservative Christopaths cancelling the peace-loving Jesus who preached welcoming the stranger, generosity to the poor, feeding the hungry, comforting to the widow, decency to the imprisoned and who gave away health care for free...

...and in His place substituted their angry, paranoid, gun-toting, minority-hating, prosperity-gospel Fake Jebus.   

I Am The Liberal Media

On The Maintenance of Meaning

From Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog:

...

As an objective matter, unemployment is lower today than when the president took office, and we've seen a net increase in job creation. Portman -- a sitting U.S. senator and former budget director -- surely knows this, but chose to say the exact opposite. Why? Because he thinks he can get away with it. Post-truth politics is liberating that way.

You see, Portman doesn't like our reality, so he has no qualms about making up his own version of facts, and asking Americans to believe him -- even though he's blatantly, shamelessly lying.

Putting aside all other considerations, it's just not healthy for a political system when one side of the political divide decides to substitute one version of reality for another. Words, facts, arithmetic, and objective truths must maintain some sort of meaning or our basic ability to have a political conversation will deteriorate into chaos.

Of course, in the natural world two and two will continue to go right on blithely equaling four no matter the wishes of our little species, but within the human world, "words, facts, arithmetic, and objective truths" do not maintain themselves.   Especially in the realms of politics and faith, our human desire to bend two and two around to equal three or seven or five trillion or eternal salvation means that those who traffic in the prestidigitation of "truthiness" will always do a land office business.   

Which means that the integrity of "words, facts, arithmetic, and objective truths" need to be protected and defended.

There used to be a professional dedicated to that cause: a profession that was so critical to our survival as a free people that it got its very own shout-out in the very first amendment to the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

But over the last 30 years, that profession has been gelded, hollowed out and corporatize to the point where the protectors and defenders of "words, facts, arithmetic, and objective truths" shout from the margins, and performers like David Gregory

command top dollar and center stage.

People like Mr. Gregory are the problem and until they are routinely called out (and not in a passive, "'the media' has failed us" voice, but by name) from someplace other than the margins they will continue to run the integrity of "words, facts, arithmetic, and objective truths" through the "Both Sides Do It" meat-grinder until, at last, our perception of reality is drowned forever in a gray, poisonous. corporate slurry of bullshit.

After which comes this (from "1984"):

In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science.' The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc.

...

Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

A Post for Fundraiser Eve

The Grand Nagus of the Ferengrich Alliance loves, loves, loves Jebus.

And America too.

Just not so must Teh Science.

From The American Prospect:

"I think you can certainly refer to both creationism and evolution as something that people ought to be aware of -- together," Gingrich told me at a press conference in Manchester, N.H. "If you look at chaos theory and the degree to which the certainty of the 19th century is beginning to be replaced, I don't think there's any problem with teaching both."

The precise, numerical answer to the question "How stupid do you have to be to belong to a Party where Newt is 'The Brain Guy'?" remains unknown.

Fund the research here...

Incredulity Watch, Ctd.

Over in the Conservative Expatriate Tree Fort, Andrew Sullivan continues to relish cock-punching the same Movement which made his career possible.

Well good for him.

Still, one of the poor habits that can come with deciding to make one's living biting the ankles of the monster you helped animate seems to be a tendency towards wishful thinking: towards low-balling estimates of how long your unholy creation is likely to rampage around and how many villagers it is likely to trample.

A small case in point here. When E.D. Kain writes:

I would suggest that perhaps the conservative movement itself is the most sacred of sacred cows here, and also the greatest impediment to conservatism as a ‘reality-based force in American politics’. More than anything, it is the movement itself which creates these closed information circuits, which revels in anti-historicism and the weaving of conservative illusion. In some ways it is also a great political force, but I also suspect that it is nearing its zenith in terms of both heat and light.

These sorts of movements by their very natures have poor immune systems which is why they guard themselves so fiercely, why they are forced to create alternative narratives, alternate histories. They are brittle. The conservative movement, for all its ferocity and political savvy, is brittle, because it relies too heavily on its own illusions – illusions which have been made in recent years all too convincing by outlets like Fox News.

Mr. Sullivan responds with this:

And when such reality-divorced movements collapse, they collapse very suddenly.

Which may sound nice, and may be a very comforting thought to someone who spent much of his adult life lending aid, comfort and intellectual cover-fire to this despicable movement, but unless Mr. Sullivan means "suddenly" in the "geological time-scale" sense of the word, the idea that "reality-divorced" movements somehow collapse fast once they are punctured by the Large-Bore Needle of Truth is fantasy of the highest order.

The absurdly "reality-divorced" Fundamentalist belief in the Bible as the literal and inerrant Word of God (and the attendant tragedies of rabidly anti-science Creationism, barbarically Levitican views on homosexuality, etc.) has been under continual assault by Reality since the Enlightenment and appears to be as frisky and nuts as ever.


As are more modern, reality-defying cults-turned-churches like Mormonism and Scientology (to name just two.)

The grotesquely "reality-divorced" European fascist movement of the 1930s drew strength from exactly the same sort of witchbag of constant lies, overt racism and seething paranoia about secret plots and internal enemies that now powers the Conservative Movement. It took a World War and the deaths of millions to stop it, and the bloodthirsty fever of it still flares back up again and again like clockwork.

And far from being something brand-new, Mr. Sullivan's own Modern Conservative Movement is itself a direct, lineal descendant of America's own Southern, White, Christian "reality-divorced" racial-purity movement. A Movement which Mr. Sullivan knows full well did not peter out in the face of facts, logic and morality, but instead drew itself up into powerful, proto-fascist nation called The Confederate States of America.

It took four years, the deaths of over 600,000 people and the massed military might of the Union to smash that "reality-divorced" movement to rubble, and yet it still remained an incredibly potent force. Potent enough to hold on, retrench and almost fully re-establish itself as the Jim Crow South 12 years later. Potent enough so that, for the last 40 years, tapping ever-more directly into its dark energy has provided the margin of victory in every major Republican victory.

As Mr. Sullivan knows full well, without America's indefatigable "reality-divorced" racist ideology, the American Conservative Movement would be nothing but rich old men whining about taxes.
Without it, there would have been no Nixon.
No Reagan.
No Bush I or II.
And no Andrew Sullivan.

If the Modern Conservative Movement were merely a weird Apocalyptic cult doing its thing in the desert, then sure, once Reality started whacking it with a stick, it would probably fall apart and scatter (except for a few who would live on in the abandoned compound and complain how everyone else had sold out and lost faith.)

But while its beliefs are every bit as "reality-divorced" as Heaven's Gate ever was, Modern Conservatism is backed by vast economic and political interests which seem mor than willing to bankroll its lunacy forever. And if Mr. Sullivan really thinks that mere facts have ever been a threat to illusion-driven, "reality-divorced" weirdos in funny hats as long as those weirdos have a powerful media and a sufficiently large war-chest at their command, then he's not half the Catholic he pretends to be.

Aggregation 4 Dummies

First-name-chummy + link.

Will and Conor talk about Winnie.

See?