Cancel Culture is a Mighty Tool of Fascism's Advance

Those of us of a certain age remember those grainy, black-and-white films we were shown in school of a spreading ink stain or the tentacles of a giant octopus that represented Communism spreading over Europe and heading our way. Today the advancing fascist, totalitarian state that is coming for us might well be represented as a gigantic Pac-Man figure scurrying around within eating any idea or thought or expression that deviates from or opposes leftism: It's Frost's fog not on tiny cat feet but on steroids, and when it is done it will envelop us all. This Pac-Man figure is: Cancel culture ...the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming. It is led by truly ignorant people who, literally, don't know what they are talking about.  The prime example of which is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a cum laude graduate of Boston University majoring in international relations and economics: AOC is but one of the geniuses urging a boycott of Goya Foods because its CEO, Robert Unanue, dared to praise President Trump.  Mr. Unanue, of course, is not alone.  The list is long, from the coaches who use the wrong words, to the proposed rescinding of admission of the student who also praised Mr. Trump (the rescinding has been, for now, aborted),  and even to the canceling of a virtual speech by the President's daughter. That is but a small sample, and readers undoubtedly know of many more that, especially, do not involve the President such as a Superbowl-winning quarterback being forced to grovel for criticizing the practice of kneeling during the anthem.  And, ridiculously, they've canceled The Duke, John Wayne! This is all done, of course, not in the name of fascist totalitarianism but to correct the evils of capitalism or to improve race relations or in the name of some other liberal cause, but I ain't fooled, I think AT readers are not fooled, and surely the great novelist, Sinclair Lewis, wasn't fooled eighty-five years ago when he wrote: “But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”   None of this is new.  In George Orwell's seventy-year-old novel, 1984, the job of Winston Smith, its protagonist, was to rewrite the past.  In Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union his enemies were routinely erased from history. From the time of Horace we know “that even fools are right sometimes,” so I am pained to use the words of a true fool when I say that our rulers cannot be criticized, but they are free to criticize and silence whom they wish. When all opposition is silenced, certainly totalitarianism will prevail. [ ... ] The post Cancel Culture is a Mighty Tool of Fascism's Advance appeared first on NewsCetera.
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