Hypocrisy is more common than oxygen in politics. It is the lifeblood of those who strive to hold their opponents up what they not only can’t achieve themselves, but have no interest in holding themselves too either. And “cancel culture” is their weapon of choice.
Remember all the talk during the Clinton administration about the “politics of personal destruction”? It was Bill Clinton’s go-to defense against anything – claiming those evil Republicans were simply out to destroy him personally because they hated him. Never mind the facts of the things Bill actually did while in office – perjury over his affair, illegally accessing confidential FBI files of political opponents, raising campaign money from Chinese communists, etc. – the default position for every new revelation against Bill was framed as a personal attack, and therefore should be ignored, lest the country “normalize” such character assassinations. Meanwhile, they burned every calorie they consumed smearing any Republican they could, in any way possible, to burn them down for opposing Clinton.
The scalps in the water in the wake of the Clintons gave rise to cancel culture – the idea that the left could obliterate its enemies if they stepped too far out of line by using half-quotes, spin, or flat-out lies to stigmatize someone into retreating from public life. The left has embraced it…unless it’s used against one of their own.
That the political left wants to destroy Fox News is nothing new; it’s a bit of a running joke that 80 percent of CNN’s daily programming is spent playing clips of Fox and whining about them. That seemed harmless enough – bunch of liberals complaining about people with a much larger audience very much like Chester and Spike in the old Looney Toons cartoon, annoying but harmless. Now they’re trying to do harm.
There is a concerted effort on the left to destroy Fox. Granted, the virgin goon squad of keyboard warriors at Media Matters have been trying to damage Fox’s bottom line since their founder realized he could rake in a fortune from gullible donors eager to score points with fellow travelers, but this time is different. This time it seems like everyone on the left is on board.
Television personalities at CNN and MSNBC are openly calling for Fox to be canceled, to be dropped by cable companies. Not an advertiser boycott (their old weapon of choice), but to rid Americans of the option of seeing Fox, whether they want to or not.
“It’s time for this question to be front and center: Should Fox News be allowed to exist? Brain-mashing as a business model shouldn’t be legal,” writer and cable news talking head favorite Anand Giridharadas asked on Twitter last week.
Giridharadas joined Washington Post columnist Max Boot in calling for the “Fairness Doctrine” to be applied to cable news to rid the world of the scourge of facts and opinions they find inconvenient. Neither, it seems, understands the difference between the public airwaves and how cable is delivered to televisions, but the sentiment is where the danger lies.
Media columnist at the Post, Margaret Sullivan, wants to hit Fox where it could hurt – the bottom line. She wrote, “No, the only answer is to speak the language that the bigwigs at Fox will understand: Ratings. Advertising dollars. Profit. Corporations that advertise on Fox News should walk away, and citizens who care about the truth should demand that they do so (in addition to trying to steer their friends and relatives away from the network).”
Of course, when your employer is the world’s richest man and your newspaper was purchased for the cost of the change in his couch cushions, you can be very cavalier about canceling others, can’t you? First Amendment be damned, there’s a political agenda at play.
While the left-wing media complex was calling for the cancelation of Fox News and the thousands of jobs it sustains, they have circled their wagons around one of their own being held to a bare minimum of standards of journalism.
Lauren Wolfe was a contracted editor at the New York Times. She had her contract ended last week after tweeting a series of things that made clear she was on a political team, not an impartial journalist. This caused waves of anger at the Times by fellow leftist journalists outraged over what they saw as nothing out of the ordinary. (She’d said she had “chills” seeing Joe Biden’s plane land in DC the day before his inauguration, amongst other things.)
They started raising money for Wolfe and denounced her bosses. Suddenly, and very specifically, cancel culture was wrong to its originators.
It was a bit like Dr. Frankenstein complaining that his monster had damaged his castle after cheering the destruction of the village below. It doesn’t work that way. Either cancel culture is wrong, or you have to be prepared for its tactics to be used against you or someone you do care about.
The easier, smarter path would be to respect the First Amendment and the right of all Americans to their own opinions and ability to convey them, should they so choose. But that’s not how the left works anymore, if they ever really did. They seek to destroy while demanding they be exempt from any and all of the standards they impose on everyone else.
That’s not how the world works, nor should it be. The best way, really the only way, to ensure mob tactics and cancel culture don’t come for you is to not embrace it in the first place. Until the left realizes this and ends their fatwa against Fox and every conservative in any form of media, they’re going to have to take a big dose of their own medicine every time it happens. Because, sooner or later, the monster always returns to destroy the castle.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show on WCBM in Maryland, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.