On "Cancel Culture"

Someone else entirely, and a typo on my part. Tim Pool is a right-wing podcaster.

(sigh)

Anyway, yeah, thanks.

 

How It's Going

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Something else: Click because you think you can.​

Ben Collins↱, this morning:

This InfoWars interview with Kanye West is getting so thoroughly antisemitic that even Alex Jones is pushing back, after West has spent the last few minutes accusing Jews of being pedophiles. "I think most Jews are great people," Jones says. "But I agree there's a Jewish mafia."​

Think of it this way: Even Alex Jones can't take it.

Collins continues:

Honestly I'm not sure what to do here. I cannot tell you how unbelievably antisemitic this Kanye West Infowars interview is. This is straight up, old fashioned Naziism being mainstreamed from celebrities who are in the ear of the last U.S. president.

Getting a little horrifying. On Infowars, Kanye having a pretend conversation with Bibi Netanyahu (whose name he said he earlier learned two weeks ago). He brought a prop on a stick to argue with "Bibi" like a puppet, mockingly saying "I'm gonna take your family away from you."

I cannot believe I'm saying this, but Alex Jones seems uncomfortable here, trying to get Kanye to take off the mask that covers his entire face and to at least slow down on the hatred of Jews.

"I'm not on that whole Jew thing," Jones says.

This is just a shockingly antisemitic interview. However bad you think it is from the random quotes from Kanye today, it's considerably worse. Overt Naziism that is making Alex Jones himself squirm.​

And here, Collins cites NBC News colleague Marisa Kabas↱, who observed:

ALEX JONES: You're not Hitler. You're not a nazi. You don't deserve to be described as that.

KANYE: I see good things about Hitler, also.​

Her thread includes audio of Alex Jones trying to set up a segment on George Soros, in which Kanye can be heard responding, "I like Hitler." Again↑, someone close to him needs to intervene; if we are to worry about his mental health, then we might wonder at how the rest of his life spent in infamy as a noncompetent toady who betrayed his community might affect his psychological circumstance. Yes, it feels hilarious, in its own way, that Ye went after Ben Shapiro, even more so that he cribbed from a white nationalist, but what actually makes the shekel joke funny is a matter of priorities: That it devours Kanye West is either funny or significant of his psychological condition, but it can't quite be both. "We gotta stop dissing the Nazis all the time," proclaimed the Yeezy one, who explained, "They did good things, too."

And if it is hard to imagine what the end of Kanye's career would look like, it is one thing to wonder at his determination to test that precipice, yet if he is swallowed by the abyss and his pop star career is utterly destroyed, how long will people remember how it went before he becomes an icon of the cancel culture complaint? How long before we hear about how Yeezy was so unfairly canceled by snowflake liberals and some Jewish world-domination conspiracy?

Historically, we've already been through the bit where people keep pushing on something just for the sake of being obnoxious and making some personal point of declaring one's own empowerment, and it turns out that the reason a lot of those people who weren't supremacist but just proving what's wrong with feminists, liberals, and snowflakes, actually believed the stuff they were pushing in order to be obnoxious. We've already learned this lesson.

There will be, in all this, a lesson for the discussion about cancel culture; we just have to wait to find out what it is. If Ye is destroyed, then we have a boundary marker; if not, then we laugh anew at how petulant is the complaint about cancel culture.
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Notes:

@MarisaKabas. "ALEX JONES: You're not Hitler. You're not a nazi. You don't deserve to be described as that. KANYE: I see good things about Hitler, also. (just now on Infowars)". (thread) Twitter. 1 December 2022. Twitter.com. 1 December 2022. https://bit.ly/3B1k9hF

@oneunderscore__. "This InfoWars interview with Kanye West is getting so thoroughly antisemitic that even Alex Jones is pushing back, after West has spent the last few minutes accusing Jews of being pedophiles. 'I think most Jews are great people,' Jones says. 'But I agree there's a Jewish mafia.'" (thread) Twitter. 1 December 2022. Twitter.com. 1 December 2022. https://bit.ly/3H3xYQn

 

How It's Going

Activist and researcher Jason Campbell↱ offers two images from right-wing media outlet Newsmax, observing, "These segments ran back-to-back."

The first features a chyron reading, "Florida bill to end Democratic Party".

The chyron in the second image reads, "Florida's fight against cancel culture".

Reminder↗: Cancel culture asserts on behalf of anti-egalitarianism and radical exclusionism. This is the counterrevolutionary implication: Cancel culture is a complaint against the disruption of empowerment to cancel. Florida is helping make the point.

Some prefer an anti-liberal narrative to describe cancel culture, and once again their beliefs are frustrated and demeaned by the conservative attitudes they seek to protect.
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Notes:

@JasonSCampbell. "These segments ran back-to-back. Beyond parody." Twitter. 3 March 2023. Twitter.com. 3 March 2023. https://bit.ly/3kJnBsa