Film Sessions: Cancel Culture by Tom Nicholas

 

Editor's note: Film Sessions is a weekly feature here on Media Madness in which I share, analyze and expand on a relevant video created by someone on the left wing of YouTube. 

You're Not Cancelled If You're Still On My TV

I must confess that personally, I've always struggled to take the discourse around what its critics have dubbed "cancel culture" very seriously and, aside from perhaps some passing commentary on the No Fugazi Podcast, I've never really bothered to wade into the discussion with any vigor. This is, at least in part, because I am extremely online enough to know that half the folks who signed the now infamous "Harper's letter" are virulent transphobes, former friends of billionaire pedophile sex slaver Jeff Epstein, or the kind of folks who think acknowledging that Palestinians are people and deserving of basic human rights, is somehow anti-Semitic. Oh, and there's also that part where the whole debate is clearly a stalking horse for the reactionary American right; it's rather hard to take folks who call Tucker Carlson a brave truthteller very seriously, after all.

Even setting right wing f*ckery and craven self interest aside however, there has always been something about the class character of the discussion that felt significantly off to me. After all, the labor class (especially in America) overwhelmingly works under a system of "at will" employment, and can therefore be fired at any time, for almost any reason, or in many cases no reason at all - "congratulations, you've been downsized!" Yet in the larger "cancel culture" discussion you find a completely manufactured moral panic, being pushed by bougie media muppets drawn almost exclusively from the upper classes, about the possibility that other, upper class media muppets might face online criticism and the periodic book boycott, for their crappy and often bigoted opinions. The vast majority of the people whining about cancel culture haven't lost career opportunities for their odious behavior, and given their ability to find a sympathetic platform full of other bougie class media muppets to gripe about the issue incessantly, you can't really suggest they're being "silenced" somehow either. Of course, corporate or institutional censorship does indeed exist online and in the media, but we already have words for those phenomenon and any reasonable person can see that has little to do with some folks online deciding not to buy JK Rowling's next (explicitly transphobic) book because she's a piece of dogsh*t.

Taken altogether, that certainly doesn't sound like anything a labor class person should really give a damn about, so I didn't much give a damn about the "cancel culture" debate. Alas, naval gazing media minions obsessed with presenting their class grievances as mere "common sense" have never really cared about the opinions of the peasantry, and thus this "cancel culture" debate continues to rage on to this day; and sometimes, from some rather frustrating sources. In light of the interminable nature of the subject, I've been waiting for the right moment to offer some of the above opinions on the cancel culture hysteria, and this week's Film Sessions post is precisely just such an opportunity.

Today's feature sees the return of popular creator Tom Nicholas and his series What the Theory; which we examined in detail during our previous discussions about media bias and neoliberalism. At this point, I feel like we know what we're getting with Nicholas's work; longer videos with high production values, pinpoint editing, and a firm background in the kind of theory you have to actually read books to learn. In "Cancel Culture: Fear of the Mob" however, Tom also shows off a delightful talent for comedic sketch-work, and some genuinely subversive sensibilities when it comes to class issues and the nature of crowds.

This highly watchable presentation is divided into two parts, intertwined with each other throughout the entire forty-seven minute episode. This first portion is a subversive, darkly comedic, and extremely snarky little comedy sketch about the fictitious "cancellation" of Tom Nicholas, that includes winking allusions to the theatrics of notable sh*theels like Jordan Peterson, JK Rowling and indeed, the entire celebrity whining cycle surrounding cancel culture. The second part of the episode, which I'm choosing to focus on here so as not to spoil the fun for those enjoying the skit, is a far more stringent, academic study about the class issues surrounding both the spurious literature on crowd psychology, as well as the relation between "cancel culture" fearmongering in the media, and a ruling class that has promoted the idea of the bloodthirsty mob for centuries to undermine popular direct action.

Nicholas opens by examining the principle arguments and selection bias of those promoting the cancel culture moral panic, and discovers that they directly echo longstanding pro-ruling class, anti-direct action theories about the danger of mobs, and the madness of crowds, put forward by upper class, pearl-clutching muppets like Gustave Le Bon, Charles Mackay, and modern writers who apply the same theories to online life; folks like Jon Ronson. So what's the problem? Well, as Nicholas notes, academic studies of crowds, protests and mobs have utterly discredited those theories from a scientific perspective, and they remain with us only because they are repeated over and over as "common sense" by a ruling class that is eager to police protest actions by the proletariat, and remains altogether uncomfortable with being criticized by filthy peasants. 

Our presenter then transplants this understanding into a fascinating discussion about how the mendacious presentation of cancel culture arguments encourage us to treat all incidents of public shaming as identical (when they most certainly are not,) while observing that the very purpose of attacks on the "online mob" is to police who counts as an individual, and whose ideas are treated as valid or self-determined. Along the way Tom also kicks the crap out of that putrid, self-serving Harper's letter (while noting the obtuse tone-deafness of releasing it at the height of a fascist crackdown on demonstrators protesting the extrajudicial murder of George Floyd by an American police officer,) points out that the cancel culture discussion provides an unwarranted veneer of legitimacy for otherwise blatantly bigoted opinions or behaviors, and lays waste to the idea that online criticism has any real long-term impact on the careers of affluent whiners pushing this moral panic. 

Throw in the genuinely humorous skit, and that sure is a lot of "bang" for your time investment. As regular readers of my work will undoubtedly be aware, the above-mentioned class tensions and assaults on objectively reactionary "common sense" in capitalist societies are kind of my jam at this point, and as such I found Tom's video absolutely smashing. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that the inclusion of these elements makes "Cancel Culture: Fear of the Mob" one of only a very few truly worthwhile videos about the subject on YouTube. 

You can check it out by clicking the header, or watching the embedded video itself, below:

"Cancel Culture: Fear of the Mob"

Additional Resources

Tom Nicholas's Youtube Channel

The Real Cancel Culture

Cancel Culture Is Not Real: At Least Not in Way People Think

Political Correctness Is Destroying America! (Just Not How You Think)

The “Free Speech Debate” Isn’t Really About Free Speech

The Real War on Free Speech

Harper's Platforms Famous Writers So They Can Whine About Being Silenced

The Class Politics of the Harper's Letter

Cancel Culture is a Class Issue

‘Cancel Culture’ Is How the Powerful Play Victim

You’re Getting Called Out, Not Canceled

Transgender people and the Harper’s Open Letter

What’s Wrong with “Cancel Culture”?

How White Religious Conservatives Invented Cancel Culture

Why the Right Is Obsessed With Cancel Culture

The “Cancel Culture” Con

Tucker Carlson, Ariel Pink and the Cancel Culture Grift

‘Cancel Culture’ Isn’t Real

The Reality of Cancel Culture Is that it Is Not Real

Don Cheadle Tells Fox News Cancel Culture is ‘A Fabrication’

Our Political Upheaval Wasn't Caused by Mob Rule

The Myth of the Mob: How Crowds Really Work

Donald Trump and the Myth of Mobocracy

How Being Part of a Crowd Can Change You For the Better

Crowds Are Not People, My Friend

nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Six Things I Think: The Enemy of My Enemy Is Still a Fascist, Actually (Link)

 

Editor’s note: our Six Things I Think feature is a type of post I use when I want to cover a lot of ground about a multi-faceted topic very quickly. Although you don’t strictly *have to* click on every citation link in this essay, you might want to at least read the headline articles, and watch the embedded videos, as they each frame the discussion immediately underneath them.

Please also note that this article is part of the “Amerikan Musik: Fascism Ascendant in the USA” collection on ninaillingworth.com.

Ok, so I'm definitely aware I've been away for almost a week but I'm hoping by the time you click on the link to this article, you'll understand why - it's pretty, extensive.

What is it? An extremely detailed, multi-media Deep Dive post explaining why Boogaloos are fascists, Jimmy Dore is no leftist, and online pinkos have a crypto-reactionary infuencer problem.

Finally I guess I should warn you that I wasn't exactly thrilled about having to spend 9,000 words explaining to pinkos who don't read theory, why we don't make alliances with fascist militias; it's funny, but I'm not pulling punches out of respect for your faves, and there's quite a good deal of profanity in the piece. I literally do not care if this makes folks mad because going along to get along with reactionaries and fascists is no way to do leftism.

You can check out by clicking on the header below:

Six Things I Think: The Enemy of My Enemy Is Still a Fascist, Actually 

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Film Sessions: The Minimum Wage Debate Explained by Second Thought

 

Editor's note: Film Sessions is a weekly feature here on Media Madness in which I share, analyze and expand on a relevant video created by someone on the left wing of Youtube.

-----

As I promised readers last week, today we're going to take a look at a video from a new creator we haven't featured yet on Media Madness: JT Chapman, otherwise known in the world of lefty Youtube as "Second Thought." 

Although I really don't know that much about Chapman, I first encountered his work a couple weeks back when my friend from Discord, TechnOkami, suggested I check out his January 15th, 2021 video about the fascist riot on Capitol Hill and what I (and others) regard as Trump's failed coup attempt. While I didn't ultimately end up featuring that video because the Renegade Cut presentation I did feature was more in line with the discussions I was already having about Americanized fascism with my audience, there were a couple of portions of Chapman's video I wished I could share in isolation: 

• First up would be the part where our presenter names and shames elected Republican officials who either directly helped inspire the riots, or were actively on the ground participating in what quickly turned out to be a chud-backed "stupid coup" attempt. This is really just a simple rundown of elected fascists and fascist sympathizers that oddly enough, you won't find in any corporate media outlet in America, anytime soon.

• More importantly however, Chapman's Capitol Hill riot video also explicitly and directly explored the class character of the chud insurrectionists themselves and found, to the surprise of precisely zero Marxists on Earth, that they were not in fact working class, but rather business owners, affluent leisure class muppets and at very best, fine examples of the Volkish American petite-bourgeoisie - which is after all, the class right wing "populist" leaders really mean when they refer to "the people" on the hustings. 

Ultimately it was this latter, class-focused angle that really attracted me to Chapman's work, and I didn't have to wait long for him to release another video that also revolved around class analysis; specifically this one - "The Minimum Wage Debate Explained." 

In terms of general bells and whistles, Chapman's work actually has quite a lot to offer here and most of it is on display in this excellent and informative fourteen minute video. Although the "voiceover + video clips" style of Youtube essay has faded from fashion online, I'm old enough to genuinely prefer it to the modern "guy talking in front of a CGI logo" format that is more popular today. Chapman himself is clear, as well as articulate and his essays appear to be well organized and presented at pace based on the few I've watched; which is something I always appreciate as a viewer.

To open the video, our presenter notes that because the discussion surrounding the minimum wage is somewhat constantly in the American news these days, he's going to focus on some of the rarely if ever discussed underlying issues surrounding the raise the minimum wage debate itself. This then transitions into a very rough, four minute history of American labor conditions and the legally mandated minimum wage. The important takeaways here in my mind are that contrary to popular libertarian mythology, capitalists were making a pile of money from child labor and would not have ended it on their own (more on why this matters in a moment,) and that even by the standards of Depression-Era American labor, modern minimum wage workers are vastly underpaid. Accounting for merely inflation, the real minimum wage in the U.S. should be around thirteen bucks an hour and if you factor in productivity, which essentially represents your ability to meet your employer's increased demands, it should be roughly twenty-four dollars an hour. Although Chapman doesn't mention this until later, it is crucial to understand here that there is literally no place in America, where the federal minimum wage of seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour, represents an actual living wage. 

The next few minutes of the video go through a sort of point by point refutation of common business class, or bourgeoisie arguments against raising the minimum wage in America. Although I would strongly encourage you to actually watch the video, we'll take a brief look at each of them below:

• The argument that minimum wage is for students and retirees, and thus was never meant to be a living wage. Setting aside the fact that this is just straight up not true, Chapman presents a fairly decent moral argument that it is objectively wrong to pay even students and retirees literal poverty wages. What I really would have liked to see here however, is some acknowledgement that relying on students living with their parents, and elderly pensioners to make up their minimum wage workforce, is essentially allowing corporate America to have someone else subsidize their workforce. This would then include a discussion about how this subsidized workforce generates a tremendous amount of downward pressure on wages for labor throughout the entire working class as Second Thought later defines it; as was the case in our previous example regarding child labor, above. Finally, this would allow one to point out that the root problem here, the transformation of labor from something living, breathing people do, into a commodity that has to be traded at the lowest possible price, inextricably links all strata of labor class society; thus (as demonstrated by the very study of the 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act Chapman references multiple times in this video) an increase in the minimum wage is likely to result in increased wages for the entire labor class - an objectively good thing unless you're a member of the exploiter "owner" class.

• The argument that increasing the minimum wage will drastically raise the price of rental housing. This claim is at best highly speculative, and in all likelihood completely unrelated to the topic; as Chapman demonstrates by pointing out the 40% average rental price increase between 2010 and 2020, a period during which the minimum wage didn't rise at all.

• The argument that increasing the minimum wage will drastically raise the price of everyday goods and services; the most common example given is typically a McDonald's "Big Mac" sandwich. JT tears that one to shreds by pointing out McDonald's workers in Denmark make twenty-two dollars an hour (in addition to numerous benefits) and yet the price of a Big Mac in that country is a mere twenty-seven cents more than in America; leading our presenter to ask if twenty-seven cents is really that high a price to pay for human dignity and survival? 

• The argument that raising the minimum wage will result in widespread business closures and economic devastation. On this point, Chapman's rebuttal is quite intricate and really has to be divided into two parts; corporate profits and the cherished American small business. In regards to the former, JT points out that same study of the 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act which indicates that there were literally no business closures as a result of increasing the minimum wage at that time, while also asking viewers to consider the enormous profits American corporations and the rich people who own them have racked up during the global coronavirus crisis. In other words, raising the minimum wage isn't going to cause corporations to become unprofitable and go out of business, but it might keep Jeff Bezos from buying an extra yacht this year; how tragic. As for small business, Chapman points out that if you're unable to turn a profit while paying your workers literally about a third of what the adjusted minimum wage really should be, then your business is making money by exploiting people and thus by the logic of your own free market, you probably shouldn't be in business. He then notes that one method of reducing the (largely hypothetical) burden minimum wage increases create on small business, is to automatically tie the minimum wage to inflation and productivity metrics, producing gradual increases over time - like they do in noted socialist country, um, France. 

• Finally, Chapman notes the absurdity of the argument that raising the minimum wage is bad because it will cause unskilled workers to make more than other low-paid workers like say, teachers, in a country that has no problem spending a trillion or so dollars a year on its military. Ultimately JT concludes that literally all low-paid workers should receive better wages in America and again, given that whole reality that the minimum wage tracked to inflation and worker productivity objectively should be twenty-four dollars an hour - it's pretty hard to disagree with him. 

Now to be clear, all of that does in fact make for an interesting explainer video in its own right; I mean it's certainly a damn sight better than anything they do over at Vox for example. Furthermore, I have to give JT credit for finding a way to put together a video primarily about debunking think tank talking points, without falling into the trap of only reacting to their bullsh*t, and not assailing the "common sense" ideas that underpin this disingenuous, pro-capitalist propaganda. Still, what ultimately makes this video stand out is not our presenter's ability to de-spin a relatively straightforward issue, but the fact that he also articulates a rudimentary vision of American class struggle through the lens of the federal minimum wage. Touching on American hyper-competitiveness, exploitation, and social Darwinism, the piece goes well beyond the minimum wage debate and asks important questions about how we organize work in America, and why, or perhaps rather - for whom? The language is a little off, and one is forced to wonder if JT understands that literally all wage labor under capitalism is exploitation, but in the final analysis, this essay is firmly rooted in basic Marxist ideas about labor and wages, in a way you aren't going to find from more mainstream news outlets. 

All in all, I'd have to describe this video as excellent and Second Thought himself, as a lefty Youtube creator worth watching; I know I subscribed about halfway through the presentation. You can check it out by clicking the header, or watching the embedded video itself, below:

The Minimum Wage Debate Explained

Additional Resources

Second Thought Youtube Channel

JT Chapman Twitter

If Worker Pay Kept Pace With Productivity: $24/hr Minimum Wage

Full-time min wage workers can't afford 2-bedroom rental anywhere in US

$7.25 an hour is not a living wage

It Was Always Supposed To Be A Living Wage

 Study shows taxpayers are subsidizing “starvation wages” at McDonald's, Walmart

Raising the Minimum Wage Would Boost Recovery and Reduce Subsidization

Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 Would Lift Pay for 40 Million

Out of Reach (NLIHC Report)

The affordable housing crisis, explained

McDonald’s Workers in Denmark Pity Us

Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality

This is why raising the minimum wage can help cities to thrive

Minimum wage increases aren’t a job killer

Profits are soaring for large retailers but frontline workers barely earn more

The Rich Got Richer During COVID-19

The gig economy is being fueled by exploitation, not innovation

Research Shows Minimum Wage Increases Do Not Cause Job Loss

America’s Defense Budget Is Bigger Than You Think

Marx on exploitation: an ABC for an unequal world

A Functional Class Framework for Modern Western Leftists

nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”