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

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

Article Analysis: Warren's Surrogate Gaffe, Media Double Standards towards Bernie and the Cone of Silence

Editor's note: this article originally appeared October 21st, 2019 on Facebook; for more of my recent writing, please check out my image blog at Can't You Read; including this piece of why war in Syria is still bad despite Trump, institutional loyalty, class and propaganda in "Ghost Wars" by Tim Weiner, and what's changed about liberal attitudes towards Ed Snowden in the past six years. 

All analysis by Nina Illingworth unless otherwise indicated.

---

"Elizabeth Warren Under Fire as Campaign Surrogate’s Racist, Homophobic Tweets Come to Light" 

Frankly I'm not going to spend a lot of time analyzing the above piece from October 14th because there's really not a whole lot to analyze here, but let's summarize a little bit: 

One of Elizabeth Warren's high-profile campaign surrogates (activist Ashlee Marie Preston) who happens to be a black trans woman made the ludicrous claim that Bernie Sanders has never supported the LGBT community and declared that she "had the receipts" to prove it. 

As it turns out however, it was Preston herself who had left a long list of receipts online - specifically all manner of homophobic, bigoted and racist tweets which I'm not going to bother to review here, you can just read the article if you want to get a good idea of how awful they were.

Predictably, Preston issued a defiant "sorry, not sorry" non-apology and began deleting tweets while the Warren campaign did everything it possibly could to deny any sort of official ties to Ashlee Marie - offering meekly that Preston was "not on the payroll" of the Warren campaign, which is pretty funny because I'm pretty sure Bernie Sanders isn't paying folks like Nina Turner or Killer Mike either but nobody would doubt they are Sanders campaign surrogates. As the photo at the top of the Law and Crime article above clearly indicates, Ashlee Marie Preston was clearly an official part of the Warren campaign and whether or not they paid her directly for her time and services out of the campaign kitty is completely irrelevant to the subject at hand. 

While the Warren campaign's response *is* more than just a little shameful, the simple truth is that I'm not here to bust Liz's chops for employing a bad campaign surrogate without doing the proper amount of vetting beforehand. Mind you, I do take exception to the campaign's attempts to portray itself as an innocent and friendly bystander while Liz uses folks like Preston and loyal think tanks like Demos to mercilessly slander and attack Sanders in the public discourse, but Warren isn't the first campaign to screw up by failing to properly vet a particularly aggressive and effective surrogate, nor will she be the last either. This is obviously a serious gaffe, but it's not even remotely as openly disqualifying as say Palooka Joe Biden's corruption or Trapper Keeper's habit of chucking binders at subordinates.

What I personally find more revealing about this whole sad episode is the nominally-liberal, mainstream corporate media's disturbing cone of silence surrounding a story which, if it had been a Sanders campaign surrogate, would almost certainly have been a front page story for at least a couple of days. There's a reason I'm sharing a link from Law and Crime, an objectively right wing (albeit not fascist) news blog and it's because if you do a Google search right now, you'll discover that while multiple "winger" outlets across the spectrum from blogs to Fox News picked up the story, it somehow didn't even rate a comment on sites like MSNBC, Vox, Salon, the Washington Post or any one of the numerous, even pro-Biden websites that dominate the "liberal blogosphere."

Naturally sycophants and apologists will simply argue that the incident isn't newsworthy and the right's only interests here are sensationalism and the endless culture war, but any fair-minded observer of the ongoing liberal vilification of both Bernie surrogate Susan Sarandon and Sanders himself for not disavowing Sarandon will know that's utter hogwash - this might not be disqualifying for Warren, but it sure as sh*t is "news" in any reasonable understanding of the word.

At this point it absolutely could not be *more* obvious that mainstream liberal media is openly "in the tank" for a Liz Warren nomination run; that's not a conspiracy, that's just a reasonable analysis of the available evidence and it should definitely concern you if you're still clinging to the lie that Warren is "basically the same" as Bernie if you're a working class voter. There's a reason Wall Street, billion dollar media corporations and rich Democratic Party donors are all "coming around" on Liz Warren and it certainly isn't because they now agree with Bernie's agenda - the same agenda these liberal media outlets want you to believe Warren has improved upon for her 2020 nomination run.

Indeed as those of you who study the growing phenomenon of online censorship are no doubt already aware, this problem actually goes much deeper than just the mainstream corporate media because the entire establishment is against Sanders and in on this cone of silence. For just one obvious example, do a quick Google search for "Susan Sarandon liberals insane" and then repeat that same search with "Duck Duck Go" - as you'll see, someone at Alphabet (the giant company that used to be Google) doesn't think pointing out the objectively insane liberal obsession with Susan Sarandon is worth including in the front four pages of results; that's not an accident (see below.)

Of course all of this will hardly be news to anyone who watched the Washington post publish sixteen negative headlines about Sanders in sixteen hours during the 2016 Democratic Primary but the obvious contradictions here, both in terms of the media's supposed role in the election process and the staggeringly obvious bias against Sanders require constant reminding in the face of this same "cone of silence." Elections are not supposed to be decided by an openly biased corporate media complex and the newsworthiness of a given story isn't supposed to have anything to do with whether or not the boss likes a given candidate - yet clearly, in the American "democratic" system, nothing is as it's "supposed" to be in a liberal democracy and the ruling classes are determined to stop Bernie Sanders and his labor class political revolution at all costs.

The obvious question then becomes, will the American labor class get "fooled again" or will they find a way to see past the cone of silence and an interconnected web of aristocratic lies to vote for the only candidate in the 2020 Dem Primary who actually represents their interests? 

Nobody can predict the future, but I'm willing to bet that after four years of lies, smears and open gaslighting against the real left and the roughly eighty-nine percent of American society that comprises the labor class, folks are awful tired of watching Lucy snatch away the football. If 2016 taught us anything it's that while the liberal corporate media can certainly *lose* an election, they are utterly incapable of winning one - unless liberal elites are prepared to shatter the Democratic Party into a thousand pieces by blatantly rigging another nomination process, Bernie Sanders will be the 2020 nominee on the Democratic side, and yes, he'll beat Donald Trump or Mike Pence regardless of how this impeachment inquiry shakes out.

This is the end of the line for neoliberalism; the only question left is will the rich folks burn the party to the ground to stall the rise of Democratic Socialism and thereby hand the country over to a reality TV show fascist (again) for another four years? I wouldn't bet against it, but after watching 26,000 excited people cram into a Sanders rally on a cold October Saturday, it's clear that they're going to have to do a little better than the same old cone of silence to stop Bernie's momentum this time.

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

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

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.

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