By Daviemoo
And so begins another week in the UK where another entitled person – shocking no one, a cisgender straight white man – rails against the terrors of the cancel culture machine, a machine that literally stops nobody who decries it.
The ex member of Mumford & Sons, Winston Marshall unleashed his full potential as a spewer of nonsense today on GB news, or as I like to call it, “Gammon Blithering news”. Railing against the horrific, life ending effects of a cancel culture that’s claimed literally not one person who has spoken out against it, he explained his ire with people “cancelling” Joe Rogan’s podcast and stating that he sees this as trying to censor free speech.
Ultimately, adopting phraseology which allows you to attack people who are more adept at navigating the human experience than you is the ultimate weapon of people utterly ill suited to sharing the planet with others. If someone told me my behaviour was offensive to them and rather than even hearing them out I declared them woke, I’d probably be ashamed- and therein seems to be the crux- those anti woke amongst us are desperate to be allowed to continue verbally shitting their pants in public without being called out on the stench of their ridiculous words.
Listen reader, you and I are as bored as each other with this absolutely bottom drawer argument about cancel culture, wokeness and free speech so, dearest reader- lets do some debunking.
Cancel culture
Not one person that complains about cancel culture has ever been a victim of it. Let’s look at some examples.
JK Rowling- constantly stirring up transphobia, still rakes in millions, lives in a castle.
Donald Trump – he wasn’t cancelled, he lost an election because he was about as good at being a president as I am at being a blue whale
Joe Rogan – his podcast is one of the widely disseminated pieces of media that exists today even with episodes removed
Kathleen Stock – Regularly making the rounds on British media, stepped down voluntarily from her teaching role and her university protected her, immediately obtained another job
Yes some people have been wrongly accused of x and y and people have jumped on them, and this isn’t cancel culture. Its mob mentality. Normally these people are successful and people are quick to attack them because people love to see the fall of a star. It’s now par for the course for these so called “cancel culture victims” to actually be seen and heard wider from the front pages of our unquestionably right leaning media. In a way it’s become a lucrative side gig to claim cancellation and lap up money and accolades from your blind defenders. At worst cancel culture means a change of status, of employer or something else- but never for these people does it mean CANCELLATION.
“Wokeness”
Woke comes from slang to mean that someone is awakened to the existence of racial injustice. It’s now regularly thrown at people like myself as an insult, a pejorative term to indicate that I’m offended by everything and yet I have sound solid reasoning for my stances for and against certain things, whereas it’s all too easy to throw out the “oh that’s woke” flare that means that you can 1 attract your fellow thoughtless to defend whatever you’re saying and 2 immediately insulate yourself from the critique- after all, why SHOULD you have to moderate how you speak to people if theyre offended by everything? Is it because humans have been doing that since literally the beginning of time.
I’ve no doubt that if everyone walked around saying what they thought the world would look something akin to the middle of a disaster movie, riots in the street every day. It’s not woke to ask someone not to say something stupid or offensive, it’s common sense- and if you immediately declare something woke without even listening to reasoning then you’re hardly a brainbox- in fact, it takes a stupefying dearth of independent thought to simply disregard everything you don’t understand as just another thing you don’t need to learn or account for in your own behaviour. If children learn not to urinate in their pants by age 4 it’s eminently possible for an adult to learn that something they do or say is rude and adapt their behaviour.
Free speech
Ah free speech. I’ve said this literally hundreds of times: free speech actually doesn’t exist. If you walked down the street exclaiming how much you wanted to fucking murder every bastard who got in your way, you’d be in the back of a police van fairly quickly- not as quickly as before the conservatives gutted police numbers, but still. If you walked into my office as a new employee and called me a fag, I’d rightly complain and if justice prevailed you would lose your job.
Of course you’re able to say whatever you want. But should you? Free speech has been used as license for utter, mind boggling stupidity for years in online discourse. Racist people will use the N word and then cry FREE SPEECH when they lose their liveliehoods over it, shocked that they’re being punished for using hate speech- because you see, free speech is often in an intimate tango with hate speech. It’s never someone like me talking about how terrible the state of the world is decrying my lack of free speech, because what I’m saying shouldn’t be offensive to you – I’m looking out for your interests. So we see this neat intersection between free speech and hate speech, and these two things are distinct. Saying something discriminatory isn’t something to be proud of and even if you were absolutely able to do it, you exercising that right means you’re… well, an asshole. It’s that simple. You can think it all you want, but it’s possible to have thoughts and believe them deeply and not say them- I believe I want to mount some of the more muscular guys at the gym but I fully expect they’d probably be pretty offended if I sashayed over and gave them the laundry list of tawdry acts I’d perform on them. It’s common sense to keep your thoughts in your head- and the free speech bayers often lack common sense in place of the ability to censor or hold in their thoughts.
Additionally, let’s go further with all these things.
Many of the Cancel Woke Free Speech shouters claim they want people to be able to say whatever they want. Recently in Germany a far right politician ran on the platform of “you should be able to say whatever you want!” and when a political commentator said “yeah, listen to the Nazi bitch” she… sued him.
So it’s never, ever about being able to say whatever you want. And if someone from Isis was online spouting off about the west being decadent and disgusting I guarantee they’d raise their hackles- it’s exclusively about right wing bigotry being allowed. Let’s put it this way- if they really believed in free speech they wouldn’t get so pissed off when we called them out on their disgusting words and actions.
Joe Rogan has the ability to say the N word. He shouldn’t. Society dictates that- if he wants to do it, society is allowed to call him out. He’s absolutely able to platform anti vaccine propogandists- should he? It’s easy enough to find well reviewed peer confirmed data that shows vaccines are safe and effective. So he’s being called out for doing shitty things, and for being WRONG… and if it’s now become “cancel culture” to tell someone they’re wrong then the problem isn’t political correctness gone mad- it’s stupid people becoming far too confident in being able to create verbal diarrhoea without being told they are being stupid.
If you don’t want to be called stupid, either be smart, or be quiet.
Daviemoo is a 34 year old independent writer, radicalised into blogging about the political state of the world by Brexit and the election of serial failures like Trump and Johnson. Please check out the rest of the blog, check out Politically Enraged, the podcast available on all streaming platforms and share with your like minded friends! Also check him out on ko-fi where you can keep him caffeinated whilst he writes.
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