Woke Cancel Culture: De-Platforming Human Rights

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” ~Salman Rushdie

Censorship is one of the religious practices of Wokeism. It is a necessary doctrinal practice to keep the ideology shielded from rational and reasoned critique, because the religion of wokeism, as is the case with all religions, cannot stand on its own intellectual merits, or else we would call them sciences, not religions. No, ideologies must severely punish blasphemy and heresy if they want to survive, and an ideology’s only main objective is to spread like a social and psychological virus. For this reason, ideological movements need to establish extremely strict and neurotic fences to maintain their structural integrity. These fences must be zealously policed and if a patroller notices someone climbing over the fence and attempting to live freely on the outside, sanctions must be swift, severe, and advertised to dissuade others from trying to live beyond the confines of the ideological compound. These fences also serve to divide humanity into two competing categories, insiders and outsiders. Woke ideological authoritarianism uses cancel culture as a punitive measure by which both escaping insiders and heretical outsiders are publicly punished to coerce widespread conformity, and this religion’s primary goal, which is intellectual hegemony. Here we encounter a prima-facie distinction between other cults like Scientology, who primarily seek to control insiders through fear of degradation and banishment. However, in similitude to Wokeism, Scientology is also notorious for harassing and litigating its non-believing critics.

James Lindsay argues that the Woke tend to police each other more heavily than they police the non-Woke [citation pending]. If true, this would go some way to mitigating my distinction between Wokeism and cults like Scientology, but it wouldn’t eradicate the distinction entirely, as there is a growing number of examples of non-Woke outsiders to the movement being targeted for cancellation. I think the reason for this could be, Wokeism is largely, yet not exclusively, an online socio-political religious movement, which gives it an extended capacity to enforce its dogmatic worldview on both insiders and outsiders.

Cancel culture is spreading throughout all of its host-societies’ institutions, from entertainment to academia. Most notably of recent, comedians are bearing the brunt when it comes to the implementation of this doctrinal practice.

You must be exhausted reading all of these heavy concepts. I know I am. Let’s take a quick comedy break, shall we?

Regarding cancel culture’s impact on society, Jordan Peterson correctly observed that today’s comedians are the “canaries in the coal mine“, so to speak. The reason for the Woke moral panic surrounding comedy will be discussed below, however, in the conceptual framework of Woke orthodoxy, jokes, words and phrases all have near-supernatural powers, and where rational people see a harmless joke, the Woke see a violent and dangerous thought-crime capable of creating real atrocities, and so cancellation of the expresser is seen as the only safe remedy. But what is cancel culture? Let’s start by clarifying what cancel culture is not. It is not someone receiving public criticism for saying something that offends the norms of the society. Let’s just get that meme out of the way. The term can be applied in different ways and exercised to varying degrees, and against various targets, from people to anything at all the Woke find “problematic” and worthy of erasing for the rest of us. Brooke Kato of the New York Post defines ‘cancel culture’ in the following words:

‘…the phenomenon of promoting the “canceling” of people, brands and even shows and movies due to what some consider to be offensive or problematic remarks or ideologies.’

The Woke defend this mechanism of control by arguing that they are just innocently and justifiably “holding people accountable for their violence”. As discussed in my full piece on the religious nature of Wokeism, to the Woke, “violence” can be something as innocuous as an innocent and non-violent act, omission, symbol, breath, or comment capable of being misconstrued in a manner that goes against this hypersensitive cult’s neurotic dogmas. As an example, the ‘OK’ hand gesture, despite being important to the deaf community, is now considered by the Woke as a symbol of hate, simply because some alt-right activists used it. On the New Discourses website, Lindsay said of cancel culture:

‘Because of the cultural power held by Social Justice ideas and activists and the fears of organizations that they will be deemed racist, sexist, or transphobic, etc., these attempts at cancellation are often successful (see also, hegemony). Various factors, including the popularity of the individual (thus their potential influence on the discourses), the seriousness of the problematic speech or behavior, and the “wokeness” of the individual’s audience or that of the organization for which they work, decide whether that individual is ever able to redeem themselves or will be forever “untouchable.” The goal of a cancellation is usually to remove the targeted individual from status-bearing jobs, particularly ones that have the capacity to create or influence the discourses of society.’

The list of cancelled people and things grows at an increasingly rapid rate. Not even cheese is safe from cancellation. A famous brand of cheese in Australia has been pulled from the shelves and rebranded due to its “offensive” name. Coon Cheese, named after American cheesemaker Edward Coon, is now ‘Cheer Cheese’ after an uproar by the Woke orthodoxy in Australia. Coon, however, is not a racial slur in this context at all – it is a Scottish family name of Gaelic origin. Nonetheless, this family name was deemed cancel-worthy due to its fortuitous phonetic transliteration into English.

DE-PLATFORMING HUMAN RIGHTS

De-platforming is one of the ways in which the Woke orthodoxy employ cancel culture to assert control over speech. It has become increasingly common to have Woke students at universities practice their religious rite of shouting down and banning speakers who cause them to experience cognitive dissonance. This is potentially one of the Woke orthodoxy’s most nefarious doctrines, because those who control speech control the narrative, and those who control the narrative control truth, or at least the subjective and collective perceptions of the truth. It is no logical fallacy to observe the slippery slope this creates toward useful mass-ignorance and tyranny. Information and thought control have been a staple for all tyrannies of the past and present. Just as one example from modern history:

‘in the early twentieth century, before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Empire of Japan (1868–1947), in 1911, established the Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu (‘Special Higher Police’), a political police force also known as Shisō Keisatsu, the Thought Police, who investigated and controlled native political groups whose ideologies were considered a threat to the public order of the countries colonised by Japan.’

I could go on to cite the Nazi’s book burnings, Stalin’s secret police, who were responsible for reporting thought-crimes, as well as a plethora of other examples in North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Just as reporting an employee to his/her private employer for unsanctioned expressions of thought, de-platforming seeks to silence heterodox speech by coercing social media and mainstream media platforms to de-platform commentators who commit the sin of ‘Woke blasphemy’. As is the case with traditional blasphemy, Woke blasphemy attacks the two cornerstone human rights of freedom of thought and freedom of expression, without which the very foundations of human rights crumble, along with the civilizations these rights uphold and protect. However, the Woke clergy argue that de-platforming is not a human rights issue because it doesn’t seek to legally prevent someone from freely expressing themselves. They argue that such people can still go out into the streets with signs (for now) that express their opinions, and that private companies have every right to decide to whom they provide their platforms and services. I agree. Legislating restrictions that would protect the principle of free speech at the expense of freedom of association and the freedom companies require to decide who they do business with would be like biting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It is, however, a point of irony that some Woke believers promote freedom for some private companies whilst also arguing against such freedom for others. Where the Woke zealously defend the autonomy of companies like Twitter and Facebook, they preach government intervention when it comes to Christian bakeries who would rather not provide their services to same-sex weddings. I am not arguing in favour of these bigoted bakeries, but it is certainly an interesting conundrum for the Woke orthodoxy, and illustrates Chris Rock’s criticisms concerning selective outrage. To steel man this point, you could argue that this example relies on a false equivalence between identity and speech. That is to say, being gay is not always a choice, but what you say is always a choice, therefore the former deserves unequivocal protection whilst the latter does not. The Woke might also argue that if the speech hurts someone’s feelings (“speech is violence”), regardless of how important that speech is to the identity of the person expressing it, then that speech should not be protected whereas someone’s sexual identity should always be protected. But aren’t both of these rights equally important to maintaining a free and harmonious society? I think most human rights lawyers would probably argue that the right to express yourself via your sexuality is just as important as the right to express yourself via your opinions, thoughts and beliefs. In fact, it could be easily argued that freedom of expression underpins gay rights, and that any assault on this foundational freedom has the potential to dangerously undermine the freedom of all expressions, whether those expressions involve dildos or microphones.

Once censorship takes root in society it is very difficult to uproot, because censorship is self-protecting and what the Woke orthodoxy fail to appreciate is that there is no guarantee that the dominant political philosophy of the day will remain in power. What if the far-right rises to power? Don’t you think they would benefit from the Left’s zealous erosion of these two fundamental human rights? Of course they would! I would warn the Woke to be very careful what they wish for, because before you know it, you’ve just unwittingly dug mass-graves for all those principles your well-intentioned ignorance has sought to protect.

Whilst cancel culture and de-platforming are not strictly considered human rights issues, their application generally have the same stifling impact on freedom of thought and expression. In a hyper-sensitive and hyper-reactive environment, where one could lose one’s livelihood and be unable to feed themselves and their family, self-censorship becomes the most logical behaviour, and once this behaviour becomes the norm, freedom of expression and thought may as well be illegal. In this way, the Woke orthodoxy are threatening the existence of human rights in countries that have enjoyed immense progress as a result of these rights.