Film Sessions: Cancel Culture Fear of the Mob by Tom Nicholas

NinaIllingworth February 11, 2021November 5, 2022 American politics, analysis, Bigotry, blog, Cancel Culture, cancel culture isn't real, class war, common sense, criticism isn't censorship, crowd psychology, culture war, FA1, Fantastic Lies, film sessions, grift, Harper's Letter, JA5, JK Rowling, Jordan Peterson, left wing theory, left wing Youtube, Matt Taibbi, Media, Media Madness, MP6, News, Nina Illingworth, Offsite Writing, Politics, Reviews, ST2, Theory, Tom Nicholas, transphobia, Tucker Carlson, Video, What The Theory, Youtube

Editor’s note: Film Sessions is a weekly feature on my Media Madness blog, in which I share, analyze and expand on a relevant video from the left wing of Youtube.

The Cancel Culture Discussion Is About Class

The plain and simple truth here is that I’ve spent a long time purposely avoiding the larger societal discussion about “cancel culture” because as far as I can tell, the entire debate revolves around bougie nonsense designed to conflate real life censorship against the marginalized, the powerless, and basically anyone left of Pinochet, with “people yelling at your rich ass online for doing a racism.” As such, it’s been utterly impossible for me to really take the discourse surrounding “cancel culture” seriously at all. That changed this past week when lefty YouTube creator Tom Nicholas put out a video about the cancel culture debate that explicitly delved into the class tensions, and mendacious obfuscations that help put this phenomenon into a proper, relevant context in our society. In response, I decided to analyze Tom’s video and offer a few additional thoughts of my own, over on Media Madness.

“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.”

To read more over on Media Madness, click on the quotation block above, or the header below:

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

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!

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