Canceling the Left with Right-Wing Projections

Accusing your enemy of doing what you’re doing—in this case, right-wing organizations canceling left-wing academics, and then claiming liberals are perpetrating cancel culture—is a form of deflection that riles the right-wing base against intellectuals, but also sends the coded message that the Republican Party will do what it can to silence left-wing critics.

Ari Paul, Panic Over ‘Cancel Culture’ Is Another Example of Right-Wing Projection

We Americans can’t have a meaningful public debate about “cancel culture” until we can publicly acknowledge (i.e., stop canceling) the long history of those who have been cancelled in American society by various means: colonialism, aristocracy, plutocracy, slavery, land theft, genocide, patriarchy, xenophobia, bigotry, scapegoating, Jim Crow, sundown towns, redlining, race wars, vigilante mobs, lynching, Ku Klux Klan, right-wing terrorism, private militias, Pinkertons, English only laws, internment camps, eugenics, English only laws, Prohibition, drug wars, McCarthyism, corporate blacklisting and blackballing, Comics Code, COINTELPRO, class war, union busting, book burnings, propaganda programs, gerrymandering, voter suppression, rigged primary process, legal bribery of politicians and officials, militarized policing, mass incarceration, propaganda model of news, media consolidation, and on and on.

Also, there is never acknowledged the mass cancelling of the political left. Most Americans are to the left not only of the Republican Party but also of the DNC elite and corporate media. On top of that, there is actually more recent attacks on leftist academics that never gets acknowledged because it doesn’t fit mainstream frames of the ruling paradigm. And consider the left-anarchist David Graeber having been blackballed from US universities. Large swaths of the left are so canceled as to be treated as not existing — a wholesale blackballing by way of pre-emptive canceling where the silenced were never heard in the first place. Leftists often don’t need to be fired to be censored as they were never hired. They never have to be blocked from giving a speech at a university or from being a guest on corporate news because they were never invited in the first place.

As more of a leftist, I’m not much of a fan of either (pseudo-)liberal identity politics or right-wing identity politics. Nor do I support much of what gets called ‘political correctness and ‘cancel culture’. Not that I’m opposed to the otherwise powerless using the power of shame or boycotts to have influence within an anti-democratic system. And certainly I’m fine with comforting the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. So let’s be realistic and let’s be informed. If we go back to the Cold War, we should remember that often the supposed liberal class in the corporate media and corporatist politics were among the most strident Cold Warriors in siding with the right and silencing the left. That pattern has continued since as seen with the Democrats punching left. It’s never been easy to be a leftist in American society, not then and not now.

To speak of it meaningfully, cancel culture requires an effective wielding of power to punish opponents and transgressors or otherwise to enforce social control. It does not merely mean powerless individuals making complaints on social media and refusing to support those they disagree with and find offensive. The defining feature of cancel culture is the ability to actually cancel people, to get them fired or destroy their careers, to discredit and silence them, to harass and threaten them into public banishment, to censor them from getting published and have their books removed or burned. Such canceling always requires at least a certain amount of authoritative position within or influence over the systems of concentrated wealth, power, and/or privilege.

Cancel culture is when the Dixie Chicks were banned from country music venues for speaking a simple, if inconvenient, truth to authoritarian power that hurt the feelings of reactionary snowflakes. Cancel culture is James O’Keefe making false accusations based on doctored videos to get people fired. Cancel culture is Donald Trump, Fox News hacks, etc constantly going on about how anyone who disagrees with them should be fired. Cancel culture is Jordan Peterson’s habit of suing people who are critical of him. Cancel culture is right-wing media’s constant lies and disinformation, libel and slander.

Cancel Culture is Gamergate in targeting women for harassment, threats, and doxxing. Cancel culture is Bill O’Reilly repeatedly calling Dr. George Tiller a “baby killer” until one of O’Reilly’s viewers acted by killing Dr. Tiller. Cancel culture is Alex Jones ranting about (and Fox News spreading) the Pizzagate conspiracy of a supposed global cabal of pedophiles until one of his listeners shows up at the Pizza restaurant with a gun. Or when Alex Jones used harassment in trying to silence the parents of the students killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Cancel culture is when there are mass shootings at synagogues and mosques, after systematic fear-mongering about and scapegoating of religious minorities.

Cancel cultures is elderly Asian-Americans getting attacked because some bigots perceive them as ‘Chinese’, in responding to the xenophobic paranoia of right-wng media. Cancel culture is right-wingers driving vehicles into crowds of left-wingers. Cancel culture is the constant shootings, hate crimes, and terrorism mostly committed by the political right; and where the main targets are leftists and minorites. Cancel culture is the police profiling and targeting of minorities. Cancel culture is, as one study showed, the police being 3.5 times more likely to use violence against peaceful leftist protesters than against peaceful right-wing protesters, and 81% of the arrests were leftists. Cancel culture is where thepolice also more often used the illegal practice of entrapment against the political left.

Now that is some serious official canceling. Yet think of how peaceful leftist protesters are not only effectively canceled by being attacked by violent police, being treated the same as right-wing counter-protesters and provocateurs, but also effectively canceled by the corporate media that selectively and repeatedly shows cropped footage of violence and riots, without identifying who caused or incited it, which gets used to discredit and dismiss the already canceled political left. In Portland, the corporate media went so far as to intentionally deceive its own viewers by showing homeless camps and reporting it as protesters, using this tactic to simultaneously silence both the homeless and the protesters. The whole point of such protests is to publicly speak out against canceling and the typical response is more canceling.

Did you know there is still a US law on the books, Communist Control Act of 1954, that makes it illegal to be a member of or support the communist party and communst-action organizations? It hasn’t been enforced in a long time, but Trump when president suggested it should be used against the left, that is to cancel his opponents. Also, think of COINTELPRO that destroyed leftist groups in the past, including morally depraved acts such as the FBI trying to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into suicide or their having assassinated the popular Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Technically, COINTELPRO is illegal; and yet that hasn’t stopped the government from using COINTELPRO tactics since 9/11. Also, some see evidence of COINTELPRO in the 1990s as well. The US government has a long history of funding propaganda programs and it’s still doing this. That is some of the darkest cancel culture that goes straight to the top of right-wing authoritarianism.

Some suggest that corporate media has a left-wing bias that cancels all voices on the political right. Really!?! Give me a fucking break. Is that why all newspapers have both a business section and labor section, as was true earlier last century? Is that why all of the network and cable news have hosts, guests, panelists, and debate moderators who are democratic socialists, municipal socialists, communists, Marxists, anarchosyndicalists, left-libertarians, labor organizers, environmentalist leaders, indigenous rights advocates, reparationists, black feminists, Black Panthers, etc? Is that why, every time politicians war-monger and demand more military funding, all of big biz media refuses to beat the war drums and instead rallies behind pacifism in opposing authoritarianism, imperialism, and militarism? Is this why the owners of corporate media have disinvested from the military-industrial complex?

Oh, wait… The answer to those questions is that, obviously, none of that is true. Something doesn’t quite add up with the right-wing narrative about left-wing ‘cancel culture’ we so often hear in the corporate media. That this corporate media, as with the corporatist DNC elite and the corporate-funded universities, is dishonestly portrayed as a leftist hegemony is part of the problem. The actual left-wing is largely powerless and disenfranchised in American society, despite most Americans being on the political left. False narratives, deceptive rhetoric, and controlled framing are among the main tools used to cancel the voice and power of the moral majority.

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About meaningful public debate, below is a good example. Taking down, moving, or simply relabeling statues of violent authoritarians, genocidal imperialists, slaveholding aristocrats, and white supremacists doesn’t inevitably mean a canceling. Instead, it could be the beginning of a conversation and a broadening of civics education. That is the problem with these monuments as they stand in obliterating the memory of other more worthy and inspiring historical figures. We shouldn’t necessarily remove these historical figures from the history books and history classes, but rather take it as an opportunity to teach the full history, both good and bad. Such a possibility of public honesty and fairness is what has been canceled.

There is far more to American history than white males who were right-wing authoritarians. Why aren’t there statues and monuments all over the country in honor of Thomas Morton and Roger Williams, Margaret Brent and Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Paine and Daniel Shays, Tecumseh and Geronimo, Henry David Thoreau and Henry George, Harriet Tubman and John Brown, Sojourner Truth and Mother Jones, Eugene Debs and Henry A. Wallace, Fred Hampton and Malcolm X (to name just a few)? Why isn’t every school child taught about these centrally important revolutionaries, radicals, and rabblerousers, these great thinkers, leaders, and activists who influenced American society, advocated justice, advanced democracy, and fought for the public good?

After we finally achieve some balanced representation and an honest teaching of history, then we might treat the empty complaints on the poltical right as if they had the slightest relevance to a just and free society. Until then, for some thoughtful consideration on the matter, read the following:

If Americans Grappled Honestly With Their History, Would Any Monuments Be Left Standing?
by Michael Hirsh

Issac J. Bailey, a journalist and scholar and the author of the forthcoming Why Didn’t We Riot? A Black Man in Trumpland, said he believes “we have to do a lot more grappling with the legacies of men like Washington and Jefferson,” but he doesn’t advocate the removal of their statues. “They are different from the Confederate statues, because Confederate monuments and memorials went up largely in the early 20th century and later as a clear pushback to civil rights gains by Black people. They are specifically about explicit white supremacy and the honoring of men who were literal traitors to the U.S.”

“That’s the easy part, though,” Bailey wrote in an email. The issue is more complex when it comes to Washington and Jefferson. “I’ve heard the argument that they are being honored for the great things they’ve done, not for the evil they perpetuated. I get that. But why do they get that kind of treatment when we’d never do the same for architects and participants of the Holocaust who went on to do great things, including helping the U.S. put a man on the moon and unleashing the kinds of technologies that we take for granted today, technologies that have made it possible for things like the smart phone, GPS and the like? We would never say let’s honor them despite the evils they wrought during the Holocaust. Why do we so easily do the same for wealthy white men who profited and participated directly in this country’s original sin?” […]

The recent police killings of African Americans in cities from Atlanta to Minneapolis also bitterly tainted the celebration of Juneteenth, which marks the day a Union major general, Gordon Granger, formally announced the end of slavery in the state of Texas, over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and the beginning of “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.” That promise, along with President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of a “new birth of freedom” out of the Civil War, didn’t quite pan out either. […]

Even so, Wiencek and other historians suggest the recent tumult in the streets could help promote a healthy debate that should cast a new light on who the founders were and what they really believed—and, by extension, what America really stands for. You don’t have to tear all the statues down, they say—but you should at least change the inscriptions on them to better reflect who these people really were. And Americans should consider erecting new statues to long-forgotten heroes like Lt. Col. John Laurens, a young white South Carolinian aristocrat who repeatedly and passionately urged Washington to move toward emancipation before being killed in the Revolutionary War. […]

“At the very least, we have to be willing to tell the full story of what those men did—making it clear on those massive monuments and memorials we’ve dedicated to them,” said Bailey, himself a South Carolinian. “It should no longer simply be a treat to visit such sites. More Americans need to understand [these men’s] role in the systemic rape and murder and enslavement of Black people even as they got rich off slavery.” […]

And there is still, Ellis said, a kind of tragic if tacit conversation occurring every day on the Mall in Washington—among the monuments themselves. “If you go to the Mall and stand in a place where you can see the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, and the Martin Luther King Memorial, imagine an ongoing dialogue among those three giants,” he said. “Jefferson believed slavery was wrong, but he didn’t have the courage to do anything about it. Lincoln did, but he never could imagine that the races could live together in the same society on an equal basis. Then there’s King standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial giving his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, saying, ‘I have come to collect on a promissory note written by Thomas Jefferson.’”

The full debt has not yet been paid, and the dialogue goes on.

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Talk about cancel culture. Bill would censor slavery text in Missouri classrooms
Tom Cotton’s war on the 1619 Project is the real ‘cancel culture’
Hollywood Blacklist? Cancel Culture? Accountability!
The Real Cancel Culture: Pro-Israel Blacklists
Panic Over ‘Cancel Culture’ Is Another Example of Right-Wing Projection

Using Free Speech Rhetoric to Silence Opponents
Right-Wing Political Correctness, Censorship, and Silencing
Framing Free Speech
Anarchists Not In Universities
Corporate-Ruled MSM & DNC Is Left-Wing, Says Corporatist Right-Wingers

Biased Jury Selection and the Unjust Justice System

After the past year of Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests, one of the early cases of police brutality finally makes its way into trial. Check out this article about the jury selection in the prosecution of the “former Minneapolis police officer who faces second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in the death of George Floyd.” Did you notice the makeup of the jury? “The seven jurors consist of three white men, one white woman, one Black man, a Hispanic man and a multiracial woman.” That one sentence says a lot about what we might expect, but one should pay attention to the other details given. The piece is fairly decent reporting, although even greater detail would’ve been preferable, as what goes unstated speaks loudly.

In case one has been living in a cave and is unfamiliar with this incident of police brutality, it should be noted that the victim was a black male and the defendant is a white male, the latter being a person intentionally left unnamed here as he deserves to be forgotten beyond his status as an anonymous figure of an unjust system of racial and class oppression. One might add, to be fair, that there have been plenty of non-white women and poor whites who also have been targeted by police (in fact, combined they form the majority of such incidents), if they don’t receive the same attention in the corporate media and political discourse, unfortunately but as expected.

Right from the start, there is a bias in what is reported in the ‘mainstream’ news and what is ignored. For various reasons, the “black male” has been chosen as the stereotypical stock character for the controlled narrative agreed upon by the media and political elite. Rather than the authoritarian system being on trial, it becomes a debate within the white patriarchy about which male bodies are of value and which can be sacrificed (the bodies of women and poor whites being less directly relevant to the system of power as defined). The tricky part is that the white patriarchy, in order to maintain its rule, must present itself as if it doesn’t exist. So, the real debate is whether this guardian of the white patriarchy overstepped the respectable bounds of allowable oppression in making violence too blatant to be rationalized away according to the ruling rhetoric of perception management.

Anyway, the jury consists of five men and two women. And that includes at least four whites, one non-white, and two others who might or might not identify as white to some extent. Even the one black is an upper middle class professional. None of these people appear to be either poor minorities or to otherwise be typical victims of systemic prejudice and violent oppression. There is no evidence that any of these jurors have had personal experience or direct witnessing of police profiling, police brutality, etc. There is no evidence that any of these jurors lives in an impoverished and segregated neighborhood that has been treated as a war zone with militarized policing, along with racial profiling, school-to-prison pipelines, mass incarceration, etc. Their perception of these issues is, therefore, likely to be mediated secondhand through the ruling narratives of corporate media and so would carry predictable biases.

Basically, it’s mostly a jury of men and whites, and probably mostly middle class. Yet there is no place in the entire country where the majority of the population consists of middle class white males. Since this officer is a middle class white male, does a jury of peers mean everyone else also should get a jury of their peers as defined by their own demographics of identity politics? If that were true, then why don’t most female defendants, most non-white defendents, and most poor defendants get juries consisting mostly of women, non-whites, and the poor? Heck, maybe more than the defendant it is the victim, as a silenced and opressed minority, who needs and deserves a jury of peers or, failing that, a jury representing the fuller spectrum of the American population — assuming this legal system is a justice system.

With that in mind, it’s telling that there was not a single juror who didn’t have some pro-police sympathy, even among the few that nominally agreed that black lives matter. What really stood out was that apparently not a single juror agreed with the BLM message that police departments are systematically racist and need to be reformed, even though that specific BLM message is supported by the majority opinion of Americans in diverse polling, even from Fox News. This seems like a case where the moral majority and demographic majority was pre-selected to be excluded from the jury, whether consciously and intentionally or simply through in-built biases. As the American public, we really need to publicly understand why this happens, but that would require the possibility of actual public debate, the one thing that the ruling order can never allow.

Here is the problem, in practical terms. Even if this unrepresentative jury comes to a guilty verdict, as it might, it’s unlikely to be the strongest verdict they could come to, as it’s clear they are going into this with a probable tendency to side with the police in at the very least offering the benefit of the doubt, as based on the normative assumption that the official authority of police violence is to be assumed justified until proven unjustified (a normative assumption not shared by many other Western countries where police violence is less accepted as a normalized fatalistic inevitability). The officer is likely to get a slap on the hand or some extremely minimal sentence. This jury, like the elite that helped select them, appears to be to the right of the general public. They may not be far right and so might have less imbalance than in other cases. But why does the elite system always somehow manages to define the ‘center’, the ‘moderate’, the ‘reasonable’, and the ‘normal’ as being on the right?

Biased jury selection and the scripting of trials, as part of narratized social reality, is a great example of how perception management as propagandistic mind control (and hence social control) is enacted in practice. It’s similar to how the corporate media and corporatist parties get to select which candidates are allowed to participate and which excluded (as silenced into disenfranchised non-existence within public perception) in televized political debates during presidential campaigns. This kind of process is so subtle as the public only sees the end product, but not how the sausage is made. The establishment system of the status quo operates invisibly, as a default mechanism of how the system is designed. The results, within a narrow range, are largely predetermined or constrained. It’s yet another way that democratic self-governance is made impossible, not only in socipolitical reality but also in public imagination.

Doing a web search on jury selection bias, a massive amount of results come up, not limited to articles but also academic papers and scientific research. It’s been a heavily studied area, as one would expect. It’s the type of thing that could be used as a topic for a lengthy analysis in exemplfying a larger system of corruption and injustice; but the motivation to do so is lacking and, instead, we’ll keep it as a more casual commentary. Still, one could support all of the claims made here with endless evidence, not that it would make any difference and not that any new insight could be added to the vast literature already written over the decades. Anyone here visiting this blog is likely part of the silenced majority who was not invited to the table of power. This post is not going to shape the debate and decisions at the elite level. Still, we should continue to speak truth to power, if only screaming into the void or preaching out in the wilderness, as we never know what might finally break through the silencing.

This topic makes one think of a lot of things about our society. We know about problems of racism, inequality, corporatism, corruption, climate change, etc. Most Americans, typically a large majority, understand these problems and agree we should do something about them. Also, the scholarship in these fields often shows a consensus among the experts. Yet, the ruling elite ensures that nothing ever changes. And the corporate media never allows much public debate about it. It feels so disorienting. It creates a schizoid experience of reality, what one knows in one’s experience and in relating to other Americans versus what one is told is true in the dominant media and politics. Another trial about injustice can feel like yet more spectacle to distract us with no repurcussions for the system of injustice, no matter the outcome of the trial itself. At best, this individual police officer could be prosecuted and, at worst, he could be made into a scapegoat. This could be taken as further proof of our powerlessness, if we let it stand without challenge and without voicing protest.