Mobs, Tattletales, and Home Depot Cashiers
A Consideration of Cancellation
Darcy Pinckney’s words weren’t unusual by Facebook standards, nor was her distaste for our Once and Future President. She was hardly the first person to wish Donald Trump dead on Facebook or any other social media platform. In fact, for years comments of this ilk had been greeted not with scorn but with likes and upvotes.
But given the circumstances, Ms. Pinckney received a very different reaction. A quick gander at Ms. Pinckney’s Facebook profile revealed her location and place of employment. After fielding dozens of angry calls and a videotaped customer confrontation, Home Depot fired Pinckney.
For the Left, this was a terrifying example of MAGA Fascist bullying and a harbinger of things to come as Trump takes the helm. For the Right, it was sweet comeuppance. For better or worse, the Right has now embraced cancel culture.
So what does that mean for the future — and the present?
Pinckney’s discomfort is clear throughout the brief video. The humiliation is, of course, part of the point. Her embarrassment and fear prove her guilt and serve as part of her punishment. She is an object of contempt and a warning. Everyone watching knows that they’re one spicy post away from the pillory. Many of us know all too well how she feels. Just about every Right-leaning dissident has lost accounts, jobs, friends, payment processors, and even family members for our beliefs.
Since 2016 #theresistance has received nothing but affirmations for their bold and controversial stances against anti-vaxxers, White Supremacists and you-know-who towering over them all like an orange Sauron. They have cheered while “Nazis” and “fascists” were targeted, reminding us all snidely that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.
Now Sauron is ascendant and Trump haters are learning that the rules have changed. Today when the NPR-listening Heather G. Richardson-reading set scan their feeds, they see a terrified Darcy Waldron Pinckney. And they wonder who is poring over their old social media posts, and worry they might lose their job and their friends. It won’t take much to silence #theresistance. Heck, ask them right now how they feel about anti-vaxx internment camps and watch how fast they change the subject.
If you’re one of my regular readers, you’re probably aware that we are in a culture war. Those who set the boundaries of acceptable discourse control the Overton Window. Put a few heads on warning posts and people learn your boundaries very quickly. Cancel campaigns requires few resources and can pay big dividends.
As Martian warlord John Carter put it:
To this end, distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement. She must be made to taste it, and gag, and swallow nonetheless. She must be made to weep burning tears. She must be traumatized, and made to understand that this is what she did, that these are the rules of engagement that she established, that these are the consequences of loss in this awful game that she has forced all of us to play. She needs to beg for the game to end, for the rules to change…
We want to be in a place where every leftist in the Western hemisphere lives in a state of quiet panic that the pictures of them holding up fists at BLM rallies, the video clips of them waving rainbows at the local public school, or the screenshots of them sounding off on social media about the irredeemable vileness of the white male, will come back to haunt them ... that these records will get dredged up and thrust in front of their employers, friends, and families. We want them to laugh nervously whenever the 2010s are broached, insisting that times were obviously different back then, and please can we change the subject? We want them to be like Germans in the aftermath of the Second World War, avoiding as much as they can the awkward question of what they and everyone else did during the 1930s.
We want them, in short, to feel as we have, these last ten, terrible years.
But, of course, as Carter also notes, there are good reasons we have qualms about putting heads on warning posts. We’ve established that cancellation can be useful. Now let’s talk about its drawbacks.
Holly Math Nerd is one of the more popular and likable authors on Notes. If you haven’t seen her Substack, it’s definitely worth a gander. She has regularly spoken out against the excesses of the belief conglomeration we call “Wokeness.” But Holly has decided to refrain from political commentary going forward in the wake of the Pinckney doxxing, noting:
A faction of the right that includes many of my readers, which is the crucial point here, has decided that the solution to flying monkeys is not to kill the witch. It is to publicly traumatize, degrade, humiliate, and punish, as brutally as possible and without mercy or pity, all the flying monkeys they can find.
They have concluded that this is not just morally correct, but that enjoying and reveling in inflicting this trauma is part of holding the moral ground.
I have sufficient experience with what humans are like when they decide that inflicting trauma is righteous to know that I cannot talk anyone out of this.
Holly Math Nerd, In Which I Resign from Political Commentary
When you control speech through fear, many will choose silence. This is true even for people who are largely on your side. The cancel mob’s standards are arbitrary and there are no ex post facto exceptions. Last decade’s harmless joke may be this week’s hate crime. In such a climate it makes sense to keep your head down and avoid topics that might attract unwelcome attention. Cancellation campaigns suppresses signal along with noise.
Because freedom of speech is such a big part of the American Myth, Right-leaning cancellers are liable to get more pushback from their followers. You can dismiss their concerns as cuckoldry, just as you could dismiss Holly as yet another overly emotional female. Lots of right-wingers are doing just that. But in doing so, you can’t be surprised when those people dismiss you as well.
If you are looking to grow a movement, you generally want to avoid driving away current supporters and sympathizers. Cancellations are divisive and divisions work in your opponent’s favor. Membership churn is inevitable, but you want to keep it at a bare minimum if possible.
Cancel culture also rewards groupthinkers and penalizes freethinkers. It gives the true believers something to get enthusiastic about. But those who march to a different drummer are bound to trigger those desperately seeking something to be triggered about. At best this drives away or silences your most creative, productive members. At its worst cancel culture can send your org purity spiraling into irrelevance.
Perhaps most troubling, cancel culture encourages and praises snitching. We all know that prison guards, police, and intelligence agencies couldn’t exist without informants. But we also look down on those informants. The snitch turns states evidence on his co-defendants. He reports his neighbors for extra ration coupons. He sells out his country.
Most of us look upon this behavior with horror and contempt. Cancel culture applauds it. It rewards those who use anonymous whispers and complaints to get their opponents fired and isolated. It celebrates mean girl shaming and bullying. Combine that with the dopamine pump that is social media and you have a recipe for endlessly amplified toxic behavior that will soon infect your entire group.
So now that we’ve talked about the pros and cons of cancel culture, we come to the most important question of all: what can we do about it?
When it comes to LITERALLY KILLING trans children, even JK Rowling would be hard-pressed to top Chaya Raichik. The always-reliable and not at all Deep State infected Wikipedia has this to say about the woman behind Libs of TikTok.
On April 19, 2021, Raichik adopted the moniker @libsoftiktok, promising to “help you find your daily dose of cringe.”
In May and June 2021, before and during Pride Month, Libs of TikTok started posting anti-LGBT commentary, including her first tweet promoting the LGBT grooming conspiracy theory.
The account's early reposts also included reposts of videos by progressives about Anthony Fauci and vaccinations that it deemed cringeworthy. Slate linked Libs of TikTok's early success to “shamelessly tagging alt-right and far-right heavy hitters on Twitter, a strategy she continues to use to this day.”
LoTT has been one of the most effective fighters in the war against transing and sexualizing young children. The endless stream of shrieking dangerhairs and creepy men in dresses has garnered Raichik an audience of 3.2 million loyal X followers. Those fans have flooded hospital switchboards and pressured school boards and libraries into removing books, curricula, and instructors.
Disney writers may blame audiences for their failures. Chaya Raichik’s audience is proof of her success. She has followed the first commandment of show business: she gives her audience what they want. And what that audience wants is ragebait. Multiple account cancellations and huffy exposés have done nothing to slow down LoTT’s readership. After journalist Taylor Lorenz outed Raichik in 2022, things wound up like this:
Raichik, an Orthodox Jew, is also an ardent Zionist and strong Trump supporter. She has begun shining her spotlight on the pro-Palestine and anti-Trump crowds. Because many of her groomer-hating fans are equally happy to turn their venom on libtards and anti-Semites, LoTT has only enlarged its audience.
Whether you like or loathe LoTT, you can’t deny its influence or its staying power. We can expect both sides to continue launching these operations against its lowest-hanging wrongthinkers. And we can expect all parties to continue funding social media influencers to do their dirty work at a safe distance.
As John Michael Greer would put it, with cancel culture we have a predicament rather than a problem. You can solve problems, but you have to live with a predicament. If we can’t fix or eradicate cancel culture, how do we engage with it?
Westerners were horrified when they first saw images of the Tibetan drag gshed and the Indian dharmapāla. Even today many mistake these Wrathful Deities for demons. But these monstrous spirits are driven by compassion. The Wrathful Deities represent anger held in abeyance, then released in service of Enlightenment. They ruthlessly clear away obstacles so that you can move forward. Toward that end, let’s see how we can channel our wrath to productive ends.
To get caught up in a cancel campaign is to take the ragebait. Anger you waste on some asshole’s obnoxious comment is anger you aren’t using for constructive purposes. Your world was not worse for not knowing Ms. Pinckney. Your world did not become better for your snarky reply or your call to her former employer. If you think otherwise, you’re deluding yourself. Dopamine junkies are just as good at self-justification as any other addict.
High-minded disclaimers that you don’t support doxxing are worse than useless. Unsolicited comments disclaiming someone else’s behavior only affirm your mutual connection. Never apologize for something that someone else did. If you don’t like cancel attacks, don’t participate in them. If you feel sorry for the target, start a GoFundMe on their behalf or make a donation to an existing one. That will do more concrete good than preening about your superior ethical standards.
One way to avoid getting targeted in a cancel campaign is to temper your conversation. Refrain from overheated rhetoric and calls for violence. If you’re currently anonymous, assume that your anonymity will be penetrated and you might be held accountable for anything you say. Realize the higher your online profile gets, the greater your chances of exposure.
That doesn’t mean you have to give up speaking altogether. I certainly haven’t. But no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, understand that we have entered an age when online words can have life-changing consequences. You don’t have to like it. But you had best accept it and post accordingly. We talk about DOOM a lot on our podcast. You’re in the “big brother is watching” phase now.
Should we use cancel campaigns to further our ends? That’s for you to decide. Most of us would agree that some behaviors need to be exposed and some people deserve public humiliation. You can draw up your list and take responsibility for your choices and your actions. Culture wars rely on the initiative and imagination of the troops in the field. Choose your targets wisely.
"One way to avoid getting targeted in a cancel campaign is to temper your conversation. Refrain from overheated rhetoric and calls for violence."
There is no way to avoid getting targeted in a cancel campaign because everyone out there has their own bug-a-boos about what it is heretical, offensive, or inappropriate.
I'm okay with enforcing your boundaries and attacking back (defending yourself) to the person who attacked you. But with a lot of these people, they're attacking the wrong targets.
Like, if someone says something mean about Trump (wanting him dead), the person attacked is Trump. People who identify with Trump feel as if it's about them too. But it's about Trump. The person who should be defending himself is Trump in that case. He doesn't care enough to fight back, so why does everyone else care on his behalf?
People are aware that the Home Depot lady didn't attack them personally, but see her as a representative of the people who do. They're choosing the wrong target. They don't feel as if they can go up against the people who directly hurt them so they attack the more vulnerable target to feel better. That's blame shifting and it's not "defending yourself."
I appreciate your wanting to establish a dialog about the cancel culture phenomenon. This is good, and I hope the conversation continues.
But as far as I know, the ones who began all this have never begun or had a dialog questioning whether cancel culture is right, or appropriate; or self-reflecting over what this does to your society at large or your inner man. If one good thing could come out of the current situation it would be that this starts happening.
My own personal stance is this: We are forced to deal with many of our fellow citizens who are basically adult toddlers. They shriek and pitch a fit over everything they don’t like, and act as bullies to get their way. The world has in some ways turned into a gigantic school yard. Maybe it’s been that way for a long time, and we are only now realizing it.
When we were raising our kids, we taught them not to be bullies, and don’t pick on other people. Don’t start trouble. But if some other kid starts trouble with you, you have our permission to end it.
Perhaps in an imperfect way, the scales are rebalancing themselves in our imperfect society. I pray that the process may not further damage things. And that grace for repentance and restoration may be manifested in the hearts of all.