© Jordan PetersonJordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
Cancel culture is a misnomer for the ages. If it is anything, it is first surely not a culture, but its very opposite and antithesis. An anti-culture, or a movement to suffocate and injure real culture.
Like many other pernicious practices, it comes out of the horrid womb of woke politics. Its mode of operation is simple and, alas, well known. When it was a mere toddler its operations were localized. Mainly it was kept behind the ivy-darkened walls of the modern university, nursed by all the laboured and ersatz "disciplines" of the various and hollow studies departments. It emerged from the fallow field of identity politics and found ready home in all the morbid "isms" of our time, and the shower of every multiplying "phobias." I won't list them. You know what they are, but all orbit around Planet Politically Correct, and all are empty.
The earliest demonstrations of the anti-intellectual
cancel culture phenomenon usually revolved around bands of precious students ganging up to stop some speaker coming to a campus, under the ludicrous accusation that the particular speaker would "create an unsafe space." That he or she would threaten to destabilize the hyper-ripe sensibilities of the various "marginalized" groups, force their "erasure" and buttress "hegemonic discourse and cis-heteronormative privilege," this latter a piece of arcana known only to those who write and say such things. I have yet to meet a "cis-het" and it causes me no grief I have not.
Comment: Shock and flaw tactics are losing momentum...even in California. Newsom can no longer cry 'wolf'.