May 4, 2023
Forget Cancel Culture, the Culture Is Cancer
by Derek Hunter
Townhall.com
Before he passed, my father regularly said he felt sorry for the type of country his grandchildren would grow up in. He was a man married to a woman he loved for 57 years. He lived long enough to see incredibly dumb people who would like nothing more than to destroy the United States come to power, led by grown adults claiming not to know what men or women are. He lived long enough to see a “devout Catholic” President of the United States, someone who swears he is a committed family man (he gave us his “word as a Biden”), routinely deny the existence of his own granddaughter because of the inconvenience of her conception. That mentality and denialism is now running the show. Forget the handbasket, we have a political party making hell here on earth.
Cancel culture controls so much of what people do – causing people to be afraid of expressing themselves, lest the left-wing mob find out what they really think. Use the wrong pronouns for the man in a dress at the urinal next to you or an old yearbook of yours resurfaces with some joke written in your hand, completely appropriate until 20 minutes ago, and it could be over. It’s tempting to say that cancel culture is a cancer on society, but our culture has become the cancer – the method of death and destruction unleased on us all.
Every time I write about something related to the popular culture I get emails, tweets and comments from people who brag about not having cable or not watching television, etc. The gist of the message is “I don’t like the culture so I don’t pay attention to it.”
That’s all well and good, no one should be forced to participate in something they hate, but the ostrich defense of shoving your head in the sand and pretending something isn’t happening is not going to cause the side of sanity to win. You don’t have to participate in something to be aware of its existence – both in basic form and specific. And if you’re going to push back against the latest progressive attempt to rot our culture you need to know what that rot is. All the “high road” gives you is a nice view of your political defeat.
Make no mistake, the left focuses on rotting the culture for one reason: it is wildly effective.
There was a time when there were very few gay characters on TV, now it seems like every third character is. Track that with the rise of redefining marriage. That energy has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? It’s gone into “trans.” (Why else would the Navy hire a drag queen as a recruitment tool? They can’t meet their needs, so why not alienate the people most likely to serve? You only do that if you want to advance a political agenda and damage the country further.)
Think what you will of gay marriage (my main problem with it was how it was done – by court decree – and the redefining of words based on political whims of the moment), but that model is now pushing even further down the rot road.
“Trans woman are women!” they scream, not realizing the irony of how needing a prefix negates the declaration. If they really were women why do they need “trans” in front of it
The reason it’s there is a bit of the left’s own poison – some of that cancer they’re spreading – coming back to bite them, and it is also what normal people can use to defeat them. The prefix is there because A) trans women are not, in fact, women, they are men and medically that matters. And B) the left is so invested in victimhood that if they simply refused to differentiate between women and trans women, two very important victim groups would disappear.
The second point needs a little explanation.
If there is no difference between women and trans women the “wage gap” becomes irrelevant and disappears. Democrats get a lot of mileage out of that myth, they aren’t ready to give it up. The women's vote is far too important to them – weird how they know exactly what a woman is when it comes to abortion, isn’t it? When it’s a man in a dress in a legislature somewhere fighting for the right to mutilate the genitals of children they are confused, when it comes to pandering for votes on focus group tested issues they’re all gynecologists.
The situational nature of the left’s existence is its Achilles heel, the chemo for the culture. To fight it you have to be aware of it and its importance. In other words, you have to be engaged, at least to a minimum degree. To defeat it, Republicans have to be able to message against it effectively…which is the Achilles heel of the right, unfortunately.
http://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2023/05/04/forget-cancel-culture-the-culture-is-cancer-n2622787