The Woke Cancel Culture is McCarthyism 2.0

Only Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais Refused To Bend the Knee

For a brief moment, I will be giving you a quick history lesson that is very significant going forward. There was this man named George Santayana. Do you know who he is? Well, congratulation if the name is familiar to you and for those who don’t know who he was, he was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. He is best known for this line that has been bastardized over the years. The line is, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I’m sure you’ve heard of it in some varying degree of iteration. This saying will be important as we continue with the history lesson.

Now, do you know who Joe McCarthy is? Joe McCarthy was a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin who served for ten years from 1947 till his death in 1957. He is best known for giving the U.S. of something known as ‘The Red Scare’, the widespread fear of the promotion of communism and for also giving the American populous McCarthyism, rightfully named after him for making false allegations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence during the late 1940s and the early 1950s. These accusations caused people to lose their jobs and be put on a blacklist as being un-American. Did you know that Lucille Ball, Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Danny Kaye, and Orson Welles was just a few of the most notable figures who were blacklisted at the time?

That brief history lesson was important as it shines a very bright light on to what is known as the woke cancel culture. The woke cancel culture is plain and simply McCarthyism 2.0 only it’s in warp speed. I’m not sure where cancel culture came from or how it manifested itself into what I refer to as a cancerous lesion to the social media platforms. If you participate in any social media platform, you must be perfect, saintly, virginal, free of controversy, you must tow the perfect line of inclusion, diversity, provide all the boxes to check and most importantly, your past should be free of blemishes and if it is not, you’re doomed, cursed and will suffer the moral outrage from a faceless entity that now holds your life in its anonymous hands.

How did the wake cancel culture become this behemoth? I will speculate that it became prominent in 2018 when it was announced that Kevin Hart was supposed to host the upcoming Academy Awards in 2019. It was one of those plumb position any comedian would give their right eye to have, to host a show that reached a global audience in one day and to increase your brand personally. But for Kevin Hart, that wasn’t the case. Some people went back to Mr. Hart’s history and found ten-year-old jokes that he did that, in today’s climate, was deemed socially problematic. These were ten-year-old jokes told by a comedian who is known for ribald humor. That didn’t matter. He said the jokes and for the woke cancel culture community, he must be fired from the Academy Awards. He would have to apologize, he would have to lay prostrate to the woke cancel culture and beg for forgiveness, he would have to humble himself to the queen of the homosexual party, Ellen DeGeneres and Kevin Hart reluctantly bent the knee. It was a knee that wasn’t bent too long as Kevin stood back up and held his ground for his past comments and stopped making apologies for something that wasn’t a mistake.

But the knee he bent was already established. The woke cancel culture had its first victim and it tasted fine. They were hungry for more and the hunt was on. In the past few months, we’ve seen a variety of woke-cancel-culture claim victim after victim for past Twitter posting, for current Twitter postings, for taking an opposing side on an issue, for speaking off the cuff with a general phraseology that was claimed as misgendering. The 1959 song, Baby It’s Cold Outside, was canceled as it was deemed to be a song about date rape or non-consensual sex. Gone With The Wind, a film that came out in 1940 depicting the South during the Civil War era, was canceled by HBO for being offensive. I’ve never seen the film because I chose not to see it because of the depiction and because of the Hollywood segregation with the awards ceremony where Hattie McDaniel received her Oscar while being seated near a back wall out of sight at a segregated table because of the Jim Crow laws at the time. However, the film was made and it won Oscars so regardless of your feelings, you are the one who decides to view it or not. I chose to look at its depiction of American blacks and I have consistently chosen to not view it. That doesn’t mean that it should be canceled. It’s still a history lesson.

And there have been numerous firings in recent weeks surrounding past statements and current statements associated with the organization Black Lives Matter. You can’t give your opposing opinion regarding this group without receiving the wrath of cancellation from the woke community. It is forbidden to have an opposing opinion, your free thought has been criminalized. Hartley Sawyer, an American actor on the CW television series, The Flash, was fired after old tweets surfaced that were deemed offensive. I read them and at worse, they were really bad jokes from someone’s attempt to be crudely funny. He has made his apologies and accepted his responsibilities for his action but why was he fired for old tweets that had nothing to do with his work on the show? What makes his jokes worse than someone like Andrew Dice Clay or the late Sam Kinison? Would the late Richard Pryor be castigated for his humor by today’s standards? Some would say that all words have meaning but in the context of which they were given. Hattie McDaniel Oscar's acceptance speech cited her saying “being a credit to her race”. That’s a cringe statement but it was acceptable during her time and also appeasement to the white culture.

Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais have maintained their sanity in these volatile moments. Ricky Gervais has called out this cancel culture and still has maintained his humor and ignored the attacks against him by just switching off their rhetoric. Dave Chappelle has ignored the shouts and cries for him to be canceled by attacking them with such aplomb that it’s like watching a skilled surgeon remove a diseased liver and replacing it with a new one. If you were offended, you’d also have to say that it did feel good with the technique.

The battlefield theater of the woke cancel culture war is being littered with an ever-growing body count. There is no pleasing them in this skirmish. Filmmakers tried appeasing them but to disastrous results. The list of films trying to go woke went broke. Charlie’s Angels went broke, Terminator: Dark Fate went broke, X-Men: Dark Phoenix massively flamed out and went broke, Birds of Prey went broke, Ghostbusters 2016 flamed out. But you wouldn’t know it from the woke cancel culture who didn’t support these films when they came out. They blame the usual suspects, mainly white heterosexual men.

We are literally burning ourselves up alive. They are rioting in the streets destroying and burning properties that have nothing to do with the death of George Floyd. Social media platforms are accepting this behavior as if it is in an abusive relationship with a partner as they refuse to acknowledge the destructive nature of that misadventure. The old McCarthyism lasted nearly a decade. How long will McCarthyism 2.0 last? For me, it should have ended in 2018but because of Twitter, that unrepentant festering malignant tumor of a social media platform that turns comments into gangrenous sores has allowed the rampant spreading of sick individuals who infect the social strata to its nth degree. Why did you bend the knee, Kevin Hart?