Tim Pool on the unintended effects of "cancel culture"

Cancel culture is the new term of art to describe, in a collective way, the stifling behavior of elements on the left that, instead of engaging in debate, strive to deplatform, censor, repress, suppress, or otherwise oppress people on the right with whom they disagree. Righties, living in left-dominated culture (academe, the media, etc.), are afraid to express their beliefs for fear of losing their jobs, being doxxed, or having their lives ruined in various ways by wild-eyed, frothing partisans who project their violence and menace onto the right. The unintended effect of driving righties underground, though, has been the creation of a huge and growing bloc of secret Trumpistas: entire swathes of the US voting population are, even if they don't openly admit it, planning to vote for Trump in 2020, and all for varied reasons ranging from wokeness-fatigue to general disappointment with the left's current insanity to "chaos voting," i.e., the desire to vote for Trump simply to throw a monkey wrench in the Democrat works.

Tim Pool's latest video covers this effect—a blowback against cancel culture that is only going to continue to build momentum as the 2020 elections rumble ever closer.*

It's interesting to note that Democrat candidate Marianne Williamson, dismissed as a crazy fruit-loop by people on both the left and the right, has recently (and very belatedly, in my opinion) voiced disappointment at the left's capacity for falsehood: she has apparently been hit with a slew of published lies about her beliefs, her possible use of crystals (which she denies), and her motivations. Lefties of late have been the last ones to wake up to reality (not so long ago, the left billed itself as "the reality-based community"), so I suppose it's no surprise to see Williamson only now realizing she's been playing for the wrong team. But will this realization be enough to prompt Williamson to take drastic action, e.g., leaving the Democrats and striking out on her own, #WalkAway-style? Williamson's shock is almost cute in its naiveté: imagine the hell that black voters go through when they out themselves as Republican/conservative or as people now leaving the Democrat party. The racial slurs that rain down on these good folks are proof of leftist hypocrisy, for this is the same pious left that preaches you should never use "the N-word" or other epithets that wound people and create walls between them.

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*At this point, I think it's safe to say that Trump is going to win the 2020 presidential election, so that aspect of the race doesn't interest me. I'm actually much more interested in what happens to Congress in 2020—both the Senate and the House of Representatives. I'm dying to see "the Squad" voted out, for example, and for the GOP to retake the House, but with new blood in place of the Never Trumper dinosaurs who have obstructed the building of the US-Mexico border wall. In the US House of Representatives, congressmen serve a term that's only two years long, so their seats are in perpetual jeopardy unless they come from non-volatile voting regions. My great hope is that the districts that voted the Squad in will have a great change of heart and repent of their previous idiocy. Meanwhile, I hope the Senate retains its current composition.

And this is where I say something that's sure to catch flak from my leftie readers: the problem with electing "intersectional" people is that those people are incapable of looking beyond their supposed intersectionality. We see this problem everywhere, but especially in academe. This is why so many African-American college students major in African-American studies; it's why so many young women major in feminist or women's studies: no one can see past their own demographic, and this is ironic because it used to be the left that trumpeted our common humanity. That banner has now been taken up by the right, and it'll remain there as long as postmodernist thinking has a death-grip on the left. It's the PoMo wing, after all, that dismisses the notion of a common humanity because of its insistence that every human phenomenon be looked at through a radically contextualized lens.

Intersectionality, as a mindset, is a direct offshoot of this PoMo strain of thinking. For this reason, if you criticize Barack Obama, you must be attacking his blackness, so you're a racist. If you criticize Hillary Clinton, you must be attacking her womanhood, so you're a sexist/misogynist. If you criticize Ilhan Omar—well, she's black, a woman, an immigrant, and a Muslim, so you must be a racist, sexist, xenophobic religious bigot. Note that Omar's rhetoric since she's been in office has had little to do with her mostly white constituents: of her remarks that make the news, most have been about her—her blackness, her womanhood, her immigrant status, her religion. The same goes for the rest of the Squad: not a single one of them can see past her own intersectionality to embrace a common humanity. It's identity politics or nothing with these people. Or—ha ha—maybe we shouldn't use the generic term "people," a toxic word that insidiously papers over our particularities. In point of fact, I'd agree that it's probably best not to refer to the Squad—and to intersectionally-minded creatures like them—as "people" at all. That's fine by me.