Over the weekend, the artist and entrepreneur Kanye West, now known as Ye, let loose a blitzkrieg of appalling screeds to his 33 million followers on X. “IM A NAZI,” he proclaimed. He reiterated his position that “SLAVERY WAS A CHOICE,” contended that “JEWS WERE BETTER AS SLAVES YOU HAVE TO PUT YOUR JEWS IN THEIR PLACE AND MAKE THEM INTO YOUR SLAVES,” implied that domestic violence is a self-sacrificing form of love, and shared a screengrab tallying the sales receipts for a White Lives Matter T-shirt sold on his Yeezy website. By Monday, the only product for sale on the site was a white T-shirt adorned with a black swastika, and his X account had been deleted.
Remarkably, this was not the highest-stakes or most widely discussed racist controversy on that social-media platform during the same time frame. On Friday, Vice President J. D. Vance defended Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency office, who was revealed to have posted (pseudonymously), “I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate.”
When Ro Khanna, the Indian American representative from California, inquired of Vance—whose wife and children are of Indian descent—whether, “for the sake of both of our kids,” he would ask Elez for an apology, Vance became apoplectic. Toward Khanna. “For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up,” he fumed on X. “Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children.”
Elez resigned from his post, and Musk asked his 217 million followers on X what they thought: Should he be reinstated? Almost 80 percent of those who replied said yes. Later that day, Musk confirmed that Elez would be “brought back” to DOGE. Not only was a self-professed racist like Elez not canceled—on the contrary, he was transformed overnight by some of the most powerful (and pugnacious) men in America into a national cause célèbre.
Incidentally, this was the same week that Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, announced that it had hired Daniel Penny as “a Deal Partner” working on its “American Dynamism team.” Penny, a former Marine, was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide after he held a mentally ill man in a choke hold on the subway, and the man died. In an internal memo reported by The New York Times, an Andreessen Horowitz partner praised him for showing “courage in a tough situation.”
If a vogue for virtue signaling defined the 2010s and early 2020s, peaking in 2020 during the feverish summer of protest and pandemic—a period in which pronouns in bio, land acknowledgments, black squares, diversity statements, and countless other ethical performances became a form of social capital—something like the exact photonegative of that etiquette has set in now. The reassertion of brute reactionary power in the dual ascendancy of Donald Trump and Elon Musk has brought us to a cultural tipping point. Virtue be damned: Now we are living in an era of relentless, unapologetic vice signaling. Of all of Ye’s deranged posts, one was particularly confusing. “DO YALL THINK I CAN TURN THE TIDE ON ALL THIS WOKE POLITICALLY CORRECT SHIT,” he asked. Here it seemed the infamous trendsetter was decidedly behind the times.
After a decade and a half of progressive dominance over America’s agenda-setting institutions—corporations, universities, media, museums—during which everyone was on the lookout for the scantest evidence of racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, and every other interpersonal and systemic ill, it is not at all frivolous to ask what has been achieved. What, to put it bluntly, was all that cancel culture for?
If the genuine but ill-conceived goal was to create a kinder, friendlier, more inclusive and equitable world for all (often paradoxically by means of shaming, coercion, and intimidation), the real-world effect has been an abysmal rightward overcorrection in which norms of decency have been gleefully obliterated. We have not merely been delivered back to the pre-woke era of the early 2000s. Nor is what we’re seeing some insubstantial vibe shift in manners and aesthetics, confined to the internet.
Consider: We had a #MeToo movement characterized by sometimes disproportionate reputational sacrifices; now we have a presidential Cabinet populated by men with credible sexual-assault accusations on their records. The stifling racist/anti-racist binary of the anti-racism movement has led to the wholesale dismantling of DEI initiatives in both the government and the private sector. The insistence that “no human is illegal” has ended with an unconstitutional attempt to retract birthright citizenship. And the push not just for tolerance but for the equivalence of trans athletes with cisgender athletes has culminated with the president banishing “gender ideology” and surrounding himself with a multiethnic crowd of beaming girls to sign the “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order. On every single issue that mattered to them, progressives now find themselves in a weaker position than before.
In The Opium of the Intellectuals, the French sociologist Raymond Aron observed that utopian programs are “refuted not so much by their failure as by the successes they have achieved.” In the blistering weeks since Trump’s inauguration, we can say that this has been axiomatically true of the movement we look back on now as “wokeness.”
GlaberTheFool on
> By Thomas Chatterton Williams
immediately disregard
Outrageous-Dig-8853 on
Cultural pendulum is gonna cultural pendulum🤷🏾♂️The world is much more online nowadays, the pandemic sped up a social catalyst that the right was more than happy and willing to grab and hold. It’s also how much outrage and ridiculousness drives engagement, engagement is profitable, social media companies want profit, they force engagement, and the algorithms ensue. The human populace in this state lives in a split reality that doesn’t exist yet they insist that it does, those who are overwhelmed embrace cynicism and nihilism. Most people don’t care about these progressive ideals, and those who do care about it more as opposition than those who view it as a friend. I myself have become numb to it, even as a young black man who will be personally impacted by the current rise of facism as it’s head is reared in the worst possible position we could have hoped it would never have. It’s hard for me to look at this and not say “It is what it is”. I may just be a weakling and i may just be a coward, i may just be too young and naive, but it feels as if every safeguard to the world we do not want (the voters, the billionaires, the social media companies, our government, etc.) just seem to be ineffective. I don’t want us to just “shut up” since these progressive ideals are worth standing for and staying firm on, but it’s hard not to just….doom about.
JimC29 on
I agree with most of this. Why include Daniel Penny though? It’s unfortunate the man died, but he was a threat to everyone on the subway. Someone needed to restrain him.
circlemanfan on
Was I overreacting about woke issues and cancel culture by reporting on them constantly and overstating their harms in comparison to right wing extremism? No, that cannot be right. It must be the woke people that are the problem still!
It’s time for these anti-woke people to admit the authoritarianism, the censorship of ideas, everything they thought was coming from the left, is actually occurring on the right from people with actual power, not company HR departments and college freshman.
They had no interest in actually helping societal progress-they were obsessed with pointing out every single issue in the entire movement of societal progress, even if it came from college freshman being sort of annoying. Look at your own biases and realize if you look at everything through a woke or anti-woke lens, you’ve been playing into the right wing extremists hands this whole time. It’s time to grow up, admit you were wrong, and actually try to report on true abuses of power.
GodOfWarNuggets64 on
Another “Everything is the left’s fault” article on the pile.
itsquinnmydude on
The right has been building the architecture for this type of takeover since Reagan, so no, it does not make sense to blame it on annoying young Twitter leftists
/Thread
Goodlake on
On the bright side, at least they’re blaming cancel culture and not BLM or trans rights?
scoots-mcgoot on
Most people who use the phrase “cancel culture” can’t define it. This article doesn’t either.
Reporter here got paid more than 90% of Americans to write in a publicly available diary basically.
9 Comments
Article:
Over the weekend, the artist and entrepreneur Kanye West, now known as Ye, let loose a blitzkrieg of appalling screeds to his 33 million followers on X. “IM A NAZI,” he proclaimed. He reiterated his position that “SLAVERY WAS A CHOICE,” contended that “JEWS WERE BETTER AS SLAVES YOU HAVE TO PUT YOUR JEWS IN THEIR PLACE AND MAKE THEM INTO YOUR SLAVES,” implied that domestic violence is a self-sacrificing form of love, and shared a screengrab tallying the sales receipts for a White Lives Matter T-shirt sold on his Yeezy website. By Monday, the only product for sale on the site was a white T-shirt adorned with a black swastika, and his X account had been deleted.
Remarkably, this was not the highest-stakes or most widely discussed racist controversy on that social-media platform during the same time frame. On Friday, Vice President J. D. Vance defended Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency office, who was revealed to have posted (pseudonymously), “I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate.”
When Ro Khanna, the Indian American representative from California, inquired of Vance—whose wife and children are of Indian descent—whether, “for the sake of both of our kids,” he would ask Elez for an apology, Vance became apoplectic. Toward Khanna. “For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up,” he fumed on X. “Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children.”
Elez resigned from his post, and Musk asked his 217 million followers on X what they thought: Should he be reinstated? Almost 80 percent of those who replied said yes. Later that day, Musk confirmed that Elez would be “brought back” to DOGE. Not only was a self-professed racist like Elez not canceled—on the contrary, he was transformed overnight by some of the most powerful (and pugnacious) men in America into a national cause célèbre.
Incidentally, this was the same week that Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, announced that it had hired Daniel Penny as “a Deal Partner” working on its “American Dynamism team.” Penny, a former Marine, was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide after he held a mentally ill man in a choke hold on the subway, and the man died. In an internal memo reported by The New York Times, an Andreessen Horowitz partner praised him for showing “courage in a tough situation.”
If a vogue for virtue signaling defined the 2010s and early 2020s, peaking in 2020 during the feverish summer of protest and pandemic—a period in which pronouns in bio, land acknowledgments, black squares, diversity statements, and countless other ethical performances became a form of social capital—something like the exact photonegative of that etiquette has set in now. The reassertion of brute reactionary power in the dual ascendancy of Donald Trump and Elon Musk has brought us to a cultural tipping point. Virtue be damned: Now we are living in an era of relentless, unapologetic vice signaling. Of all of Ye’s deranged posts, one was particularly confusing. “DO YALL THINK I CAN TURN THE TIDE ON ALL THIS WOKE POLITICALLY CORRECT SHIT,” he asked. Here it seemed the infamous trendsetter was decidedly behind the times.
After a decade and a half of progressive dominance over America’s agenda-setting institutions—corporations, universities, media, museums—during which everyone was on the lookout for the scantest evidence of racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, and every other interpersonal and systemic ill, it is not at all frivolous to ask what has been achieved. What, to put it bluntly, was all that cancel culture for?
If the genuine but ill-conceived goal was to create a kinder, friendlier, more inclusive and equitable world for all (often paradoxically by means of shaming, coercion, and intimidation), the real-world effect has been an abysmal rightward overcorrection in which norms of decency have been gleefully obliterated. We have not merely been delivered back to the pre-woke era of the early 2000s. Nor is what we’re seeing some insubstantial vibe shift in manners and aesthetics, confined to the internet.
Consider: We had a #MeToo movement characterized by sometimes disproportionate reputational sacrifices; now we have a presidential Cabinet populated by men with credible sexual-assault accusations on their records. The stifling racist/anti-racist binary of the anti-racism movement has led to the wholesale dismantling of DEI initiatives in both the government and the private sector. The insistence that “no human is illegal” has ended with an unconstitutional attempt to retract birthright citizenship. And the push not just for tolerance but for the equivalence of trans athletes with cisgender athletes has culminated with the president banishing “gender ideology” and surrounding himself with a multiethnic crowd of beaming girls to sign the “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order. On every single issue that mattered to them, progressives now find themselves in a weaker position than before.
In The Opium of the Intellectuals, the French sociologist Raymond Aron observed that utopian programs are “refuted not so much by their failure as by the successes they have achieved.” In the blistering weeks since Trump’s inauguration, we can say that this has been axiomatically true of the movement we look back on now as “wokeness.”
> By Thomas Chatterton Williams
immediately disregard
Cultural pendulum is gonna cultural pendulum🤷🏾♂️The world is much more online nowadays, the pandemic sped up a social catalyst that the right was more than happy and willing to grab and hold. It’s also how much outrage and ridiculousness drives engagement, engagement is profitable, social media companies want profit, they force engagement, and the algorithms ensue. The human populace in this state lives in a split reality that doesn’t exist yet they insist that it does, those who are overwhelmed embrace cynicism and nihilism. Most people don’t care about these progressive ideals, and those who do care about it more as opposition than those who view it as a friend. I myself have become numb to it, even as a young black man who will be personally impacted by the current rise of facism as it’s head is reared in the worst possible position we could have hoped it would never have. It’s hard for me to look at this and not say “It is what it is”. I may just be a weakling and i may just be a coward, i may just be too young and naive, but it feels as if every safeguard to the world we do not want (the voters, the billionaires, the social media companies, our government, etc.) just seem to be ineffective. I don’t want us to just “shut up” since these progressive ideals are worth standing for and staying firm on, but it’s hard not to just….doom about.
I agree with most of this. Why include Daniel Penny though? It’s unfortunate the man died, but he was a threat to everyone on the subway. Someone needed to restrain him.
Was I overreacting about woke issues and cancel culture by reporting on them constantly and overstating their harms in comparison to right wing extremism? No, that cannot be right. It must be the woke people that are the problem still!
It’s time for these anti-woke people to admit the authoritarianism, the censorship of ideas, everything they thought was coming from the left, is actually occurring on the right from people with actual power, not company HR departments and college freshman.
They had no interest in actually helping societal progress-they were obsessed with pointing out every single issue in the entire movement of societal progress, even if it came from college freshman being sort of annoying. Look at your own biases and realize if you look at everything through a woke or anti-woke lens, you’ve been playing into the right wing extremists hands this whole time. It’s time to grow up, admit you were wrong, and actually try to report on true abuses of power.
Another “Everything is the left’s fault” article on the pile.
The right has been building the architecture for this type of takeover since Reagan, so no, it does not make sense to blame it on annoying young Twitter leftists
/Thread
On the bright side, at least they’re blaming cancel culture and not BLM or trans rights?
Most people who use the phrase “cancel culture” can’t define it. This article doesn’t either.
Reporter here got paid more than 90% of Americans to write in a publicly available diary basically.
Waste of time.