On cancel culture

Though I proudly live in South Florida, I miss my home of Sacramento, California. I miss the mountains, the cold ocean, and the burritos and pizza. Yes, Miami has some good pizza, and you can find an occasional decent burrito, but it's not even remotely the same scale. I miss my Sacramento Kings, though I have nothing but respect for the Miami Heat.

I still have family in Sacramento, too, and hope we can retire there. Still, whenever I move home to California, I will certainly miss the foods here in Miami.

Anyway, that's why I was reading the Sacramento Bee, the original McClatchy paper, when I stumbled across the Miami Herald's hot take on cancel culture. If you don't know, the Herald is owned by McClatchy, or, rather, was, until the McClatchy family sold their holdings to Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund, which now controls all of the McClatchy news organizations.

For a moment, let's set aside John Stamos's Mar-a-lago trip to advocate for nurses, a group of people that includes my mom, who just renewed her RN's license, which she's held since 1968.

Instead, let's talk about cancel culture. Mancuso opens her piece with "Cancel culture is out of control." Let's examine that a bit, shall we?

As we begin, let's look at the Miami New Times, another paper in Miami, talking about a new podcast, created by anti-vaxxers and funded by the windfall one of the anti-vaxxers got when he sold off SunPass. That's right Florida, one of the biggest tax collecting agencies in Florida was created by a private company and made a guy so rich he could champion measles and "canceled" celebrities like Rudy Giuliani and Papa John's founder John Schnatter. The program is called "Erased," taking the notion of being canceled even further to suggesting these "victims" have been erased.

What I don't understand is if Giuliani and Schnatter were "erased" why I know who they are at all. Canceled does a lot of work, but erased? You've got to be kidding me. Giuliani was found liable for defaming election workers in an American Court and is still referred to in many circles as "America's Mayor." It sounds to me that he was found liable in a court and that he still maintains enough celebrity that David and Leila Centner want to talk to him. Is that erasure?

I also remember John Schnatter being fired for being racist during a training trying to help him not tank the company's stock by being racist. Never mind the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. So, Schnatter, who still has enough pull to get on a podcast and is worth several million dollars (admittedly, not super rich), has been erased. Got it.

Then there's Will Smith, who The Shot headlined their June 2024 piece "Celebrities who have been canceled," with a headshot of Smith, who dropped a new album this month. Golly gee, I wish I could get canceled enough that a record label would produce an album after I took twenty years off of making music to pursue an enormously successful movie career, which I jeopardized by assaulting a colleague on stage at the industry's biggest event in front of millions of live TV viewers. The album has flopped, according to some (though, it's not fully out yet?), but maybe that's because the majority of people who buy albums these days weren't alive when Will Smith last recorded a studio album. Or maybe it's because he assaulted someone on live TV during Hollywood's biggest event. Perhaps both. Of course, being canceled didn't stop some reviewers from praising the album.

The Shot goes on to list Joe Rogan as a canceled celebrity. Poor Joe, he's no longer the top Podcast at Spotify, which pays him millions on top of subscription fees. Being canceled has him all the way down at number three at time of writing this.

The Shot lists Clarence Thomas as a member of the canceled celebrity list. For those who don't know, Clarence Thomas has been a member in good standing of the United States Supreme Court since he was appointed and confirmed to replace the legendary Thurgood Marshall on the bench.

According to The Shot, the then 75-year-old Clarence Thomas had to retire from a job most people didn't know he had but got to keep the one he's known for because he was canceled. Seems like a rough life, being canceled.

The list on The Shot is rather remarkable as it consists mostly of people who created hostile workplaces, like Ellen DeGeneres, and people who committed actual crimes, including Sean Combs. Yet, most of these people either retained their wealth or went to prison, so it's hard to determine if their fall-off from producing new content was due to being "canceled" or being in prison.

To be clear, Mancuso doesn't actually mention other celebrity cancelations directly nor does she mention the list in The Shot. Yet, her saying "cancel culture is out of control," and only providing the John Stamos incident as an example compels me to find other canceled celebrities, which brought me to The Shot.

So, about John Stamos being canceled. I agree that criticism of Stamos for supporting nurses, even at an event at Mar-a-lago, is hardly warranted. However, I certainly understand why people might voice their opposition to it. But the framing this as another instance of "cancel culture is out of control" seems like telling me unicorns and space lasers are destroying the planet. I mean, I guess it's an opinion one might have, but is it worth shedding big tears in a major newspaper network over?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Joe Rogan and Will Smith weren't canceled by any definition. Same with Clarence Thomas who was forced to retire, at the age of 75, from a job few knew he had but got to keep one of the most important jobs in the world, despite, you know, reams of evidence that he's being bribed routinely, being just one of the scandals he's known for. I'm gonna say if cancel culture is a real thing, which I doubt, Diddy Combs absolutely deserved it and I think people will be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees. I would say by that logic that Rudy Giuliani deserved to get canceled too, but despite him owing millions to the people he defamed, he sure seems to have a lot of pop out there, so it is hard to call him "canceled," and ridiculous to suggest he was erased. I'll also say that John Schnatter is on tape at a training to help him stop being racist in public saying "'Colonel Sanders Colonel Sanders called blacks n--—s' and never faced any public backlash at KFC," and I am going to go out on a limb and say that the board of Papa Johns was warranted for firing him--even if they agreed with him.

I'm just going to say it, being fired for cause isn't being canceled or erased.

It is possible that blending Mancuso's hot take with The Shot and with the Erasure podcast might be unfair to Mancuso. Still, saying noted Kamala Harris supporter John Stamos was canceled is, frankly, another version of this line of broad line of victimization (and, frankly, victim blaming--Rudy Giuliani tried to destroy two women's lives with lies, they are the victims, not him) reasoning that "cancel culture is out of control," when in fact, cancel culture isn't a thing. The Stamos hot take is a way to get liberals as mad as conservatives about cancel culture when cancel culture is just a political chimera--a mythical monster created by splicing together real animals to make something scary but ultimately fake.