Dan Kovalik - Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture

This book is dedicated to Molly Rush, who is an inspiration to so many of us striving for peace and justice in the world and in our daily lives.

Copyright 2021 by Dan Kovalik

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-6498-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-6499-6

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

As Vladimir Lenin once said, There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen. In 2020, we had many weeks where decades happened, and we are having such weeks now in 2021, as well. The events unfolding in our country and around the world are dizzying, and it is quite hard to make accurate assessments of these events as they roll by so quickly. This makes writing such a topical book as this quite difficult, but that is my task and I only hope that I am adequately up to it.

The event that truly gave me pause, just as this book was going to print, was the storming of the Capitol on January 6 by seemingly crazed Trump supporters. While some of these individuals seemed relatively harmless, if certainly misguided, others clearly set upon the Capitol building with ill and evil intent, including, quite possibly, the kidnapping and even killing of members of Congress and Vice President Pence. In the end, five people died in the process of this invasion, and much of the country and world were left shocked and horrified.

And just as horrifying as the actions of those who stormed the Capitol was the conduct of significant portions of the police and other law enforcement who seemed to stand down in the face of the assault and to permit it to take place. Many quite correctly pointed out the permissiveness with which police treated these invaders as contrasted with the heavy-handedness and violence police around the country treated Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters, the vast majority of whom were peaceful, during the summer of 2020.

These events certainly put this book in a different light from when I wrote the lions share of it before January 6, 2021, and other events will certainly transpire before and after publication that will do the same. For example, some may wonder why, after elements of the right wing exposed themselves as so extremely violent and even murderous, I have focused a book on the relatively more benign cancel culture of those on the left of the political spectrum; or why, after the effective incitement of these individuals with lies such as the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory, I have written about liberals playing loose with facts and the truth and using cancel culture to perpetuate liberals own myths.

My response is simple: because it matters, and because events such as those on January 6 do not give a free pass to liberals or leftists to cannibalize themselves through cancellation or to look down and shun huge swaths of the American peoplemost of whom are also horrified by the storming of the Capitolwhom they deem beneath them and even deplorable, in the words of Hillary Clinton in referring to the working class in middle America.

Indeed, the liberal/left sermonizing, chest thumping, and display of outright hypocrisy after the Capitol invasion prove the point of this book. After the Capitol assault, we heard much moralizing about how terrible it was for people to attack this apparently sacred building that numerous pundits and politicians referred to as the house of the people. All of a sudden, we were urged to care about historic landmarks when, in truth, liberal/left protesters spent a lot of the summer tearing down and vandalizing historic monuments. And the targets of this destruction, or cancellation if you will, were not just the scores of Confederate monuments nor ones of Christopher Columbus and his like, which I will assume for purposes of discussion were fair game, though others might disagree. For example, protesters took it upon themselves to topple, damage, or destroy statues of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Francis Scott Key, Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, Union Army Colonel and abolitionist Hans Christian Heg, as well as Madisons Forward statue and the statue of an elk in Portland.

And of course, in Portland, protesters came out night after night for months to attack the federal court house.

The protesters had their reasons for targeting some of these monuments, some of them defensible while some not, but the point is that the message sent by this destruction was that nothing is sacred and that it is up to the whims of the protesters du jour to determine which monuments stand unscathed and which do not. And this message seemed accepted by at least some sectors of the US media, with NPR, for example, giving airtime on August 27, 2020, to Vicky Osterweil to publicize her book, In Defense of Looting.

In this interview, which was quite favorable to Osterweil (though later revised after public criticism), she defended looting, which she defined as an attack, in the context of a protest or demonstration, on a business, a commercial space, maybe a government buildingtaking those things that would otherwise be commodified and controlled and sharing them for free. Osterweil claimed that such conduct provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think thats a part of it that doesnt really get talked aboutthat riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.

Then, after January 6, 2021, we were urged to be horrified because people vandalized and caused damage to and looted the US Capitol building and various artifacts within. We were meant to care that one gentleman famously left the building, with a wide-eyed grin, with the lectern of Nancy Pelosi. But wasnt he just experiencing the joy and liberation that Osterweil believes he deserves? He certainly looked so from the photo.

And all of this is quite relevant to the heart of this book, which was inspired by the cancellation of longtime peace activist Molly Rush in Pittsburgh for a Facebook post that was critical of rioting and looting. This was condemned as racist in the context of the George Floyd protests, as it, in the view of the cancellers, was seen as telling African Americans how to fight for their own liberation. I discuss this in detail below, but suffice it to say that Mollys criticism now seems almost prescient and would certainly be welcome as applied to the events of January 6.

Sadly, the hypocrisy does not end here. Thus, as some other commentators pointed out, the infamous Viking guy who invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was videotaped on that day encouraging Venezuelans to follow his lead in overthrowing their Communist government to take back their freedom. As some may recall, Ms. Nuland was the driving force behind Obamas 2014 coup in Ukraine, which brought to power a government, still in power, consisting quite substantially of neo-Nazis.