Finally got around to reading @RottenInDenmark's piece on the "cancel culture" moral panic & it's every bit as good as I expected. Its lessons extend well beyond this particular phenomenon to shitty journalism generally. michaelhobbes.substack.com/p/moral-panic-…
Cannot tell you how many times I've asked this question: "Why are readers of national publications constantly being told that they should worry about the left potentially, sometime in the future, becoming *as bad as Republicans are now*?"
The fact that this moral panic is taking place *while Republicans are actively trying to ban books, dictate curriculum, & deprive their opponents of the right to vote* is just so surreal. Your country is literally crumbling & *this* is what you're writing about?
The US chattering classes have long preferred punching lefties to pushing back against actual fascists, but at a certain point -- say, when RW violence is on the rise & the leaders of the GOP are openly emulating Orban -- it reaches the point of self-parody.
Virtually every bit of cancel-culture commentary I've seen strikes me the same way: this string of obscure anecdotes & portentous overstatements could seem convincing *only if you are already convinced*, if you already "know" the conclusion. It offers *permission*, not evidence.
And most mainstream punditry on the right wing is the precise mirror image: what you write/say if you *don't want to believe* that normal politics is dead & there's a fascist uprising, if you refuse to see the pattern amidst the disparate episodes. It's permission *not* to see.
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