Hard to say the War Against Cancel Culture is succeeding at the moment. At least the battle has been joined. But Rogan isn't out of the woods yet, and the Left is doing fairly well at carving out exceptions for itself, like Whoopi getting a paid vacation instead of termination.
They'll keep ratcheting up the pressure against Joe Rogan, and more lefties will join in as the value of his scalp increases. Team Censorship is openly begging a few bigger names to step in, so it's not just fossilized hippies pulling their music from Spotify in protest.
That's the thing about cancellation: when the Left wants somebody gone, it's never really over. They can keep the crusade going more-or-less indefinitely, and as Woke goose-steppers gain more corporate influence, the tide is always one or two big sponsors away from turning.
The Left's special carve-outs are based on the totalitarian principle that political stances define personal character - if a lefty says something cancellable, it's waved aside as a minor stumble or fixable ignorance, because their politics prove their hearts are pure.
The other tactic employed to get lefties a free pass is the reverse: every criticism of them is tendered in "bad faith" by bad people with bad politics and should be ignored, even if receipts are provided. That tactic has been fairly successful at saving left-wing hides.
What about the people with F-You money? Rogan has a fortune and he would surely find other venues if Spotify censors him. He might end up with more listeners than ever, and he's set for life anyway. Doesn't that prove cancel culture is losing its grip?
Maybe - but look at J.K. Rowling. She has enough F-You Money to personally invite everyone on Earth to get bent if she wants, but she's been pretty effectively canceled, and all she did was offer an anodyne observation about human biology that trans fascists didn't like.
Rowling got airbrushed out of the gala anniversary celebrations for her own books. She's casually dismissed as a monster when the media bothers to mention her. A few years ago, she was hailed as a rags-to-riches inspiration, among the greatest successes in literary history.
The fascists were able to make one of the most beloved authors in the history of Western literature so radioactive that none of the actors she made rich and famous were willing to stand up for her, as far as I know. That's not a win for free speech.
Victory against cancel culture will come when it's enthusiastically rejected, when censorship is condemned so roundly that aspiring censors are afraid to tug on their jackboots, when the truly liberal ideal of free speech is restored to its counterculture heights.
Is cancel culture defeated because one or two people with immense fortunes and devoted audiences are strong enough to scrape by? I would submit that a handful of people rich enough to limp off the battlefield, instead of ending up in a mass grave, is not victory.
Our normally emotion-based media would never dream of asking someone like Rowling how she feels about all this, but I wonder if she thinks the size of her bank account is more important than watching a generation of young people taught to think of her as an unspeakable monster.
The fact remains that nearly every government and society in the free world is becoming more authoritarian, and our loss of reverence for free speech is making that possible. Once you lose free speech, you can't sound the battle cry to defend anything else. /end
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