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July 8, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

54:13

Cancel Culture Comes For Us All | Ep. 1047

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	The cancel culture comes for liberals who decry the cancel culture.
	Callie Berry apologizes for acting.
	And Ilhan Omar makes clear, once again, she isn't too fond of the United States.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	You have a right to privacy protected at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	Well, Benjamin Franklin once suggested that death and taxes were the only inevitabilities.
	Wrong he was!
	Cancel culture is an inevitability as well.
	Everyone will be canceled, unless you're on the full-on woke left, in which case you can say anything.
	I mean, you can literally quote Hitler, and if you're on the full-on woke left, you won't be canceled.
	You'll be tried just a little bit because you made everybody look bad, but You won't be canceled full out.
	We'll get to that story in a little while.
	But canceled culture is quite real.
	It particularly exists not at the top levels, although it does exist at the top levels.
	I mean, if you're the national book critic circle, then half of your board members are forced to resign for not being sufficiently woke, for not being sufficiently supplicatory toward Black Lives Matter.
	The Vulture.com reported a week ago that 12 board members of the National Book Critics Circle, an organization of 800 critics, began to draft a statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, noting the publishing industry has long been overwhelmingly white from top to bottom.
	They wrote of their culpability in this system of erasure of black and indigenous voices from the cultural conversation and listed a bunch of steps they wanted to take.
	Ismail Mohamed, a black writer and critic, said, It was really exciting.
	We were hoping to change ourselves and then model something for the entire industry.
	Just as the group was starting to share the statement of the world, the organization began to fracture and then implode.
	Over the past several days, more than half of the National Book Critics Circle's 24 board members, which had included six people of color, have resigned in a flurry of recriminations over racism, privacy concerns, and political correctness.
	What exactly happened?
	Well, the organization's president, one Lori Hertzel, who is white, ran the statement by several board members who hadn't participated in writing it.
	One board member, Carlin Romano, said he disagreed with some of the claims in the letter, but didn't want to distract from the great majority of the board from its mission.
	But he went on to detail his objections to a number of those claims, dismissing the statement's fundamental premise as absolute nonsense, that the publishing industry has been attempting to silence the voices of people of color, which is absolute nonsense, by the way.
	I mean, it's just not true.
	I know a lot of the heads of these major publishing corporations, the last thing they are attempting to do is silence people of color.
	It's insane.
	I mean, fully insane.
	A white critic and former board president, he took issue with the idea that publishing business operated with, quote, the full benefits of white supremacy and institutional racism, and that white gatekeeping had been working to stifle black voices at every level of our industry.
	These are statements that were made in this little letter.
	And then he was chided, and then other people got angry, and then a bunch of people were basically forced to resign from the National Book Critics Circle.
	We've seen data analysts who work for liberal organizations like David Shore.
	Put out, basically, anodyne data points, and then be forced to resign from organizations like Civics Analytics.
	We've seen high-level people who've been forced to resign from their jobs.
	The Boeing communications chief was forced to resign because 33 years ago he wrote a piece saying that women shouldn't be in direct combat.
	This stuff does exist, and it's existed for quite a long time.
	I mean, let's not pretend that this is a creation of this year.
	I'm old enough to remember when Brendan Eich, the co-founder of Mozilla Firefox, was forced to resign from his position for the great sin of having supported traditional marriage Under the proposition in 2008 in California that proposed that traditional marriage be preserved.
	By the way, that was at a time when Barack Obama supported traditional marriage.
	He was forced to resign, Brendan Eich.
	And so cancel culture has been around for a very, very long time.
	It has just picked up a lot of speed and more and more it is being applied to the common everyday citizen.
	It's not just being applied to people at high levels of power and prestige.
	It is being applied to everyone.
	If you are a person who is working in a corporation and you're at a very low level and you have a Facebook post from three years ago suggesting that Hands Up, Don't Shoot was a lie, maybe you'll be canceled.
	If you say all Black Lives Matter, not just Black Lives Matter, you could find yourself on the chopping block.
	If you point out that Robin DiAngelo's white fragility is a bag of hogwash, well, then you are going to be canceled probably.
	So cancel culture undoubtedly exists because we are watching it every single day.
	And if you don't feel like cancel culture exists, it's because you are ignorant or you're a member of the persecuting party.
	There are a lot of people out there, particularly on the hard left, who are members of the cancel culture, who insist that they are not actually part of a cancel culture.
	They're just holding people accountable.
	Except they're not holding people accountable.
	Because the accountability is generally chiding somebody for their bad behavior.
	It's not going to their employer and having them fired over something that is absolutely not fireable and has nothing to do with their employment.
	The difference between cancel culture and regular criticism is, I disagree with what you just said.
	And I'm going to go to your boss and see whether your boss disagrees with what you just said.
	Cancel culture is about trying to ruin somebody's life over something they said that you disagree with.
	That's the definition of cancel culture.
	It is not just we are going to criticize what you said.
	We're not going to point out that you're wrong.
	We're not going to have a conversation about that.
	It is we are going to go to all of the ways that you make your money and make your living and earn your bread.
	And we are going to attempt to deprive you of those things because we disagree with the thing that you just said.
	That is the nature of cancel culture.
	The great defenders of cancel culture, of course, claim that it doesn't exist.
	So Judd Legum, who writes Popular Information, which is this blog that is specifically dedicated to going after outlets on the right and very often just making up information about them.
	Full disclosure, he's been coming after Daily Wire recently for the bizarre claim that the way that we make our money is by marketing via a third-party Facebook page that was responsible for, count it, 1.01% of the grand total of traffic in the last three months via our analytics.
	In any case, Judd Legum, Suggested, quote, cancel culture is something that does not exist.
	But it's a very popular concept among people who do terrible things and don't like being held accountable.
	So cancel culture doesn't exist.
	And also, I am the leader of it.
	Right.
	That statement said cancel culture doesn't exist.
	Also, I'm just going to say that I'm going to ruin your life and your career if you disagree with me.
	Right.
	Who do terrible things.
	What are the terrible things that are being done?
	The terrible things that are being done?
	are typically things like not being quote-unquote anti-racist enough in the Ibram Kendi definition of anti-racism.
	Being too fragile.
	Crying.
	A white woman crying at a meeting.
	These are things that are terrible things and don't like being held accountable.
	Judd Legum says the problem with the United States is not that there is too much accountability, but there is too little.
	Too little accountability.
	He says it's amazing the self-proclaimed champions of free speech scream, stop criticizing me, you are attacking free speech every time they say something pernicious and someone responds.
	That is the opposite of free speech.
	If you believe in free speech, defend your position.
	Okay, but this is what's hilarious.
	He then goes on to use as his example of people who are falsely claiming cancel culture, a case in which somebody actually was canceled, right?
	So then he says, so from his little screed here, in which he suggests cancel culture doesn't exist, his suggestion is that if I say something and Judd Legum criticizes it, that I call that cancel culture.
	No, that's not cancel culture.
	Cancel culture is when you attempt to take me off the air because you disagree with what I say.
	But he's fine with that too, okay?
	Because his exact example of something that is quote-unquote not cancel culture is when the New Yorkers, David Remnick, was supposed to interview Steve Bannon at an event and then cancelled the actual interview because there was so much blowback about Steve Bannon.
	That's an actual cancelling.
	That's an actual event that was cancelled, okay?
	It is not just somebody disagreed with Steve Bannon.
	It was you had booked an event and then you cancelled the event thanks to blowback.
	So Judd Legum says, I'm taking back free speech from this tiresome group of people who just complain all the time about being silenced, but actually get paid lots of money to say boring things.
	No.
	Do you not understand?
	The answer is he does understand English.
	He's just a damned liar, right?
	I mean, this is what people do.
	Okay, so it's not just Judd Legum, of course.
	There's a whole group of people on the left.
	Now, the reason this has come up at this moment particularly is not just because we've had a wave of cancellations, a tsunami of cancellations coming for literally everyone.
	I mean, they're now going after Lin-Manuel Miranda and trying to ruin his career for the great sin of having created a musical in which the founders are played by people of color.
	And he didn't speak up loudly enough against Black Lives Matter.
	I mean, they're trying to cancel Lin-Manuel Miranda, not just criticizing him.
	They're trying to basically suggest that maybe Hamilton shouldn't be on things like Disney Plus, right?
	Maybe we should remove the mechanisms of dissemination.
	There are people who are actually doing this.
	Everyone will be canceled.
	If you are not sufficiently on the left or if you have not paid obeisance to the left, the very hard radical left, then you will be canceled.
	Well, a group of academics stood up yesterday and they said, well, we're not, you know, we don't like this.
	We're not into it.
	They issued a letter on justice and open debate.
	And this letter was signed by a huge group of people from right, left and center.
	It included people like Wynton Marsalis, the famous jazz musician.
	And Applebaum, who's certainly of the political left, she's a political liberal.
	Margaret Atwood, who's the writer of The Handmaid's Tale.
	And it extended to people like Yasha Monk from The Atlantic.
	It extended to Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine.
	It extended to Noam Chomsky all the way on the left and right, a defender of Pol Pot and the Camille Rouge.
	Noam Chomsky was like, I don't like this stuff.
	Nicholas Christakis, who's the Yale professor.
	Who was ousted from his job for the great crime of suggesting that Halloween costumes were merely Halloween costumes.
	Right?
	He signed on the letter.
	J.K.
	Rowling is on the letter.
	Salman Rushdie is on the letter.
	Jesse Singal is on the letter from New York, formerly of New York Magazine.
	The list is very, very long.
	Randy Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers.
	Barry Weiss is on the list.
	Sean Wilentz from Princeton University is on the list.
	Thomas Chatterton Williams was the writer, who is black, who had created the letter in the first place.
	Matthew Iglesias, as we will see, an important figure here, was on the list.
	I can't name on the list a single person who I believe voted for Trump.
	I think every single one of these people, so far as I can see, is somebody who did not vote for Trump.
	These are all people who are on the political left for the most part.
	There may be one or two exceptions, but I'm hard-pressed to find them.
	Maybe Francis Fukuyama, maybe?
	But pretty much everybody else who's on this list is on the political left.
	So we're going to get to the actual content of the letter, which has generated a thousand backlashes.
	A thousand backlashes.
	And we'll see how it is.
	It's an utterly uncontroversial letter.
	It seems almost like virtue signaling.
	It's like, you guys were late on this bandwagon, guys.
	Some of us have been talking about this for quite a while.
	My friend, Eric Weinstein, who is famous for coming up with the term intellectual dark web to describe a group of people who just wanted to have open conversations.
	And we took inordinate incoming fire over this, right?
	For years, we took incoming fire over this.
	He was like, welcome to the party, pal.
	Okay, so we'll get to this letter in a second, because as you will see, the same people who are claiming there is no cancel culture are now attempting to cancel the people who signed the letter about the evils of cancel culture.
	And I'm not sure what's funnier, people claiming that there is no cancel culture while simultaneously being key cogs in cancel culture, or people who signed this letter, there have been at least a couple, who signed this letter decrying cancel culture, and then out of fear of cancellation, unsigned the letter.
	That's been a thing that's been going on.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so this letter from Harper's is what has generated inordinate controversy.
	What exactly does this letter, what does this letter say?
	It says, our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial.
	Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.
	But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.
	As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second.
	The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy.
	But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion, which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting.
	See, the letter is so apologetic about the point that it's making.
	I think we don't want to find ourselves on the same side of this issue as, you know, Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro.
	We don't want to find ourselves on the same side.
	But that's where we find ourselves.
	And the right wing demagogues are exploiting the fact.
	It's all about the balancing.
	The right wing.
	Remember, these are all liberals signing this.
	The right wing is exploiting the fact that cancel culture exists.
	And this is why we have to fight against cancel culture.
	You know who's really bad?
	Donald Trump is also really bad.
	Donald Trump, he's a powerful ally of illiberalism.
	Okay, Donald Trump has not done anything to stop free speech in the United States of America.
	Nothing.
	Nothing.
	Zero things has Donald Trump done to stop the free speech in America.
	The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate this has set on all sides.
	So this is a very tepid statement, right?
	It's a very tepid statement from the center-left to the left.
	The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.
	Well, we have come to expect this on the radical right.
	Censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture.
	Okay, I love this.
	It's the, again, the entire letter is about how we have to keep saying the right, the right, the right, the right.
	Okay, the free exchange of information ideas.
	Let me let you know a little secret, folks.
	The right has not been complicit in this for a long time.
	The notion that the right Unless you're talking about the radical, radical right, like you're talking about the alt-right or white supremacist or something.
	If you're talking about the mainstream right attempting to shut down the free exchange of information ideas, that has not been a thing for a very long time, which is why so many people on the left have been texting me from their elite perches at major media institutions going, why am I on your side?
	What's going on?
	And I'm saying to them, like, listen, if you get fired, I'll help you find a job.
	They're coming to me, OK?
	It's not the other way around.
	I've been standing over here with this flag for quite a while, guys.
	You don't get to go, well, you know, the radical right normally normally does this sort of stuff.
	But we've been perturbed to find the left doing this sort of stuff.
	Guys, maybe that was true in like 1966.
	It is not true in 2020, and it hasn't been true for a very long time.
	The censorious left, those are the people who are attempting to shut down my speeches on college campuses, or go after my advertisers, or shut down shows like mine, or shut down shows on Fox News, or shut down Rush Limbaugh.
	What are you talking about?
	I love this creation.
	I'm not even a fan of this letter, but the letter goes on.
	They say, While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture.
	An intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in blinding moral certainty.
	We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters, but it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.
	More troubling still, institutional leaders in a spirit of panicked damage control are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.
	Editors are fired for running controversial pieces.
	That's a reference to the New York Times op-ed editor who was fired for running a Tom Cotton piece.
	Books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity.
	That is a reference to a novel called American Dirt, in which a woman who was, I believe, not of Latina extraction, she wrote a novel about illegal immigration, and it was considered very, very very bad because she was not actually an illegal immigrant.
	Journalists are barred from writing on certain topics, which happens all the time.
	Professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class, has happened several times.
	A researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study, that'd be David Shore.
	The heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.
	That'd be the op-ed editor, the Philadelphia Inquirer, or the head of Bon Appetit, or the guy who is, they're trying to now oust from his perch over at the Southern Food Group, or whatever it is, who had committed the great sin of being a white guy.
	Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without threat of reprisal.
	We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
	This sifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time.
	The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power, and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.
	This is all the letter in Harper, signed by, again, a bevy of people who are on the left.
	Like, it's a list of maybe 150 people.
	Again, not a single one voted for Trump.
	The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.
	We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.
	As writers, we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk-taking, and even mistakes.
	We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.
	If we won't defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn't expect the public or the state to defend it for us.
	Okay.
	Except for all of the bizarre kind of slaps at the right that are just virtue-signaling nonsense to their leftist friends.
	Don't worry, guys.
	We're still on your side.
	We still agree.
	Except for all of that, this is basically just reality, right?
	I mean, that is just the reality.
	And that is why you have people ranging from, on the right, people like Deirdre McCloskey, all the way to folks like Noam Chomsky on the far left, right?
	David Brooks and Noam Chomsky.
	Steven Pinker.
	And Tawfiq Rahim, right?
	I mean, a very large swath of the left, right?
	Malcolm Gladwell, all the way to people like Gloria Steinem and Nadine Strassen.
	And so that's a very big list of people who are, again, center to left.
	The blowback has been intense and not shocking, not shocking.
	And we'll get to that blowback in just one second because it is so telling about where we are in society.
	That letter, which is pretty straightforwardly of the left, again, has the requisite slaps against Trump and the requisite slaps against the radical right and the evil conservatives and all this stuff.
	That letter is now being ripped up by the hard political left.
	And in an attempt to prove the cancel culture doesn't exist and or is being exaggerated, people on the list are now coming under pressure to be canceled.
	We're having to sign the letter, which is just perfect.
	It's just perfect.
	Cancel culture doesn't exist, says the man as he tries to club you into submission.
	That's where we are right now.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so the blowback on this letter is intense and huge, right?
	The radical left is like, I can't even believe that people would say that cancel culture is bad because what the radical left has been hoping to do is again, push and then gain adherence simply through intimidation tactics.
	It's like a snowball.
	You start the snowball effect, you can sort of get people to stay silent.
	And then once they've stayed silent, Then you can compel them to repeat the nostrums you want them to repeat.
	And then you can get them to become part of the mob.
	Because better to be part of the mob than to be eaten by the mob.
	And so here you have an obstacle to the mob mentality that is now formed on the radical left to cancel everybody who disagrees.
	And so you're seeing journalists, reporters, who are like, you know what?
	This letter's real bad.
	Letter's real bad.
	Felicia Sanchez is a Washington Post national political reporter.
	Here's what she wrote.
	She said, there's definitely a debate to be had about ordinary people whose lives are turned upside down by a viral moment, a phenomenon that's happening more and more these days.
	It's not just happening.
	It's being pushed by places like the Washington Post and the New York Times.
	And we have seen how many incidents have we seen that have been blown up into national stories that are not even local news.
	That whole story about the woman in the bird park who had a racially tinged conversation.
	It was kind of nasty, a racially tinged conversation with the black birdwatching guy.
	That was a national story that ran for like five days on the front page of the New York Times.
	So don't tell me that this stuff is just sort of happening.
	It's not just sort of happening.
	Sometimes the consequences are warranted, and sometimes they're not.
	Each case is different, says Felicia Sonmez.
	But high-profile cancellations, such as the ones alluded to in the Harper's letter, are a different beast.
	And it's disingenuous to describe them in such innocuous terms as the letter does.
	It's not about free speech.
	It's about words and actions that harm the vulnerable.
	And this is the line of cancel culture.
	The line of cancel culture.
	Some of us have been describing this for years, so it's a point of high irritation to people like me, who've been calling this out for literally years in exactly the tactics they are using.
	And now people are starting to come around and be like, no, that's either saying, no, that's not real, or explicitly saying the thing I've been saying they're saying.
	I gave testimony in Congress, in the congressional record, in which I explicitly talked about the attempt to treat speech as violence.
	When I was at Berkeley, people were literally chanting, speech is violence.
	Because the idea is that if I say something that you don't like, I have done a violence to you, I have micro-aggressed you, and therefore you're allowed to perform physical violence on me and or harm me or my career.
	That is what you're allowed to do because my words hurt your feelings.
	And if I hurt your feelings, I've done you harm.
	It's words or actions that harm the vulnerable.
	Now, the beautiful thing about that standard is there is no way to disprove it.
	Because how exactly do you prove that words harm the vulnerable?
	When we were all kids, we used to hear, sticks and stones may break your bones, but words may never hurt me.
	But we have decided, no, that words are actual weapons.
	Words are things that hurt you.
	And if something hurts you, you're allowed to fight back.
	The proper response to being hurt is to punch back and to defend yourself.
	And thus, canceling someone and ruining their career or ruining their life, getting them fired for no apparent reason, all you're doing is defending yourself from harm.
	And this is, again, a Washington Post national political reporter, not an op-ed editor.
	And she says, Okay, hold on.
	You just lumped together sexual assault and the quote-unquote marginalization of trans people.
	harm.
	As though sexual assault, racial epithets, and the marginalization of trans people were all frivolous things, just part of some intellectual exercise.
	Okay, hold on.
	You just lumped together sexual assault and the quote-unquote marginalization of trans people.
	If you are now equating an attempted rape with I used the proper biological pronoun to describe a person, I have a feeling that you are the problem here intellectually.
	That's a horrifying equation.
	Right?
	Instead of thinking of the cancelled as figures whose merits and flaws can be weighed in a vacuum, why not view them within the context in which they actually exist?
	As figures whose action may be putting their co-workers or students or others around them at risk.
	Ah, so here, now we get to the crux.
	We can't actually view people with their merits and flaws in a vacuum.
	We can't view them as individuals.
	In the name of social justice, we have to view them for the impact their words have had.
	This is one of the nostrums of the social justice movement.
	One of the nostrums is that intent doesn't matter, only effect matters.
	So if you say something perfectly innocuous and somebody else feels harmed by that, that is still your fault.
	This is one of the key points of the anti-racism, white fragility movement.
	So absolutely insane.
	But that right there, that's a Washington Post national political reporter.
	So part of the blowback is, you don't get to claim anything about cancel culture, because absolutely, you're hurting people with your speech.
	Your speech is hurting people.
	So you're canceled.
	Cancel culture is good.
	It's not just, it's not just, it both exists, it both does not exist and is also good, is the argument that is being made right now.
	It does not exist, but also if it is happening, it's because it's not cancel culture, it's just awesomeness.
	We're gonna get to more of this and the blowback and the predictable and the predictable walk back from some of the people who signed the letter in just a second.
	First, Let's talk about the fact that now is not a great time to go to the auto parts store.
	In fact, you know what?
	It's really never a great time to go to the auto parts store.
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	You have access to rockauto.com at your desk, in your pocket.
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	Write Shapiro in there, how did you hear about us box, so they know that we sent you.
	Okay, so the blowback again continues.
	A journalist for the New York Times named Farnaz Farsihi She writes, the letter, this Harper's letter, was shaped slash spearheaded from conversations by four privileged white men.
	Apparently they felt entitled to really weigh in on racism, diversity, and inclusion.
	That says it all.
	Actually, some of the key figures, it was spearheaded by the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who is a black man.
	So that is not actually true.
	But again, cancel the letter because too many white people involved.
	Too many white people involved.
	And then the cancelings will continue apace So, Matthew Iglesias, who I am not a fan of, as you will recall.
	I have referred to him on this show repeatedly as the Ralph Wiggum of the internet.
	So, I do not think you can count me in the Iglesias fan pack.
	Okay, How Far Is the Left Gone?
	They've forced me into now defending Matthew Iglesias.
	So, well done everybody all the way around.
	Just really well done stuff.
	There's a writer named Emily Vanderwerf, was a trans woman, which is to say a biological man who says he is a woman.
	And this person writes to the editors of Vox.
	Tries to go over the head of Matthew Iglesias to quote-unquote the editors of Vox.
	To the editors, as a trans woman who very much values her position at Fox and the support the publication has given her through the emotional and physical turmoil of transition, I was deeply saddened to see Matt Iglesias' signature on the Harper's Weekly letter.
	Now, you may be saying to yourself, wait a second, trans stuff isn't even mentioned in that letter.
	Like, I just read the entire text of the letter to you out loud.
	Not once are trans issues mentioned.
	Not a single solitary time.
	But, says Emily Vanderwerf, Matt is, of course, entitled to his own opinion.
	I know he's a more nuanced thinker than signing the letter would suggest.
	Saying you're a more nuanced thinker is just a suggestion that you didn't really know what you were signing.
	There's no nuance to the letter.
	No, there is nuance to the letter.
	You just don't like what the letter says.
	Why don't you just say it?
	Right?
	You're not nuanced enough is a way for somebody on the left to basically sneer at you in derision and paternalistic concern for your stupidity.
	Again, this was written to Matt Iglesias, the editors at Vox, where he's co-founder, right?
	But!
	It has never been anything but kind to me and has often supported my work publicly, all of which I'm extremely grateful for.
	But, but, the letter, signed as it is by several prominent anti-trans voices and containing as many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions as it does, ideally would not have been signed by anybody at Box, much less one of the most prominent people at our publication.
	Again, Matt's opinions and experiences are his own.
	He can do what he wants with his free time.
	But his signature being on the letter makes me feel less safe at Vox.
	Ah, there it is.
	There it is.
	All you have to do is just wait for it for like seven sentences, eight sentences.
	Every time.
	Every time.
	The cancel culture warriors, they go to, oh, I feel unsafe.
	You know what you should do?
	You should really start something.
	I think you can call it maybe like the Committee on Public Safety.
	You can call it the Committee on Public Safety.
	And then you can just go around canceling people.
	And if you don't really, it really, if you got a problem with them, you just behead them.
	In fact, like the committee on public safety, which was a, for those who are not getting the reference, this isn't in it.
	Overt reference to the French Revolution.
	The Committee of Public Safety was the provisional government of France during the Reign of Terror.
	That's why I'm making the reference.
	You can call it the Committee on Public Safety because your safety has been threatened, don't you see?
	You've been threatened by the fact that Matthew Iglesias signed on to an extraordinarily anodyne letter about the evils of council culture, and you can say, well, you know, as a trans woman, I now feel threatened.
	So the letter can simultaneously suggest that the person that you're writing about, quote, has never been anything but kind to me and has often supported my work publicly.
	But also, his opinion makes me feel less safe.
	Ooh, so, so unsafe.
	So much unsafeness happening.
	They used the exact same excuse, by the way, for firing Kevin Williamson at the Atlantic, right?
	They hired Kevin Williamson at the Atlantic, and then a bunch of feminists said, I feel unsafe that Kevin Williamson has been hired at the Atlantic.
	He's sitting in his house in Texas, He's never met any of these people.
	Like, I feel so unsafe.
	I'm feeling so unsafe.
	Really?
	Did he send a death threat to you?
	Did he leave like an anonymous phone call on your phone?
	What exactly did he do?
	What did Matt Iglesias do to Emily Vanderwerf?
	Did he call this person up on their phone and say, I think that you are a biological man and therefore I dismiss your existence?
	Like what exactly is the big threatening thing Matt Iglesias did?
	He didn't say anything about trans stuff.
	Matt Iglesias agrees with this person on trans policies.
	He's written about it extensively.
	Okay, like, what are you, what?
	But apparently it's a threat to safety for this person to even appear on a list of people Like J.K.
	Rowling.
	Because J.K.
	Rowling signed the letter.
	That's really what this letter is, this particular blowback is about.
	J.K.
	Rowling, who has said that biological women exist, which by the way is not a threatening position.
	I'm sorry, it is not a threat to your safety for me to point out that a biological man is in fact a biological man and not a woman.
	Okay, that is not a threat to your safety.
	I'm not saying anything bad should happen to you.
	I think anybody who tries to threaten you should go to jail, right?
	The law applies to you just as it applies to everyone else.
	But the idea is if you disagree with me, if you make me feel lesser, if you make me feel bad, then you have threatened my safety.
	You have threatened my safety.
	Your words are more damaging than me ruining your career or going to the editors at your publication and publicly... By the way, Let me just say this to Matt Iglesias, you're the co-founder of Ox.
	If somebody at my organization said something like this, like put out a public letter suggesting that I had threatened their safety for an opinion of mine, they'd be out on their ass the next day.
	I would fire them the next day.
	The next day.
	Because, let me explain.
	I run my publication, okay?
	And I'm not gonna take crap from staffers who believe that opinions are threatening to safety.
	I'm not gonna be accused of threatening someone's safety for signing on to an anodyne opinion about how council culture is generally bad.
	Do they?
	Do they really?
	Vanderwerf says, his signature on the letter makes me feel less safe at Vox and believe slightly less in its stated goals of building a more diverse and more thoughtful workplace.
	On a more practical level, the presence of Matt's tweets and his signature to a letter like this do make my job slightly more difficult.
	Do they?
	Do they really?
	As would-be readers and sources, too often equate my positions with his.
	After all, he remains one of our most prominent staffers.
	I don't want Matt to be reprimanded or fired or even asked to submit an apology.
	I don't want Matt to be reprimanded Doing any of the above would only solidify, in his own mind, the idea that he is being martyred for his beliefs.
	But I do want to make clear that those beliefs cost him nothing.
	They are not particularly risky.
	They are not particularly sound, even.
	I'm used to hearing them from people who believe my own lived experiences pale in comparison to their own momentary social media discomfort.
	I'm sorry to find that among those voices.
	At no point did Iglesias compare his experiences in life to this Emily Vanderwerf character.
	I mean, it's just, it's amazing.
	It's amazing.
	So calling out Matthew Iglesias publicly because Matthew Iglesias was bad enough to sign this letter.
	Well, this sort of pressure, which has bubbled up again, There's nothing in the letter that's about trans people.
	Not a single thing in the letter.
	In fact, the letter basically says we are members of the left.
	If you just read that letter in any objective way, what you would come away with is they support all of the propaganda put forth by the trans movement generally.
	JK Rowling is on the letter because it doesn't make that explicit.
	But the whole thing is about social justice and equality and we hate Trump and all of this.
	If you just read that letter without knowing any of the signatories, there's no way that you could possibly come away with the opinion that the people who wrote that letter Do anything except support the idea that a biological man can become a woman, right?
	I mean, that just does not exist in the text of the letter.
	But what's hilarious is that there are these tweets that are going around, things like, you know, one of the things we should think about in that letter are, are you responsible for the actions and opinions of people who are also signatories to the letter?
	Should we assume that if you're Matt Iglesias, you now agree with J.K.
	Rowling on trans issues?
	Of course not!
	That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my entire life.
	Should we assume that Matthew Iglesias is also a Cambodian genocide denier like Noam Chomsky?
	Like, no!
	If I sign on to a letter with a bunch of other people, the text of the letter is what we have in common.
	Okay, it is nothing else.
	There is no way to impute any other agreements on any other issue, other than the letter that we have commonly signed.
	What in the world?
	But what does this result in?
	It results in people starting to pull down their support.
	So one of the original signatories was a person named Jennifer Finney Boylan, who's a trans person.
	Correct, I believe that Jennifer, I'm gonna look it up just to make sure, but Jennifer Finney Boylan writes for the New York Times, And is, in fact, a transgender activist, professor at Barnard College of Columbia University.
	And this person put out a statement, quote, I did not know who else had signed that letter.
	I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning and vague message against internet shaming.
	I didn't know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company.
	First of all, this demonstrates your perspective when you think that Noam Chomsky is good company, and Gloria Steinem is great company.
	But, says Jennifer Finney Boylan, the consequences are mine to bear.
	I I'm so sorry.
	I'm so sorry.
	So out of fear of being cancelled and being ostracized by the trans rights community, a trans person who signed on to the letter now has to now has to apologize.
	And then there's a person named Kerry Greenidge.
	Kerry Greenidge is one of the signatories and I believe is the Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University.
	And so this is a person very much of the left.
	So Kerry Greenidge signed the letter and then wrote in a tweet, I do not endorse this Harper's letter.
	I'm in contact with Harper's about a retraction.
	So people are now walking this stuff back, right?
	They have to walk it back because the blowback, cancel culture isn't real.
	And also you will be canceled if you sign a letter saying the cancel culture is real.
	Really well done, everyone.
	Really well done.
	We'll get to more of this.
	By the way, there's a whole cadre of people who will never be canceled.
	We'll get to the cadre of people who will never be canceled in just a second.
	And I'll point out a couple of outstanding instances of how cancel culture comes for us all, like death and taxes, in just one second.
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	Okay, we're gonna get into more of the cancel culture that apparently isn't real, but also is so real that people are afraid of saying that it's real.
	If you say Betelgeuse three times, cancel culture appears.
	It's basically how this goes.
	We're going to get to that in just one second.
	First, if you're not already a Daily Wire member, you should consider getting a Reader's Pass to dailywire.com.
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	You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
	Hey, so how bad is cancel culture?
	Cancel culture is so bad that we have now canceled acting and also research.
	These are a couple things that we have canceled.
	But don't worry, it doesn't exist.
	And if you mention it exists, then you are a threat to somebody else's safety.
	You're a threat to somebody else's safety.
	So how do we just cancel acting?
	Well, we've had in the past, what, couple of years, several high profile actresses who have been told that they are not allowed to play trans people.
	That if you want to cast a trans person, the person has to be trans.
	So in other words, let's say that you want to play a trans man, which means a biological woman who believes that she is a male.
	Let's say that you want to play that, and you're a biological woman, which seems like it checks most of the marks for playing a biological woman.
	Like, last I checked, playing a biological woman who believes she is a man, that seems like you should be able to play that if you're a biological woman.
	Correct?
	Like, just putting it out there.
	That's like saying you have a black person who believes in a particular cause, so if you're a black person, you should be able to play that person even if you don't necessarily believe in that political cause, right?
	I mean, that's called acting, guys.
	It's called acting.
	But here, you even fulfill the physical criteria.
	Because, again, biological woman playing biological woman.
	Apparently not.
	We've had a couple of situations in the recent past in which this has not been the case.
	First of all, just pointing out, from Hollywood's perspective, if you are not a trans person and you play a trans person, in any iteration you win an Oscar or you're at least nominated for one.
	Jared Leto won an Oscar, like, a couple of years ago for Dallas Buyers Club playing a trans person.
	And I believe Eddie Redmayne was nominated for an Oscar for playing a trans person a couple of years ago.
	So it's pretty much gold ticket to Oscardom.
	But not anymore!
	Not anymore, now it's all stopped.
	Scarlett Johansson, you'll recall, about a year ago, was supposed to play a trans person in a movie that was, I think, called Rub & Tug or something.
	And the movie was cancelled because Scarlett Johansson is in fact a woman, a biological woman who does not believe that she is a biological man and therefore not trans.
	Okay, Halle Berry just went through the same thing.
	So Halle Berry was about to be cast in a story about a trans man, meaning a biological woman, and now she's pulled out of this.
	Here is the statement she released, with the full malice struggle session attached.
	This is the best acting, frankly, that Halle Berry has done since Monsters Ball.
	It's right here in this statement.
	First of all, I'm also going to need an explanation on why Halle Berry was able to play an X-Men character when she's in fact not a mutant.
	She actually is not a mutant, and yet she was playing a mutant who can shoot lightning from her fingertips.
	So I'm going to need an explanation as to the bigotry against lightning fingertips mutants.
	Anyway, Halle Berry says, Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to discuss my consideration of an upcoming role as a transgender man.
	I'd like to apologize for those remarks.
	As a cisgender woman, I now understand I should not have considered this role, and that the transgender community should undeniably have the opportunity to tell their own stories.
	Okay, by the way, this is now two Oscar-winning actresses.
	who would have greatly increased the profile of the trans movement, who have now been cancelled, or even considering these roles.
	I am grateful for the guidance and critical conversations over the past few days, and I will continue to listen, educate, and learn from this mistake.
	Man, these now struggle sessions, they are not entertaining, I will say that.
	I vow to be an ally in using my voice to promote better representation on screen, both in front of and behind the camera.
	So acting is now against the law.
	We can only have, by the way, I'm about to make a joke, but it's not actually a joke.
	We can only have somebody who's a quadriplegic play a quadriplegic.
	That's a thing that actually was discussed, right, about Breaking Bad Guy.
	Breaking Bad Guy was supposed to, what's his name, the name of the actor?
	Brian Cranston.
	He plays a quadriplegic in a movie, and people were like, why didn't you cast an actual quadriplegic?
	It's like, because it's acting, you idiots!
	We're now canceling acting.
	Well, they're casting an upcoming Peter Pan.
	And a friend of mine online, Stephen Miller, not the one who works for Trump, Stephen Miller tweeted out, Why exactly are we considering somebody who isn't naturally hookhanded to play Captain Hook?
	Because apparently they're considering Jude Law to play Captain Hook.
	He's been cast.
	But he doesn't know the pain of having to live with an actual hookhand.
	We need to cast somebody who actually has a hook for a hand.
	And we need like the guy that we need that that cleric from London who has a hook for a hand to play Captain Hook.
	That's the only way that we can really make this thing happen.
	It's just incredible.
	So everyone will be canceled.
	The cancel culture comes for everyone.
	Halle Berry is canceled.
	Other people who are canceled.
	So Princeton University, they have a group of faculty who are now demanding, I'm not kidding you, a committee to investigate research and publications for racism.
	This is crazy.
	And by the way, this sort of stuff does exist already.
	We've seen cases in which Brown University, for example, pulled down a full-on study about rapid-onset gender dysphoria because there were so many people at the school who were mad at the research.
	The research was bad, so you had to pull it down.
	Because there was somebody there who pointed out, quite correctly, that there's been a rapid rise in the number of young females who are identifying as trans, and it seems to be—this mentality seems to run roughshod through small social groups.
	So you have one girl With a bunch of friends, they all have other problems, and one of the girls says, I'm trans, and suddenly many of them are saying they are trans.
	It's called Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria.
	It's fairly well substantiated at this point.
	This researcher from Brown had her study pulled down, and the school basically apologized for the study.
	So research was being censored.
	We're seeing it now with my friend Abigail Schreier, graduate of Yale Law.
	Abigail wrote a book about Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria, and Amazon quickly censored any advertising for it.
	Research is now being silenced.
	On July 4th, a roughly 4,000-word open letter signed by hundreds of members of the Princeton University faculty was sent to the president, provost, deans, and members of the cabinet of the university, listing a series of demands related to racial justice, including a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incident research, and publication on the part of faculty.
	So now, you're going to have a racially diverse committee on public safety over at Princeton University, that is going to go through and decide what sort of research is okay.
	What sort of research is okay?
	Reparative action is also demanded.
	Acknowledge, credit, and incentivize anti-racist student activism.
	Such acknowledgement should, at a minimum, take the form of reparative action, beginning with a formal public university apology to the members of the Black Justice League and their allies.
	Other demands include nominating no fewer than two faculty members of color for annual elections to C3, C7, and committees on diversity, Commit to anti-racist campus iconography, beginning with the removal of the John Witherspoon statue.
	Witherspoon is considered maybe the founder of Princeton University, but he held slaves.
	And therefore, we have to remove the statue.
	And then the letter concludes, So again, the worst demand here is that they are going to constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors.
	And again, the worst demand here is that they are going to constitute committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors.
	Racism is not defined in this document for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in rules and procedures of the faculty guidelines.
	You're out of your mind.
	racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.
	So in other words, we want you to grant us a blank check that we can call racist whomever we want and shut down and shut down anybody who participates in behavior we now deem as racist, including research and publication.
	Okay, if you think that this is not a threat to freedom of thought and freedom of speech, you're out of your mind.
	You're out of your mind.
	And thus, I will admit that I am grateful for the simple fact that if you're in a position of public power and you just say no, just say no to cancel culture, guys.
	Okay, Just like you should have said no to drugs in the 1980s, just say no to cancel culture.
	Because if you're prominent enough, you can say no.
	And you know what?
	Nobody can do anything about it.
	J.K.
	Rowling saying no is important because she refused to be canceled and thus she is not canceled.
	You know who else they're trying to cancel these days?
	Of course, Zuckerberg over at Facebook.
	So there are these organizations, left-wing organizations, who are attempting to shut the door to free speech on Facebook by basically trying to club organizations, big corporations, into pulling their advertisement from Facebook until Facebook restricts speech to the preferred forms of speech that are approved by wild leftist groups like the ADL and Color of Change.
	Okay, the groups had a get-together with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg over at Facebook trying to basically blackmail into changing Zuckerberg's position on free speech.
	I distinguish Zuckerberg from the other leaders of these groups because Zuckerberg has openly committed to free speech and he has not taken the sort of censorious positions of many of these other social media leaders.
	I mean, he's been very public about this.
	But apparently, civil rights leaders called the meeting very disappointing, and blasted Facebook for being functionally flawed.
	In a media call after the meeting, Rashad Robinson, head of Color of Change, said of Facebook's executives, they showed up to the meeting expecting an A for attendance.
	Attending alone is not enough.
	Facebook said in a statement, the groups want Facebook to be free of hate speech, and so do we.
	They said they were taking steps to keep hate off the platform.
	And they said, we know we'll be judged by our actions, not by our words.
	But bottom line is that once you cave, once you start caving to the woke social justice warriors, they expect you to constantly cave, right?
	It never stops.
	You'll be rolled into the snowball, and the snowball will be pushed downhill, and you just have to go along with all of this.
	I will point out that Facebook refusing to go along with all of this, it's having no impact on the stock price.
	This is why I say you can just say no to cancel culture.
	You can, and you should.
	Investors are not worried about the advertisers boycotting Facebook.
	The fact is, from what I understand, Facebook actually makes most of its money because small businesses use it for advertising, not because you have major corporations dropping a couple mil here or there on advertising.
	Facebook shares hit an all-time high for the company on the same day that they were being boycotted.
	So cancel culture doesn't actually work, right?
	That's the dirty little secret, is that unless you're a low-level employee and can actually be bullied into being fired, Right, then cancel culture doesn't work.
	All these organizations have to do is just say, no, we're not going to do it.
	We're not going to do it.
	You're only canceled if you agree to be canceled.
	There's one other group of people who are never canceled, and that is if you're radical left enough, nothing you do will ever be even called up for question by the cancel culture because the right does not have the capacity to cancel the left and the left does not have the capacity to cancel the right.
	So ironically enough, the people who are most vulnerable are the people in the center of our politics.
	So if you're a centrist and you are working in a left-wing organization, good shot, you get canceled.
	If you're a right-winger, you're probably not working in a left-wing organization, right?
	You're vulnerable if you work for a left-wing organization, but right-wingers and left-wingers have basically self-polarized at this point.
	So that means people in the center are the most vulnerable.
	If you're on the right and you earn your living being on the right, you're not gonna get canceled by the right.
	If you're on the left and you earn your living from the left, the right has no capacity to cancel you.
	And the left doesn't care about canceling you because anything and everything you do and say that is bad and terrible is perfectly acceptable.
	You'll never be canceled.
	Ever.
	And the agenda never stops on the radical left.
	Because let's be real about this.
	Cancel culture is just the club with which the social justice warriors who hope to remold all of American society in their image beat people into submission.
	That's all that's happening here.
	And the crusade is very clear, right?
	The goal here is very, very obvious.
	So Sean Masawan, who is a socialist city council member of Seattle.
	She was considered an oddity way back when I was doing a show on KTTH, a radio show on KTTH back in 2014.
	She was mostly considered just like this kooky oddity who said weird things about how we need to demilitarize Boeing and we're going to occupy Boeing and all this kind of crazy crap.
	She was pushing $15 minimum wage, and now she's considered sort of a rabble-rousing leader on the Seattle City Council.
	She made clear immediately After basically, you know, getting chided by Mayor Jenny Durkan for trying to lead a revolution, after passing an Amazon tax, which is a head tax on Amazon employees, which will help drive Amazon out of the city, Shyamalan said, I'm coming for all the Fortune 500 companies.
	We're coming after all of them.
	And we're coming after capitalism generally.
	The agenda is pretty obvious here.
	It has nothing to do with making the country better and everything to do with overthrowing the system entirely.
	We are fighting for far more than this tax.
	We are preparing the ground for a different kind of society.
	And if you, Jeff Bezos, want to drive that process forward by lashing out against us in our modest demands, then so be it.
	Because we are coming for you and your rotten system.
	We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism, this police state.
	She's never going to be canceled because for the left, none of this is cancelable, right?
	What counts as a cancelable offense is the big question here.
	For the left, things that do not count as cancelable offenses include everything in America should be torn down or out in your ears.
	And also maybe violent criminal activity, right?
	I mean, the left won't even cancel people who engage in looting.
	They're trying to bail them out in the middle of the riots.
	And Ilhan Omar will not be canceled for suggesting we have to rip down the entire economic and political system of the United States.
	The representative from Minnesota, who was taken in by the most glorious nation in human history, the United States, after living a childhood in war-torn Somalia, has come to the United States and decided that the entire U.S.
	system must be taken down.
	She's an American citizen.
	She's entitled to her opinion.
	This is also a horrifically, I would say, terrible and particularly ungrateful position to take about a country that took in you and your family from one of the worst hellholes on Earth.
	And Somalia, there is no way to define it as a non-hellhole.
	It is a hellhole.
	Okay?
	Like, that is just what it is.
	It is a war-torn hellhole.
	It has been for decades.
	And she comes here and is taken in.
	And she's an American citizen, just as American as you or I. But her position on America is that America sucks and needs to be torn down.
	All of the pillars have to be torn out.
	As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit, without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality.
	So we cannot stop at criminal justice system.
	We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.
	Okay, so she won't be canceled, obviously, because too much of the left agrees with this basic premise.
	Other people who will not be canceled include Eagles wide receiver Deshaun Jackson, who posted a quote saying that white Jews will blackmail and extort America, and quoted Louis Farrakhan, and then apparently quoted Hitler, right?
	Featured Nancy Smed a quote on his social media feed.
	He attributed it to Adolf Hitler, Deshaun Jackson.
	And people are like, well, we have to inform him and chide him.
	The Eagles put out some ridiculous statements suggesting we've had a talk with Deshaun Jackson.
	Let's put it this way.
	If Deshaun Jackson were white and quoted Hitler, how long do you think he'd be in the NFL?
	Like, gone, right?
	But if you're on the proper woke side of the aisle, like Ice Cube, you can be as anti-Semitic as you want to be.
	The last hatred that is allowed in the United States is hatred of Jews, obviously, and sort of the traditional canon of hatred of groups.
	As long as you're on the right side, you'll never be canceled, is sort of the way that this works.
	Meanwhile, I want to make a quick note here about COVID-19 deaths.
	So COVID-19 deaths spiked yesterday in terms of the numbers that we saw.
	It's hard to tell whether that spike from yesterday is really attributable to a big spike that has happened in deaths, or I think it was something like 900 and some deaths yesterday from COVID, or whether that is just reporting after the long weekend, meaning that that was reporting from Tuesday and there was a three-day weekend.
	So a lot of people didn't go into the hospital.
	Some of those deaths didn't get reported.
	And so this usually happens, right?
	The Monday count is usually pretty low because you're getting reporting from Sunday, and then the Tuesday count is a little bit higher, and then the Wednesday count is typically higher than that.
	So we'll keep an eye on that.
	Obviously, as I've been saying, we should continue to be careful, but I'm still cautiously optimistic that death rates have declined pretty significantly, and we will keep you informed should any of that change in radical fashion.
	Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow for much more content, so stick around for that.
	In the meantime, head on over to dailywire.com, subscribe, and leave us a review over at iTunes, we always appreciate it.
	I'm Ben Shapiro, you're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.
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