The Cancel Culture has met the enemy and it is them! – Jeff Ward appropriating Walk Kelly
In The First Ward’s June 15 column, we used an Elgin, Illinois, example as a microcosm of a progressive dynamic that’s wreaking some serious cultural havoc on the national level. To reiterate:
They (progressives) lie in wait on social media ready to pounce on anything they perceive to be an attack on their fragile “woke” ideology. And when those provocations inevitably occur – something as simple as a misused pronoun – just like Canada geese, the first one starts honking to alert the “flock” to the “danger,” and without making any effort to determine the nature of the “threat,” the rest start honking in unison as they proceed to swarm the perceived “offender.”
When they turn out to be dead wrong, about 90 percent of the time, like cockroaches caught by the kitchen light, they scurry back to the dark corners where they do their best to ignore all the damage they left in their wake by pretending the whole thing never happened.
We used the Arabica Café debacle to describe how that process works. But while that Elgin stupidity caused no real permanent damage, the same can’t be said for the progressive Cancel Culture’s heavy-handed efforts “on behalf” of our transgender brothers and sisters. They’ve single-handedly set the LBGTQ movement back by a terrifying 50 years.
It started with the whole “cisgender” and preferred pronoun stupidity, which in and of itself, was a minor annoyance. But progressives so ruthlessly battered people over the slightest slip that middle-of-the-road folks started to rebel against it. God forbid anyone had the temerity to refer to Caitlyn as “Bruce” because, by their absurd overreaction, you’d think someone just stole their hot pockets and kicked them out of their mother’s basements.
As the great Bill Burr essentially put it, “C’mon! We’ve been calling him ‘Bruce’ for 66 years. Could you give us some time to get used to it?”
Then our progressive state legislators and perpetually “woke” teachers had to get in on the act by insisting we teach kindergarteners and first graders all about “gender identity.” And that’s a particularly egregious overreach when educators, of all people, should’ve been able to predict that imminent backlash.
I’m no fan of Ron DeSantis and his fascist propensities, but Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law was dead on when it prohibited gender/sex ed to students from K through third grade. My God, those children haven’t quite figured out how to successfully navigate the bathroom, much less worry about whether they’re really a boy or a girl.
Can’t we save all the pointless sexual bullshit and let them be children until at least the fourth grade? I don’t think that’s the least bit unreasonable.
But the worst progressive move, by a longshot, has been drag queen story hour. I’m truly at a loss for words over that one. Talk about flippin’ the double bird and waving the red flag at the most tolerant of conservatives. Even liberal political commentator Bill Maher called this bizarre practice “an unnecessary provocation.” My thought is, if a drag show aimed at children is the pinnacle of progressivism, then I want no part of it.
Then, just as The First Ward warned them, after the Cancel Culture brutally beat us over the head with our transgender shortcomings for five long years, those inevitable pronoun chickens are coming home to roost in some truly terrifying ways.
Between January 1 and May 19, 2023, U.S. legislators have introduced more than 400 anti-trans bills compared to approximately 150 in 2022. Twenty Republican states have passed laws or policies banning gender affirming care for trans youths. Seven more states, including the generally liberal Oregon and New Hampshire are considering similar statutes.
Tennessee passed a bill in March criminalizing drag performances that take place in public or anywhere they can be seen by minors, and 13 more states are considering the same thing. Florida banned ALL drag shows leaving those performers without a livelihood, before a judge blocked it pending a Constitutional challenge.
But the worst example of this rising backlash tide just took place in liberal New Hampshire where neo-Nazis showed up at a drag queen story hour to bang on the windows of the LBGTQ coffee shop hosting the event. Of course, those chickenshits wore masks to conceal their identities which tells you everything you need to know about that gang of jackasses.
And all of this insanity comes on behalf of a group that accounts for just half a percent of the population. I’ll say it again, EVERYONE has the inalienable right to lead their best and authentic life, but to set the entire 23 million strong gay/lesbian movement back years for just 1.6 million transgender Americans is an irony of epic proportion.
It kills me to watch the gains our gay brothers and sisters so diligently made for during my lifetime washed away at the hands of middle Americans who are sick and tired of being browbeaten by overly sanctimonious progressives and the Cancel Culture.
And please tell me exactly where the Cancel Culture is now that the statutory shit has hit the fan? They’re nowhere to be seen, of course, because the second they lose their online mob anonymity and face the slightest resistance, those chickenshits disappear faster than cockroaches startled by the kitchen light.
Put more simply, with “friends” like them, who needs enemies?
Make no mistake, the Cancel Culture wants this to happen; they need this to happen; because now they can say “See! I told you so!” The problem is they’re not the ones suffering at the hands of their own self-fulfilling prophecy stupidity. It’s the LBGTQ folks whom they were ostensibly trying to “protect” that have to bear the brunt of this backlash.
I’ll also say this again. The least consideration when determining the content of one’s character should be their sexuality. Because whenever we make it the first, it’s just another form of identity politics that inevitably become entirely counterproductive.
This is the point where I come up with some pithy proposition to solve the problem at hand, but aside from the Cancel Culture’s slow fade, the only answer is to stand down from the kind of hyper-partisan BS that makes demonizing “other” people so much easier. But that isn’t about to happen as long as the Cheeto Supreme clings to the notion that he’ll be reelected.
That means my only option is to leave you with this thought – God help us all!
