Affirmative action for crybullies

It’s not the thoughtcrime, it’s the sucking-up

I’ve been making fun of the cancelculture crybabies for a long time now. I was onto their early manifestations, when they were pupating from political correctness crybabies to cancelculture crybabies. I’ve mentioned, for example, my coverage of their 2014 sputterfest over graduating students rejecting rightwing commencement speakers (when they conceived the now-classic conservative can-cult Constitutional Right to yell at people who don’t want to hear it). I also glimpsed it in 2018, when conservatives pretended to think TV networks — like the ones that cancelled the Smothers Brothers and Richard Pryor in the 60s and 70s — were constitutionally prohibited from canceling Roseanne Barr for her racist ravings online.  

Not that I expect my little jibes to have any effect, but I’m hardly the only one who has caught on to their spectacular bad faith. So it is annoying and even a little dispiriting to see them still pulling the same shtick — even going so far as to recreate the college commencement cancelculture routine with Glenn Youngkin just this spring. Put “cancel culture” in Google News and you’ll get nearly nothing but credulous acceptance that it’s a Thing.

And just as we had the original salon of self-professed free thinkers in the “Intellectual Dark Web,” so now we have, via Emma Green at The New Yorker, the revival of the shtick as the“Gathering of Thought Criminals” who get together for cocktails and complaints in New York on the regular and tell each other how brave they are.

The mistress of ceremonies, psychologist Pamela Paresky, hastens to assure Green that “no one who comes to our gatherings is an actual criminal,” though at least one is an accused sex pest. They perhaps identify as criminals because they have been caught at actions that normally carry consequences, and some have received rather gentle versions thereof.  

Former Princeton professor Joshua Katz, for example, lost his teaching gig because, Green says, he “had not been fully honest and coöperative during an investigation into a consensual sexual relationship that he had with another student in 2006 and 2007.” (Green says “another” because she already mentioned a different student Katz was fucking, who eventually married him.) Don’t worry how he’s making ends meet, though, because Green tells us Katz sometimes has the Thought Criminals over for funsies at his “newly purchased home in Georgetown.”

This is a hallmark, by the way, of the Thought Criminals and nearly all cancelculture crybabies you read about in the prestige press: They may lose jobs, or the respect of their friends and peers, but they never, ever seem to lose any money. (As I’ve written before, the working-class guys who do lose badly-needed jobs because their speech isn’t free never, ever, ever feature in these stories.)

In one funny aside — and if the article were even slightly differently written I’d assume the humor was intentional — Green mentions that the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan, where the Thought Criminals sometimes gather, was one of the places Louis C.K. performed after his sponsors cancelcultured him for jerking off in front of unwilling women; “he is now back to touring nationally and internationally,” she adds.

In fact some Thought Criminals, Green relates, are “relative nobodies” who have not even suffered opprobrium or dirty looks, nor so far as we know done anything that might draw it, but “who for one reason or another have become exasperated with what they see as rampant censorious thinking in our culture.” Cancelculture by Proxy, I think the shrinks call it.

This would presumably include the young journalist who says “she felt like she had to hide books by Thomas Sowell, a prominent conservative economist, under her mattress” while she was at NYU — which, like much else, goes unexplained; what was she afraid of, being thrown out of her frat? (This journo, Rikki Schlott, now writes things like “Is Bill Maher Television’s Last True Liberal?” for the New York Post and Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, so I guess one thing she wasn’t worried about was public humiliation.)

Some of the personal narratives are just weird and a bit slippery. Take Sarah Rose Siskind, who as a Harvard junior wrote an article in the Crimson “dismissing race-based affirmative-action programs, arguing that they facilitate college admission for candidates who aren’t qualified.”

She caught some criticism (excuse me, cancellation) for this: “her friends stopped talking to her, people walked out on dates with her, and a Jezebel writer pilloried her as ‘a snide, rude little baby.’” Now, the Harvard-educated comedian-small business owner says she doesn’t really feel that way anymore about affirmative action… well, hang on, she never actually says that; what Green says she says is this:

For Siskind, one of the worst parts about her notoriety was the “weird bedfellows and allies” it brought. “A lot of people will be, like, ‘I read your article, and I really thought it was insightful, and the reaction you’re getting is really hard, and, you know, there should be fewer Black people at Harvard,’” she said. “And you’re, like, ‘Oh, my God!’”

You could take that to mean she thinks those people misunderstand her, or that they understand what she used to think but she’s changed. But she never clears that up; she just says, “It is good to be brave. But you shouldn’t be an edgelord.” And she still comes to Thought Criminal events — indeed, has been coming to them “for several years.”

If you have even a passing acquaintance with this shit, at many intervals during the three-thousand-plus-word read alarm bells will ring — as with the inclusion of Reason editor Nick Gillespie, who tells Green that “in a place like New York… every conversation is about how capitalism is evil or how America is the most racist, sexist, homophobic country in the world.” (I can picture her nodding empathetically.) Green also tells us about Thought Criminal Corinna Cohn, who “identifies as transsexual” yet regularly podcasts “with the artist Nina Paley, who has identified as a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or TERF”; Cohn believes that “mature adults in the trans community shouldn’t necessarily assume that their critics are ‘trying to oppress or threaten’ them.” Another reporter might have asked Cohn what she thinks “trans-exclusionary” means. (Maybe it’s just a fun locution like “Thought Criminal”?)

Not to mention the Thought Criminals’ “river cruise on the East River, sponsored by a sympathetic, unnamed nonprofit organization.” Hmmmmm. And the fact that the Noam Dworman, owner of the Comedy Cellar, sometimes “picks up the tab” for the Thought Criminals’ soirees because “he likes that his venues can be used for lively debate.” (Dworman features in some anti-cancelculture ads by FIRE, the freeze-peach front group sponsored by the Koch, Olin, and Scaife families.)

These money shots are piquant but, though I’d sure like to know who the anonymous donor was, I think it’s the least of it: Like our corrupt Supreme Court, this particular grift survives not so much because of the cash subsidies but rather because of what the cash rewards and represents: A tacit understanding that this is how things ought to be and therefore, whatever the facts say, they will be made to be so.

You and I look at a bunch of well-off and well-placed dopes with perfectly normal and disgusting rightwing views who call themselves Thought Criminals like they’re on the run from the law, as if views and persecution complexes exactly like theirs haven’t been exhaustively and exhaustingly covered by every prestige outlet in America from the New York Times and the Washington Post to, yes, The New Yorker for years. But this endless plea for sympathy isn’t meant to sway us; It isn’t even meant so much to please the rightwing rump who nobody seems to like but who nonetheless seem to run everything.

No, it’s meant for the high-class characters who run these prestige media properties themselves. They may not be rightwing as such, but they appear to believe that it is somehow unfair to notice that such people are ridiculous and to treat them as ridiculous in their pages. Thus at the hands of prestige media they enjoy what in another context would be called affirmative action. And, given how well-integrated into our upper classes these crybullies have become, it apparently serves its purpose.