by Sidney SecularThat’s what we tend to do, internally/mentally if not physically, when surrounded by deluded, deranged libbers. In 1945, then young liberal Democrat crooner Frank Sinatra recorded a song about the meaning of America, “The House That I Live In”. He continued crooning that tune as his voice and his politics matured and moved rightward. These are the lyrics:
The howdy and the handshake,
The air of feeling free
And the right to speak my mind out,
That’s America to me.
How quaint that Americans used to believe that. The list of topics that can be discussed in public, even in moderate and respectful ways, shrinks by the day. Conservatives of all stripes are increasingly reluctant to express their views and beliefs in public and even on the internet, that medium whose early proponents often championed as a vehicle for unfettered freedom of expression.
Indeed, many on the right had seen the internet as the key to bypassing the leftist domination of the other media. in 2020, however, the internet became just another venue in which the Left could assert its cultural dominance, as tech companies used algorithms, content warnings, suspensions and bans to limit the spread of ideas they didn’t like, a process that came to include even the former President of the United States. The impact of such open censorship is amplified by massive self-censorship, as people learn about careers sidetracked and even ended by the discovery of stray remarks made years before.
Something of this nature happened to Chris Harrison, the host of the ABC dating game show, “The Bachelor”, after he wondered aloud whether it was fair to bar a contestant for attending a party in 2018 in which the guests dressed like planters from the antebellum South. Harrison was forced to take a leave of absence as the censors took leave of their senses. Harrison will be replaced in the show’s future seasons. Even more pointedly, a member of a folk-rock band, Mumford & Sons was forced to take a leave of absence after it became known that they had dared praise Andy Ngo’s book, “Unmasked”, which is critical of Antifa,
These examples could be multiplied many times over, but the point is clear enough that Sinatra’s “air of feeling free” is now a suffocating miasma, and “The House I Live In” has become “The House I hide In”. There is an overarching attempt to cut off any appeal to the past, and American history is being buried. When the censors are compelled to allow us to see anything from the past they don’t like, warning labels are applied and commentary is applied to put them “in context” so the censors themselves are not censored by those who lord it over them and they can feel confident in their virtue-signalling. “Cancel Culture” is running on full throttle right now, running on all cylinders, as it throttles us.
The only way to throttle the cancel culture short of throttling its purveyors is to keep telling the truth as you see it–not recklessly, nor provocatively, but insistently. It doesn’t take long for beliefs that everyone knows to be true but that no one is willing to defend in public–to vanish. This has been the fate of of what the so-called conservative movement purportedly is out to conserve since that “movement” from its conception has been shot through with tactical timidity.
If we can’t stand up and defend what we know to be true, we may as well be locked in our homes.
© 2021 Sidney Secular – All Rights Reserved
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