Cancel Culture Is by, and for, the Very Online
I recently watched a botched cancellation attempt in Chicago. It said a lot about the cancellers.
A handful of Asian-American restaurateurs, including the owners of a very popular Vietnamese restaurant on Chicago’s North Side, went to the ill-conceived Trump rally in D.C. in early January that preceded the storming of the Capitol. They weren’t involved in or aware of the violent actions that followed, but cancel culture nevertheless reared its ugly head. Some local Karens found out, and quickly alerted the community of the trip on a certain poisonous neighborhood-oriented social media platform.
Swarm!
In came a few vocal progressives, posting screeds in the awkward vocabulary of their woke second language. Mostly women and, from what I could see from profile pictures, all white, they laid into these small business owners in words that I could charitably call hyperbolic. The immigrant restaurateurs were, according to them, domestic terrorists, despite having nothing to do with the invasion of the Capitol. One commenter branded them “victims of the Truman Doctrine” who side with fascism over communism whenever possible.
Their restaurants’ Yelp pages were no prettier. They were full of comments by people (mostly in different cities) perfunctorily dissing the food while claiming that the businesses’ very existence was subverting democracy. Some claimed the owners and their employees were somehow fighting against their own Asian-American community. One review that gave me a chuckle claimed that these people did not deserve “the privilege of serving the diverse community of Lakeview” (which is particularly funny if you’ve ever been to the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago).
This isn’t unusual.
The image of mostly-white wokerellas pathologizing minorities who disagree with them is now pretty ubiquitous. But its normality suggests this wasn’t about any idiotic “coup” attempt, nor the business owners’ presence in D.C. Surely the Karens would react the same way three months earlier if they found out who they were voting for.
These people shouldn’t have gone to the rally in D.C. And it’s a shame that Trump’s lies about the election brought normal people like them into the crosshairs. But the rage invoked by learning of a political disagreement shows the emptiness of progressive Karenism. The very thought that somebody would vote differently-particularly somebody that the left’s simplistic racial matrix says should be on their side-is a cause for boycott.
There is an incredibly corny meme that went around Twitter in recent years, touted by Trump himself. It showed the then-president with the text, “In reality, they’re not after me, they’re after you-I’m just in the way.” Moments like this make me think, even as he’s disgraced himself and the presidency in his final months, it was not, in fact, Donald Trump that cancel culture aficionados are after.
In the end, it did nothing…except for the Very Online.
The aforementioned Vietnamese restaurant is next to my nearest train stop, so I took notes on it a few times the week after this blew up online. They were not only open for business, but doing quite well. Their outdoor dining huts were filled to capacity at lunchtime on multiple days, and by night the table in their window was awash with takeout orders. As I passed it many times in the subsequent weeks, business only increased as indoor dining reopened. So what was accomplished by screaming into this extremely online void, except for validation from a few dozen compatriots?
The internet is not exactly known as a cooling dish, and surely this behavior existed before COVID. But with nowhere else to go, many more are jumping online to take their frustrations out on others, like small business owners they’ve never met in cities they don’t live in. With no one in the immediate vicinity to hate, social media lets us create enemies and join pile-ons. It gives us self-selected and naturally receptive audiences to perform in front of. We can publicly issue supposedly virtuous condemnations of the private views of a normie across the country. Even Nextdoor, the supposed neighborhood social network, teems with this type of performative hatred.
I have little hope the incentives for this childish behavior will go away while we live under varying degrees of lockdowns. Perhaps a post-COVID world with less time spent online and more good-faith engagement in the public square will help cool us down.
Originally published at https://mfviola.com on February 6, 2021.
