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In 212 B.C., 460 scholars were “canceled,” permanently, when Emperor Qin Shi Huang had them buried alive for owning forbidden books. The Qin, who’d united China, made the argument, “We don’t want to hear people criticize the present by referring to the past,” Harvard University Chinese history professor Peter Bol told the BBC in 2012. “The past is irrelevant. History is irrelevant. And so you have the burning of books, you have the burying of scholars, of scholarly critics.”
When the renders and “reimaginers” of civilization today bury people and the past, figuratively, it’s the reputational and career destruction known as “cancel culture.” Ah, that’s a trendy term, it is, and people unmoored from tradition love trendy terms. Whatever you call it, however, the process is obviously nothing new.
There were earlier victims of what could be called American cancel culture. There was the old Amos ‘n’ Andy TV show, canceled in 1953 under pressure from the NAACP, which claimed it stereotyped blacks (never mind that it portrayed a well-functioning black world in Harlem). There was economist Larry Summers being compelled to resign the presidency of Harvard University in 2006 after being pilloried for expressing a scientific finding: that women are relatively rare in elite science and engineering positions because most of the highly gifted in these fields, and most people with genius-level IQs, are male. And tech innovator Brendan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla Corporation (which he co-founded) in 2014 because, six years earlier, he’d donated $1,000 to California’s pro-marriage measure, Proposition 8. The Left never forgets — or forgives.
But now, with the Left cementing its cultural hegemony, this phenomenon has kicked into high gear. The occasional salvo against sanity has become an unending barrage of culture-consuming locusts that leave devastation in their wake.
This is the story of Radical Democrat Socialist Liberal Extremist Cancel Culture being a cancer on society.
