Cancel culture

Canceling Magellan

Featured image Ferdinand Magellan was one of the world’s greatest explorers. He led the first expedition to sail around the world, although he didn’t finish the voyage, having been murdered by natives in what is now the Philippines. Magellan’s greatness as an explorer and navigator has been recognized in many ways. For example, he discovered the Strait of Magellan at the bottom of South America. And his expedition observed and recorded the »

Russell Brand, Cancel Victim?

Featured image I had never heard of Russell Brand until recently. I take it that he is a British comedian and actor who has generally, for quite a few years, had a terrible reputation. Within the last week or two, several women have “come forward” and alleged that Brand raped them, or otherwise assaulted them, between 2006 and 2013. I subscribe to the London Times and the Telegraph, and they have followed »

Cancel Culture In Retreat

Featured image The story that has consumed the United Kingdom over the last week or two is the cancellation of Nigel Farage by Coutts, an exclusive private bank owned by National Westminster Bank, commonly known as NatWest. Farage, as you may remember, was a driving force behind Brexit, and Britain’s establishment has never forgiven him. Coutts precipitously fired Farage as a client and canceled his accounts. Later, Coutts lied about the incident, »

Tar-Nation

Featured image I had heard vaguely last year a lot of buzz about Tar, the film featuring Cate Blanchett starring as a conductor who gets canceled for some form of impropriety or political incorrectness, but I didn’t see it. I gather a lot of people think Blanchett and the film were passed over at the Academy Awards because it talked back to cancel culture, though I hear more and more rumors out »

When Will they Come for Waugh?

Featured image Since the cancel culture censors have come for Dr. Seuss, Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, and P.G. Woodhouse (among others), how come they’ve overlooked Evelyn Waugh, for passages like this one—my favorite—in Scoop: Various courageous Europeans in the seventies of the last century came to Ishmaelia, or near it, furnished with suitable equipment of cuckoo clocks, phonographs, opera hats, draft treaties and flags of the nations which they had been obliged »

Dilbert, RIP?

Featured image Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has been canceled: More newspapers say they are dropping the “Dilbert” comic strip after creator Scott Adams this week advised white people to “get the f–k away” from Black people. Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the US, has announced it will no longer run the workplace comic “effective immediately” over remarks Adams, 65, made on his online show “Real Coffee with »

Introducing “Uncancelled History”

Featured image Douglas Murray has a new venture entitled “Uncancelled History” that some readers may be interested in following. Its opening act is a ten-episode series of interviews with leading contrarian thinkers who take on the woke ideology of historical distortions that everyone knows today. I hope this is the first of several “seasons” of this great concept. The third episode in the series features Power Line favorite Jean Yarbrough of Bowdoin »

Canceling David Hume

Featured image The skeptical philosopher David Hume is one of the giants not just of the Enlightenment, but of the whole history of philosophy. But that was not enough to save him from being canceled in his native Scotland. At the instance of “woke” students, who wallow in incorrigible ignorance, David Hume Tower at the University of Edinburgh was re-named “40 George Square.” Hume’s offense was that, while he opposed slavery, there »

Banned In Minneapolis

Featured image First Avenue is a Minneapolis night club that became famous in the 1980s, largely through the movie Purple Rain. But the days when First Avenue hosted cutting-edge performers like Prince are apparently gone. Comedian Dave Chappelle was scheduled to perform at First Avenue tonight, but evidently he is too hot to handle. Is this because he makes “trans” jokes? Or because he mocks Jussie Smollett? I am not sure. In »

Climate Risk and Wall Street Meet Cancel Culture

Featured image As we know, the climatistas have enjoyed great success in getting Wall Street (and big business generally) to drink the climate Kool Aid, and to declare climate to be an investment risk that must be quantified somehow. Stuart Kirk, head of “responsible investing” for HSBC, gave a presentation at a Financial Times “Live Moral Money Summit Europe” a few days ago in which he shredded the climatista claim about financial »

Whoopi Goldberg and the cancel culture

Featured image Josh Hammer has a column for Jewish World Review called “The limits of appeals to cancel culture.” Hammer seems bothered that David French lamented Goldberg’s suspension on cancel culture grounds. Having also objected to the suspension, I want to address Hammer’s column. Hammer argues that “there are certain things that should be canceled.” This is true, of course. Some speech is not protected by the First Amendment — Hammer cites »

Are Americans In Favor of Free Speech?

Featured image Periodically you see a poll that suggests support for free speech in the U.S. is weak, and that the First Amendment wouldn’t be adopted by contemporary Americans. But this Rasmussen survey finds something quite different: A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports and The National Pulse finds that 72% of American Adults believe cancel culture – a form of censorship that harms the careers and reputations of »

Canceling Hogarth

Featured image William Hogarth, the 18th-Century British painter and printmaker, was a critic of the milieu in which he lived. In particular, his paintings and etchings satirized the privileged classes of his time. So you might expect him to be popular with contemporary liberals. But only if you didn’t understand contemporary liberals. Hogarth is now being canceled: [A] new exhibition at Tate Britain has suggested that [Hogarth’s] pictures are no laughing matter, »

With the Claremont Institute

Featured image My friend Bruce Sanborn was chairman of the Claremont Institute for something like 20 years, if not more. That is a wild guess — Bruce is traveling in Croatia or I would have the exact number for you. Bruce recruited Tom Klingenstein to the board and stepped down upon the accession of Tom to the chairmanship a few years back. Over that approximately 20-year period, Bruce and I attended the »

“Jeopardy” in Jeopardy

Featured image Contestant: “I’ll take ‘Cancel Culture’ for $1,000, Alex.” Alex: “The foolproof trigger mechanism for career-ending events.” Contestant: “What is, ‘What happens when the Twitter mob scours your past history?'” Sure enough, the news is breaking that Jeopardy’s newly named host, Mike Richards, is stepping down because of unspecified “offensive jokes” he made some time in the past: The new host of “Jeopardy!” stepped down from the job Friday about a week »

Google resists left’s attempt to induce censorship. So far.

Featured image Sen. Cory Booker, one of the leading phonies of contemporary politics, is trying to shame Google into submitting to an outside audit of the “racial equity” of its policies and practices. Booker and four other Senate Democrats urge Google to hire an independent auditor to issue “recommendations to make the company and its products safer for Black people.” The notion that Google is unsafe for Black people is ludicrous. The »

Hunter Biden and the “N” word

Featured image You may have heard by now about Hunter Biden’s repeated use of the ultimate racial slur word for Blacks. But those who rely on CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and NPR for their news will not have heard about it. According to Aron Ravin at NRO, all of these outlets have declined thus far to mention the matter. (I haven’t read about this in the Washington Post, either, but »