South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is claiming that conservatives are attempting to “cancel” her. It’s another instance in a growing list of GOP politicians crying “cancel culture” to avoid criticism, and it’s belittling a very real issue in the United States right now.
Noem, who claims she did not cave to the NCAA, caved to the NCAA by asking the legislature to rewrite a bill that would prevent biological men from competing in women’s sports. Conservatives pushed back on Noem, who has become a prominent GOP voice on the national stage.
“Apparently, uninformed cancel culture is fine when the right is eating their own,” Noem’s communications director Ian Fury said, blaming conservatives for noticing that Noem had, in fact, caved on the issue. The response is childish, of course, but it’s substantively problematic, too.
What this does is minimize the idea of cancel culture by applying the term to run-of-the-mill criticism of politicians. To do that is to damage efforts to push back against real cancel culture, which is the practice of trying to silence dissenting opinions by threatening jobs, speaking opportunities, or the like. Real cancel culture is a blight whose bad effects should not be minimized by politicians whining in order to deflect ordinary political give-and-take.
But Republican politicians minimize it far too often. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did it when he accused Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney of engaging in cancel culture when she said former President Donald Trump should have no role in the future of the party or the country. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz called impeachment the “zenith of cancel culture,” admitting that he thinks Congress should never hold presidents accountable for anything.
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene decried cancel culture just before she was ejected from her committee seats for being a conspiracy theorist. It isn’t just one wing of the party that buys into this idea either, as South Dakota Sen. John Thune claimed that censuring GOP senators who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial was cancel culture as well. Won’t someone please think of the poor politicians?
Whiny GOP politicians using cancel culture as a shield against criticism makes a mockery of the reality we are currently living in, where media outlets such as the Washington Post get private citizens fired by running stories that are designed to shame, with no news value whatsoever. CNN has threatened to dox people for making gifs they don’t like, and the Daily Beast is now targeting a random guy for being in a viral video.
Meanwhile, privileged politicians such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, both Democrats, use their platforms to demand boycotts of businesses or shame private citizens because they have the wrong politics. The entertainment industry will also punish people for straying from the political orthodoxy, as Disney showed when it fired actress Gina Carano.
People are actually being fired from their jobs or publicly labeled as racists by politicians and establishment media outlets over their politics. That is “cancel culture,” not people criticizing you for vetoing a bill you said you would sign. Republicans would be better off ignoring cancel culture entirely than belittling it as Noem and others have.
