Carlson's Rittenhouse comment re-triggers 'cancel culture' mob

FPI / September 1, 2020

Amid the rioting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Fox News host Tucker Carlson noted that Americans are "shocked" that "17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”

Carlson was referring to Kyle Rittenhouse, who has been charged in shootings in Kenosha which left two dead and one wounded.

The comment landed Carlson, already a favorite mark for the leftist cancel culture movement, back on top of the mob's list of targets, historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson noted.

"Almost immediately the Twitter global throng mobilized to equate Carlson with the shooter himself, to render Carlson not just untenable as a news anchor but toxic to his advertisers," Hanson wrote for The Hill on Aug. 28. "Or, as a former Obama official tweeted, 'Tucker straight up endorsing vigilante murder on the show tonight. What advertisers are still ok with this?' ”

Hanson noted that Carlson’s point "was not to condone the 17-year-old shooter — a criminal court will adjudicate his innocence or guilt. Carlson simply noted that both the teenager and those he shot are the tragic results when supposed adults in the room — governors, mayors, district attorneys, police chiefs — fail to guarantee the civic rights and tranquility of American citizens. Does anyone watching the last three 'summer of love' months believe authorities have protected small businesses and kept the calm in Portland, Seattle, Chicago or Kenosha?"

Hanson continued: "Note how the pack has not only tried and convicted Carlson as an abettor to murder. The horde also has prejudged the shooter as a murderer — before a court has even heard evidence of whether he was attacked and, in panic, shot in self-defense, or instead gratuitously killed without need.

"How ironic that the Twitter mob deplores vigilantism yet its brand is an electronic lynching without weighing evidence or cross-examination — all from the safety of their smartphones."

The cancel culture mob "feels that if it can take out Carlson, it can wound its old nemesis, Fox News, and send a warning to any other journalists who dare argue that blue-state officials are either oblivious to the dangers of unchecked rioting or see it as apparently useful in this contentious election year," Hanson wrote.

Hanson noted: "Our generation’s bane is a many-headed hydra of doxing, revenge porn and canceling out the careers of public figures. Smears are predicated on the assumption that those targeted will panic; they will apologize and seek penance, reducing themselves to timid careerists and fawning toadies. The aim is electronic Trotskyization — making one disappear from computer screens as if they had never existed."

So ‘cancel culture’ is here to stay? How about the Democrat Party?

The cancel culture mob didn't stop with statues of Confederate figures. Monuments to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln statues have also been targeted for removal.

Any one with any link to slavery or racism, whether real or perceived, is canceled.

Aunt Jemima? Uncle Ben? Unacceptable racial stereotypes.

The cartoon dog on Paw Patrol, unacceptable positive portrayal of police.

With that in mind, columnist Francis Menton asked. "Isn’t it time that this institution with a long history of the most vicious racism gets canceled?"

That institution? The Democratic Party.

Writing for the Manhattan Contrarian, Menton noted that the Democratic Party "has the longest and deepest association with violent bigotry and grotesque racism, including slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan."

"When we consider the history of racism in the Democratic Party, we are not talking about some debatable lack of 'sensitivity' or uncaring use of stereotypes. No, this is something fundamentally different. This is the most overt, explicit and direct sorts of actions targeted specifically at the oppression of African American citizens," Menton wrote.

In June, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered portraits of four of her predecessor Speakers removed from the Capitol Building on the grounds that each of the four had at some point served the Confederacy.

A New York Times article reporting on Pelosi’s action quotes the Speaker as saying: “There is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy.”

Both the Times and Pelosi failed to mention that three of the four were members of the Democratic Party. (The fourth was a Whig. None were Republicans, the Republicans of course being from inception the anti-slavery party.)

"Today, our Speaker proudly associates herself with the party that has been the home of this 'violent bigotry and grotesque racism.' She hopes that we will not notice, but we do," Menton noted.

Free Press International