Conservatives started Cancel Culture -- it's their sin, not the left's

In 2003, as the invasion of Iraq commenced, administrators at three Albuquerque, N.M. high schools suspended or placed on paid administrative leave five teachers who had displayed antiwar posters in their classrooms, some created by students.

Officials claimed they were violating an Albuquerque Public Schools policy that requires educators to maintain a classroom atmosphere free from bias or prejudice.

One teacher resigned after the incident. Two others, employed on yearly contracts, were not hired back by their school.

Okay, all you valiant opponents of Cancel Culture, this is your cue! But where were Fox News, Patrick Buchanan or Dennis Prager when it was time to defend these teachers and condemn the stifling of debate -- and by one of those bias-free policies they are always denouncing!

That same year CBS caved in to a conservative firestorm and decided not to air its own made-for-TV movie “The Reagans,” featuring James Brolin playing the 40th president in what preview watchers described as a non-flattering light.

The network disgraced the legacy of Edward R. Murrow by punting the movie off to the cable channel Showtime.

And today’s fierce critics of Cancel Culture, or their forerunners in 2003? Surely, conservatives condemned CBS’s dropping its movie as mob rule censoring the airwaves. Nope, conservatives were that mob.

Same comfortable silence from the right in 1995 when ABC radio dropped -- let’s say it -- canceled the show “Hightower Radio,” whose feisty Texas host Jim Hightower attacked factory farming and other chemical-based industries as destroying the land and community economics.

ABC's big advertisers decided 
you won't hear this type
of information.

The multi-billion dollar Archer-Daniels-Midland, one of the key creators of those farming methods, bought myriad advertisements on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

The network openly said that unnamed advertisers felt Hightower’s criticisms were against their interests.

What, those big city eastern network people are censoring a good ole Texas man of the soil?, screamed absolutely no conservative whatsoever.

And this year, Harvard surprised everyone by passing over acclaimed intellectual Cornell West for tenure.

The college offered West, a longtime attacker of colonialism and supporter of the Palestinian cause, a pay raise absent of tenure. That’s a move so contradictory that outside pressure from pro-Israel absolutists and power elites dependent on colonialist exploitation likely prompted it.

West said that’s what happened, though Harvard denies it.

Well, that concludes our Conservatives’ Hypocrisy by Silence Tour, though there are many more examples, such as, JUST IN:

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LINK to: Angela Davis says Butler cancelled her appearance

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Yeah, there are also left-driven episodes, but overwhelmingly they aren’t equivalents, because they’re not about intimidating critics of war or factory farming.

Consider the case of Don Imus, whom CBS radio let go for referring to black members of Rutgers’ woman’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.”

And longtime CBS sports broadcaster and odds maker Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was dropped in 1988 after he made rambling, asinine comments about black athletes owing their talents largely to slavery’s breeding practices. Snyder also said blacks breaking into the coaching profession should be seen by white coaches as a threat to their opportunities.

Was there a better way
to respond than firing Snyder?

Ed Hotaling, an African-American reporter/producer for a Washington, D.C. TV station who recorded and broadcast the remarks, said CBS should not have fired Snyder. Instead, Hotaling said the incident should have cued the network to explore racism straightforwardly.

“I think you have to think a little more broadly than firing a sports commentator for expressing stupid comments about civil rights,” he said. “You should start covering the story and let him learn something.”

Hotaling suggested letting Snyder discuss his remarks and the wider issue of civil rights with black and white athletes on CBS’ football coverage.

“His views would be expressed a little more adequately, I think,” Hotaling said. “They’d have the thing resolved in a positive way instead of a negative way.”

Today's retributive discourse, the wider problem than just Cancel Culture.

Hotaling has the right idea overall. Though as someone who remembers Snyder’s insipid pseudo-history lessons in that 1988 broadcast, I have my doubts that a person so evidently entitled and isolated as Snyder would be open to learning.

And there is also the matter of Jimmy The Greek’s words revealing an incompetence to be a national sports commentator and forecaster (would we want a TV weather forecaster using crickets and supplicating the god Thor?)

Still, what Hotaling suggested in ‘88 is very relevant to today’s controversies. A speaker or tweeter who makes a short comment should be given more time to explain it, but more importantly should be compelled to, in Snyder’s case, talk repeatedly with great black athletes. He could hear them describe the ways in which their success came not from some ghoulish echo from slave breeding, but from their own hard work and sacrifice.

Responding to bigotry should involve face-to-face discussions and persistent attempts to show the offender what they are missing, not instantaneous sanitizing of discourse that may make us feel better, but leaves the hate unaddressed.

 

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA