Remember Anita Bryant? Because of her anti-gay activism, in 1977, she became perhaps the 1st victim of "cancel culture" by America's left of center.
Well, I just found out that her granddaughter, Sarah Green, is not only gay, but has married a woman. She came out to her grandmother at age 21, after hearing her say something typically ignorant. Serves her right.
Wanda Sykes is a comedian. A very good one. She ticks some boxes that conservatives don't like. She's female. She's black. She's gay -- and married. She's smart. And, what is probably the topper for them, she's outspoken.
She recently had this to say about "cancel culture," which right-wingers believe targets them, especially:
To me, the whole complaint about cancel culture is a lot of men, especially straight men, who are just pissed that they can’t say things anymore, y’know?
And it’s not like you can't say these things. You can say them, but now there’s just consequences. So that’s why I say I can’t get canceled. Only God can say: "All right, Wanda, that’s enough."
In other words: Use a slur -- against someone's gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity, or whatever other category I may be unintentionally overlooking -- and people will stand up and oppose you.
You have the right to say what you want, so long as it doesn't endanger others, the classic example being the yelling of "Fire!" in a crowded place when there is no fire. But you do not have the right to say such things on a public platform:
* If you are at work, and you call a black customer the N-word, you can be fired. You have the right to have a job, but you do not have the right to have that job.
* If you are on line at a store, and you call a Jewish person in front of you an anti-Semitic word, the store manager can say, "Get out, and don't ever come back." You have the right to eat, but you do not have the right to shop for your food at that store.
* If you are on a social media platform, like Facebook or Twitter, and an openly gay person says something you don't like, you are free to tell him you disagree (if it's an opinion) or that he's wrong (if it's a fact). But if you use a homophobic slur against him, that platform can delete your comment, give you a warning, suspend you for a day, suspend you for a week, or ban you entirely, depending on your record on that platform, or on the severity of the offense. You have the right to express your opinions, but you don't have the right to do so there.
* And if you are on a television program, and you say anything like the preceding, that network has the right to ban you. You are not being "silenced": Your voice still works. You are simply being prevented from saying what you want to say on that network.
All those examples are of private businesses doing what they want. Conservatives used to support that. Why not now? What are you, a Communist?
Furthermore, conservatives who get "canceled" usually find it much easier to come back than liberals who do. Racist and anti-Semite Mel Gibson got to make a comeback. Racist Roseanne Barr is working on one. Even Pat Buchanan might have made another comeback by now, if he weren't 84 years old.
And, of course, the biggest example of all: Donald Trump. How many things has he said that have been worthy of "cancellation"? Despite this, and despite currently being under a federal criminal indictment, he is still accepted by the wider culture, is still making public statements, and is still the frontrunner for the Republican Party's nomination for President in 2024.
That's for people right of center. For people left of center, it's been a completely different story.
Top 10 Reasons Conservatives Need to Shut Up About "Cancel Culture"
10. The Hollywood Ten. In 1947, Congress, through the House Un-American Activities Committee, held hearings investigating Communist influence in the American film industry. They were attempting to defend screenwriters accused of Communist activity, a group known as The Hollywood Ten.
Left to right: Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson,
Alvah Bessie, Albert Maltz, Herbert Biberman,
Lester Cole, Samuel Ornitz, Edward Dmytryk,
and Robert Adrian Scott. Not pictured: Dalton Trumbo.
There were anti-Semitic overtones to the hearings, as half of the Ten were Jewish: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz and Samuel Ornitz. Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo were not Jewish, although Lardner's 1st wife, Sylvia Schulman, was.
Regardless of religion, many people in Hollywood saw this persecution as the sort of thing the Nazis would have done, and this fed their outrage. Some of them were registered Republicans, but they couldn't accept this garbage. In particular, Lucille Ball (a Republican) and Humphrey Bogart (a Democrat) testified in such a way that it could only be described as an artful way of telling the HUAC members to go to Hell.
It ended up ineffective. Many of them found it impossible to get work in America, and moved to Europe. In 1960, Kirk Douglas asked Trumbo to write the script for the historical epic he wanted to star in, Spartacus, and that film's success helped break the blacklist.
Ring Lardner Jr., son of the famous sportswriter, wrote the script for the film version of M*A*S*H in 1970. He was the last surviving member of the Hollywood Ten, living until 2000.
Even fellow liberals turned on them, to an extent. Ezra Pound was a much-admired poet. He was also a mentally ill Fascist who made anti-American propaganda broadcasts from Benito Mussolini's Italy during World War II. And yet, though he (largely) agreed with them politically, novelist Norman Mailer once said he would rather read the works of Pound than those of the Hollywood Ten, because, in his opinion, Pound was a better writer.
9. Marsha Hunt. From 1937 to 1947, she was one of America's most popular actresses. But she joined the "Hollywood Fights Back" movement. When she got back to Los Angeles, she was told to renounce her public statements in Washington. She refused. She was able to make 2 movies in 1948, and 3 in 1949.
But in 1950, she was named as a potential Communist or Communist sympathizer, along with 151 other actors, writers, and directors, in the anti-Communist publication Red Channels. She was cast in no movies in 1950, '51 and '53; just 2 in '52, and just 1 each in '54, '55 and '56, before going into semi-retirement. In a 2012 interview, she said, "The town turned against us. Just about-face... I was appalled, hurt, shocked that journalism could be so far out in prejudice."
In 1971, a year after Trumbo's death, she appeared in a film version of his novel Johnny Got His Gun. In 1987, she appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as an Admiral's wife. Her last role was in 2008, in The Empire State Building Murders.
Marsha Hunt, 2020, age 103
She died on September 7, 2022, as the last surviving blacklisted actor. At the age of 105, she remained unrepentant, because she wasn't a Communist, and still believed that what had already been done, before she stepped in, was unfair.
8. Lenny Bruce. He was the 1st comedian to get big using profanity and "sick humor." Typical of his material: "My wife caught me in bed with her mother. She said, 'You're sick!' I said, 'Why? She's your mother, not mine!'"
Bruce would joke about anything. Especially sex. And religion. Particularly the Catholic Church. In his routine, he called Pope John XXIII "John Baby." That, plus the fact that he was Jewish -- his real name was Leonard Alfred Schneider -- pissed off a lot of conservative people in "the establishment."
Yes, he made jokes about the Catholic Church.
No, here, he's not dressing like a priest to make a point.
He's wearing a "Nehru jacket," made popular
by the late Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India.
And in the late 1950s and early 1960s, if "the establishment" decided you needed what we would now call "canceling," it meant you wouldn't get hired. And any place that would hire you might get closed down. It also meant that you could get arrested for using profanity onstage. That was the conservatives closing you down. The conservatives doing the canceling.
Bruce was convicted of obscenity. He appealed, all the way to the Supreme Court. Which, at perhaps the most liberal point in its history, overturned the conviction. However, it's been alleged that it did so only because, if Bruce were in prison, he could not continue to be publicly humiliated with more arrests.
Some people even think he was murdered: In 1966, at age 40, he was found with a needle in his arm at his home in the Hollywood Hills. It was known that he had a drug problem, but this was a little too convenient for his fans.
7. The Doors. No, I'm not talking about the time they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 17, 1967, and got banned for Jim Morrison singing, "Girl, we couldn't get much higher" from their Number 1 hit, "Light My Fire."
I'm talking about the show at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami on March 1, 1969, when Morrison allegedly flashed the audience. No photographic evidence of it has ever surfaced, despite a few photographs from the concert having been made public.
Morrison was convicted of indecent exposure and profanity on September 20, 1970, and, though he remained free upon appeal, the band's concerts began to be canceled. They played only 2 more shows, in Dallas on December 11, 1970, and in New Orleans the next day. The appeal was never heard, because Morrison died in Paris on July 3, 1971.
6. Dan Rather. His long and distinguished career with CBS News included anchoring The CBS Evening News, starting in 1981. Previously the network's White House correspondent, he was already known to distrust conservatives, once openly challenging President Richard Nixon during a 1974 press conference.
On September 8, 2004, just as the Presidential election was entering its general election phase, he presented unauthenticated documents that showed that George W. Bush, running for re-election as President, frequently did not show up for duty with the Texas Air National Guard during his tenure there in 1972-73.
Even hardcore Republicans knew that the information he was presenting was true. It should have come out sooner, disqualifying Bush from being elected Governor of Texas in 1994 and 1998, let alone President in 2000 and 2004. But there wasn't enough evidence to back it up. Rather was suspended. Bush was re-elected in a close election. In 2005, CBS fired Rather.
5. Al Franken. One of the top comedians of the late 20th Century, the Saturday Night Live veteran had been elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from his native Minnesota in 2008 and 2014. On January 2, 2018, he resigned from the Senate because of a photograph taken in 2006 -- before he was elected -- which appeared to show him in an act of sexual harassment.
His own Party refused to stand up for him. In particular, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York demanded that he resign.
No one would stand up and say, "Donald Trump has been proven, through his own recorded words, to have admitted to repeatedly doing things much worse than this. If Franken should resign his office, then Trump should resign his office first."
For the record, after the Access Hollywood Tape was released, one of the candidates Trump defeated for the Republican nomination for President, former Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah, demanded he resign from the ticket in favor of Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence. So did 3 Republican members of the Senate and 4 from the House of Representatives.
Pence himself did not. Nor did the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus. Nor did any member of the Republican Congressional leadership. Nor did any living former Republican President, Vice President, or nominee therefor.
Trump is a Republican, a conservative, and a "Christian." Like a bunch of hypocrites, his Party insured that he got to keep running for the Presidency. Franken is a Democrat, a liberal, and a Jew. Like a bunch of cowards, his Party abandoned him.
4. Woody Allen. Let's be completely honest. His 1979 film Manhattan showed his middle-aged character dating a 17-year-old woman, played by Mariel Hemingway (Ernest's granddaughter, born a few months after he died in 1961). And starting a relationship with his college-age, if adult, adoptive daughter was, at the very least, weird.
But as long as we're being completely honest: Allen has now been with Soon-Yi Previn longer than he has been with all previous girlfriends combined. And he has never been criminally charged with abusing anyone. Nor has he been sued for it in court. If Mia Farrow, and those of her children who stand with her, are telling the truth, why don't they go to court and prove it? Then again, he hasn't sued Mia for defamation of character, either.
There are people who want us to treat Woody Allen as if he is Roman Polanski, who drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, and then, when a judge threw out the deal he made to avoid prison time and publicly threatened him with 50 years, he fled the country. Well, Polanski got his day in court, and lost. Allen has never gotten his day in court. Therefore, he is still entitled to the presumption of innocence.
As with Al Franken, Lenny Bruce and some of the Hollywood Ten, there may also be anti-Semitism involved in the opposition to Allen. (Marsha Hunt and Dan Rather were not Jewish. Nor were any of The Doors.)
Thus far, while religion has been an issue on this list, race has not, not even Soon-Yi's status as an Asian-American: Woody is seen as the problem, not her. But here we go:
3. Janet Jackson. It was February 1, 2004. Facebook went online exactly 3 days later. Twitter was more than 2 years away. We had the Internet, but we didn't have "social media" as we now understand that term. Had I gone into a chat room, or onto a message board, or even clicked on a newspaper or TV network website, I would have found out what happened rather quickly. But there was no way to know within minutes what had happened. I literally didn't know about it until I woke up the next morning.
It was Super Bowl XXXLVIII -- the Super Bowl with the longest Roman numeral yet -- at what's now named NRG Stadium in Houston. The New England Patriots won, beating the Carolina Panthers, 32-29. Fans of the other 30 teams were left talking about the halftime show, where Justin Timberlake ripped off a piece of Janet's costume, exposing one of her breasts.
The bulk of the public anger fell on Janet. The jokes from late-night comedians, while embarrassing and seeming to go on forever, turned out to be the least damaging part of it. Viacom and its subsidiaries, including CBS, MTV and Infinity Broadcasting, blacklisted her from their broadcasts.
"There are much worse things in the world," Janet said, "and for this to be such a focus, I don't understand."
From 1986 to 2001, she had 10 songs reach Number 1 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart. Her next album, titled Damita Jo after her middle name, was released on March 30, 2004, 58 days after the incident, and none of the 3 singles from it cracked the Top 40. From 2006 to 2021, she would have only 2 singles that did.
She was 37 years old at the time of the incident, and still looked, moved and sounded great, so it's not like she was washed up. And her fans still sold out arenas all over the planet. But she has never again been a hitmaker.
And Timberlake? His next album came on September 8, 2006, and it produced 3 Number 1 hits. From 2006 to 2018, he had 18 Top 10 hits, 5 of them hitting Number 1.
He got off scot-free from hurting Janet's career. Just as he had gotten off scot-free from the way he treated Britney Spears, both while and after he was her girlfriend.
In 2021, a documentary about Britney's struggle to reclaim her legal rights aired, and it put Timberlake's actions and words -- toward her, and toward Janet -- in a new light. In an Instagram post, Timberlake said:
I am deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem, where I spoke out of turn, or did not speak up for what was right...
I understand that I fell short in these moments and in many others and benefited from a system that condones misogyny and racism...
I didn’t recognize it for all that it was while it was happening in my own life but I do not want to ever benefit from others being pulled down again.
I can do better and I will do better.
He had better do better. To paraphrase one of his later hits, he was one of those other boys who don't know how to act.
2. The Beatles. They're Number 2 because they're the biggest act ever to get canceled. The only reason they're not Number 1 is that they got forgiven rather quickly.
In March 1966, Maureen Cleave, a reporter who befriended all 4 Beatles, and may have been the inspiration for John's affair-confessional song "Norwegian Wood," interviewed John, and she asked him about his thoughts on religion. He said,
Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I'll be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first – rock 'n' roll or Christianity.
People in Britain barely noticed: The article provoked no controversy there. Even in America, it took some time. But just before they left for the North American leg of their World Tour in August, the controversy exploded. Disc jockeys could be heard smashing Beatle records on the air, saying they'd never play another. Radio stations, especially in the South, held bonfires of Beatle records. The Ku Klux Klan picketed the band's shows in Washington and Memphis.
What's more, there were death threats. Now, John was scared: He had put his bandmates, and even their loved ones -- by this point, all of them except Paul McCartney were married, and John and Ringo Starr each had one son -- at physical risk. And so, for what turned out to be the only time in his public life, John Lennon ate crow, and apologized for something he'd said or done.
On August 11, the Beatles flew from London to Chicago, where the North American leg of their World Tour was to begin. That night, at the Astor Tower Hotel, at a press conference in front of TV cameras, John said, "I suppose if I had said television was more popular than Jesus, I would have got away with it. I'm sorry I opened my mouth. I'm not anti-God, anti-Christ, or anti-religion. I was not knocking it. I was not saying we are greater or better."
He stressed that he had been remarking on how other people viewed and popularized the band. He described his own view of God by quoting the Bishop of Woolwich, "not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us."
He was adamant that he was not comparing himself with Christ, but attempting to explain the decline of Christianity in the UK. He closed with what could be considered a halfhearted apology: "If you want me to apologize, if that will make you happy, then, okay, I'm sorry."
Shades of more recent "I'm sorry if I offended anyone" statements. But most American journalists accepted this.
The thing is, John was right. Granted, 2,000 years from now, if human civilization survives, there will likely be more Bibles sold than Beatle albums. But, at the time, kids were more interested in 4 young men from current Liverpool than in 1 young man from ancient Israel and his 12 disciples.
The people that freaked out over John's remarks shouldn't have asked, "How dare he say that?" They should have asked, "What can we do to make Jesus, once again, more popular than The Beatles?" (Disclaimer: I don't have an answer now, and I probably wouldn't have had an answer had I been around then.)
1. Michael Jackson. Up until July 15, 1993, 30 years ago today, he was untouchable, the biggest active hitmaker in the world, "the King of Pop." Then came the accusation that he had molested boys at his Neverland Ranch outside Santa Barbara, California. He intensely maintained his innocence for the rest of his life. The people who knew him the best -- or thought they did -- also stood up for him, and said he couldn't possibly have done those things, because it simply wasn't in his nature to hurt children.
In 2005, he went on trial on such a charge. He was acquitted. Many people presumed he'd done it and gotten away with it. And most of the people who stood by him and believed in his innocence were considered delusional.
I was born at the end of 1969, just as Michael became a star with his brothers in The Jackson Five. I was 13 when Thriller became the biggest album of all time. I was a grown man when the charges were first leveled. And I was middle-aged when he died in 2009, while he was still a figure of ridicule at best and disgust at worst.
For the life of me, I cannot believe that Michael Jackson would have ever intentionally hurt a child, either physically or emotionally. But I have to accept the possibility that he may have unintentionally hurt children.
Still, this wasn't like the O.J. Simpson case, where the evidence of guilt now seems clear. Or even the evidence in similar cases against Donald Trump. The evidence against Michael Jackson is not clear at all.
Maybe Michael was never quite as big as The Beatles, but their "cancellation" didn't last long. His is still in place, years after his death. And that's wrong. "Innocent until proven guilty."