The Cancel Culture Is Coming For You

There’s wailing on the right. Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who brought you Fox News, recently denounced “the awful woke orthodoxy” from his Cotswolds estate in England where he’s sitting out the plague (and getting ready for the next season of “Succession”). Murdoch’s New York Post also featured a front-page fulmination by Senator Josh Hawley headlined “The Muzzling of America,” raging against Simon & Schuster for canceling his book contract after Hawley led the Senate battle to disenfranchise the majority of Americans who voted for Joe Biden and then fist-saluted the violent insurrection while it was in progress at the Capitol. It’s hard to sympathize with Murdoch and Hawley’s cries of censorship, when they have ready access to a sprawling media empire, which includes the dominant TV channel in news and opinion.

It’s also difficult to take up the right’s crusade against the cancel culture when right-wing extremists — like the ones who threatened the lives of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and his family, as well as the lives of other prominent progressive legislators like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — are the biggest “cancelers” of free speech in America. Threatening to murder public figures — and their spouses and children — is the ultimate in cancel culture.

But yes, the left has its own problem with free speech — and with erasing history and public figures in the name of political correctness. Take the San Francisco Board of Education — please! These illustrious public servants have just followed through on their threat, voting to strip the names from 44 public schools in the city. I’m all for changing the names of schools that honor notorious slaveholders, colonialists, conquistadors, imperial generals, butchers of Native Americans, mediocre presidents and other humdrum public servants.

For instance, George Washington, the “father of our nation,” was indeed a notorious slaveowner on his Virginia plantation. Marquis de Lafayette — the young French general who was like a son to Washington — thought he convinced the first American president to free his slaves, but was bitterly disappointed when he did not. “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived thereby that I was founding a land of slavery,” Lafayette later declared. So yes, strip Washington’s name off the high school — and rename it maybe after Lafayette… or Frederick Douglass?

But why rename Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary School? Stevenson wrote and spoke out against imperialism and colonialism, especially in his final years when he lived with his wife Fanny on the island of Samoa. Stevenson’s classic “Treasure Island” inveighs against the lust for gold that drove European explorers mad and his “Kidnappped” is a passionate embrace of Scottish independence against bloodthirsty British invaders.

The San Francisco Board of Education was guided (or misguided) by a task force, which supposedly deliberated for months on the question of which schools should be renamed. But the board entertained little public input, and its members could’ve used far more historical sophistication and learning before they made their haphazard decisions.

So yes, the cancel culture — on the right and the left — has spun madly out of control. It’s the job of the level-headed American citizenry — and yes, there’s millions of us out there — to restore reason in the land.