Creative Commons
Tucker Carlson
Molly Rush is a longtime peace activist in her mid-eighties who lives in Pennsylvania. She was a member of the Plowshares 8, along with brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who in 1980 damaged a nuclear missile at a General Electric factory in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.
Last June, as protests against police killings raged, Rush reposted a meme she saw online. It depicted Martin Luther King Jr. and bore the message: “Looted nothing, Burned nothing, Attacked no one, Changed the World.”
Rush began hearing from others who criticized this post as insensitive and arguably even racist. She promptly apologized, thanking her critics and writing “I’ve learned a lot.”
But, as Dan Kovalik recounts in his new book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, Rush’s apology was not enough. She was branded a racist on Twitter. Her children and grandchildren who defended her were called “white trash.” The Thomas Merton Center of Philadelphia, which Rush co-founded, issued a statement disassociating itself from her “until she demonstrates both accountability to the people she has harmed and a commitment to continuous learning about how her behavior embodies white supremacy culture and impacts the people around her.”
Kovalik, a labor and human rights lawyer who lives in Pittsburgh, says the center has continued to shun Rush—an example of “cancel culture” that the left inflicts to ensure orthodoxy and stamp out dissent.
It’s an urgent premise, one worthy of a book. But Kovalik’s book falls short of being worthy of its premise.
What happened to Rush, to whom Kovalik dedicates Cancel This Book, is lamentable. But it’s the sharpest example of cancel culture in some 200 pages of exertion. And even here the overreaction she experienced was offset by statements of support, including that of a Black former board member of the Thomas Merton Center who declared, “Molly said nothing that was racist or offensive and those zealots can K.M.A,” which stands for “kiss my ass.”
In this and other respects, Cancel This Book comes across as overreaching and, worse, a testament to the craving for victimization that Kovalik decries. (We learn, for instance, that the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he is an adjunct professor, doesn’t pay him enough.) Instead of an incisive critique of how well-meaning people can become agents of injustice, what we get is an effort to blame the left as a whole for the actions of a few.
Kovalik lays out his thesis in the book’s preface: “[T]oo many on the left, wielding the cudgel of ‘cancel culture,’ have decided that certain forms of censorship and speech and idea suppression are positive things that will advance social justice.”
Okay, like what?
Worst of all is when Kovalik gushes about how conservatives including Fox News blowhard Tucker Carlson are open to having “liberal and even leftwing guests” on their shows, overlooking that they serve mainly as punching bags.
Kovalik singles out David Remnick of The New Yorker for having “famously, and quite effectively, advocated for the invasion of Iraq in 2003—an invasion that has destroyed the lives of millions.”
As a longtime subscriber to Remnick’s magazine, I don’t remember its pivotal role in this foreign policy blunder. What I recall are the massive protests in the United States and around the world by progressives who were solidly opposed to an Iraq attack. And what does any of this have to do with cancel culture?
Kovalik also tells the tale of a left-wing journalist named Lee Fang who wrote an article published by The Intercept last summer that quoted a Black resident of East Oakland who asked “[W]hy does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?” Another Intercept journalist, Akela Lacey, sent out a tweet accusing Fang of being a “racist” that received thousands of likes and responses. Unmentioned by Kovalik is that Fang expressed regret for his “insensitivity,” Lacey thanked him for it, and life went on. Fang has more than a dozen Intercept bylines so far this year; he’s hardly been canceled.
Writing about the COVID-19 pandemic, Kovalik goes on and on about the double standard that exists when the left condemns mass gatherings like the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally while winking at mass Black Lives Matter protests, glossing over that the former was mostly maskless while the protesters were mostly masked, although social distancing was not practiced at either.
But, again, why is this “cancel culture,” as opposed to, say, an opportunity to disparage the left?
Yes, there are people who have suffered serious and demonstrably unfair consequences for saying the wrong thing. But except when this is done by the government, it is not censorship—a point I distinctly remember hearing Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz—who contributes a back cover blurb calling Kovalik’s book “a strong liberal argument against the cancer of cancel culture”—make when I sat in on one of his classes while visiting Harvard in 2006. The First Amendment, he said as he scolded a student who got it wrong, doesn’t protect you from being harshly condemned and even fired for the things you say.
Nor are even the most disagreeable actions of a few indicative of a grand moral failing among an entire political persuasion. I know many people on the left who respect and defend the rights of others to say things and hold opinions with which they disagree. I like to think I’m one of them.
But Kovalik’s book looks past these exceptions—perhaps even the rule—in his determination to make the left look bad.
Throughout Cancel This Book, the reader is treated to a smug sense of moral superiority masquerading as a commitment to fairness.
Kovalik chides the Black Lives Matter protesters who he imagines “go home at night and watch Hillbilly Elegy on Netflix and wallow in the satisfaction that they are not like those people on the screen.” He blames the call to “defund the police” for the Republicans’ surprisingly strong performance in the 2020 election. And perhaps this slogan did backfire. But, in this case, isn’t it Kovalik who is urging that certain things not be said?
He notes that “liberal-leaning” California approved “anti-worker and anti-union” referenda while voting down a key criminal justice reform in the same election as they voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. Inconsistent, hypocritical, and disappointing, surely. But is this cancel culture?
Worst of all is when Kovalik gushes about how conservatives including Fox News blowhard Tucker Carlson are open to having “liberal and even leftwing guests” on their shows, overlooking that they serve mainly as punching bags. Kovalik goes on to exalt Carlson as an anti-war crusader:
“Indeed, there is good reason to believe that Carlson may have personally convinced President Trump not to launch a war against Iran, as his hawkish advisers had been urging him to do. If that is true, then Carlson deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, at least.”
Instead of “sitting around striving for some unattainable purity that really does not do anyone any good,” Kovalik advises, people should apply themselves to worthier tasks. “And just maybe, if you’re lucky, you can do something great like Tucker Carlson and stop the next war.”
Pardon me while I wipe the vomit from my keyboard.
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There. That’s better.
In his book’s conclusion, Kovalik allows that there are likely things he overstated or just got wrong. It’s admirable for him to say that, after producing a compendium of grievances that seem to attribute to political worldviews what is really just inherent in human nature.
The sad fact is that people on the left can be, and often are, too judgmental and unforgiving. That’s an indictment of their style, not their politics. But it’s a real problem. And the solution is laid out in remarks Kovalik says were made by Ibram X. Kendi, the author of Stamped From the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist, at a symposium:
“[T]hose who are constantly growing and striving to be a better form of themselves are constantly recognizing and admitting their mistakes, and constantly seeking to be better for them. And so, I think that we should take the pressure off of our backs to essentially be perfect. But we should simultaneously do that for other people. And so, an anti-racist doesn’t just recognize that they’re gonna make mistakes. They’re gonna allow other people to make mistakes.”
Kovalik deserves credit for sharing this wisdom. But, for the most part, Cancel This Book ignores it.