As the Cancel Culture Proceeds on Its Merry Way, the Left is Eating Itself

As I write this on Election Day it seems indisputable that many on the left are motivated to vote against the President due to their complete and utter hatred for the man. That is not an exaggeration. We see it in the rioters and looters across the country and the counter protesters who often appear at Trump rallies. Closer to home, I received a text message from one my mother’s cousins today imploring me to “think long and hard before you vote for that SOB!” Did you see last Sunday’s New York Times opinion section in which the columnists presented a litany of “What We’ve Lost” because of the Trump presidency (“Persuasion,” “Imagination,” “Innocence,” to name a few).

But the left doesn’t limit their loathing to the Bad Orange Man. Sometimes, they direct their anger at one of their own for saying or doing something that violates a perceived rule or leaves a member of the progressive left feeling “unsafe” or otherwise offended. Case in point: David Shor.

Shor is a 28-year-old data analyst who in May of this year tweeted about a paper published by a Princeton social scientist named Omar Wasow. As Jonathan Chait reported, Professor Wasow analyzed the 1960s civil rights movement and determined that peaceful protests were more effective in drawing favorable public opinion towards the movement than violent protests. For that tweet, Shor was accused of being a racist. Apparently, in the progressive world it is not acceptable to criticize violent protests by members of the left (now we know why Democrats and their media allies didn’t have much to say about the rioting and looting in Democratic cities we have seen the last few months).

Shor, who worked on President Obama’s reelection campaign, was a member of an email group of left of center data analysts named Progessphiles. After being accused of being a racist, he apologized for his earlier tweet. One of the other Progressphile members forwarded Shor’s tweet to the CEO of the company where Shor worked. He was fired a few days later. Then he was kicked off Progressphile.

If you stray from the party line, there will be consequences.

Did I mention that Professor Wasow is black?

Here’s a good one. Lee Fang is a lefty reporter for The Intercept, founded by Glenn Greenwald (more on that later). Fang had the temerity to write about his interview of a young Black Lives Matter supporter (again, who is black), who lamented to Feng that he was frustrated, asking “why does a black life matter only when a white person takes it… I grew up in East Oakland and there have been a lot of black people killed by other black people…”

Well, that didn’t turn out so well for Lee (this is from another Chait article on illiberal liberals). He was, of course, accused of being a racist and not sufficiently woke by another Intercept journalist. He posted a long-winded apology, which seems to be the norm in these instances. They have not fired him, to my knowledge. If you read the apology, it sounds as if they marched him through The Intercept newsroom in a dunce cap as he dictated his apology to his captors (not sure if The Intercept has a newsroom, btw).

I could go on. James Bennett was the op-ed editor fired from the NYT after the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s piece calling for the military to assist local authorities quell the ongoing riots in Democratic cities. Not to pick on the NYT (heh, heh), there’s Bari Weiss too.

And there are more. Most recently, Glenn Greenwald resigned from The Intercept. Greenwald received a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on the classified information Edward Snowden stole about NSA surveillance programs. He co-founded The Intercept in 2014 to work outside of the mainstream media.

I like Greenwald. I don’t agree with his world view of the president and the U. S. intelligence agencies (well, not all of it), but he doesn’t hesitate to call out Democrats too. He resigned from The Intercept when the editors refused to publish his article critical of Twitter’s and Facebook’s censorship of the New York Post’s articles concerning the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and his China/Ukrainian business dealings. His editors acted in unison with CNN, the Washington Post, the NYT and other mainstream media players who ignored the story (and wanted you to ignore also).

The autophagy on the left is going to continue indefinitely. I suppose it will only get worse during President Trump’s second term (if there is one). They’ll need an outlet for their anguish over President Trump’s win.