WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND

I’ve never seen Jimmy Kimmel Live, nor have I seen any other late-night TV chat show since Johnny Carson’s left the air. Nowadays, if I am awake late at night, I am more likely to be found reading some sleazy pop fiction (which I can do without disturbing my wife’s sleep) than watching TV (which I can’t). Nonetheless, I am aware that Kimmel was recently victimized by cancel culture because, well, because I live on planet earth and have an internet connection. Kimmel, as you no doubt know, had his show cancelled by ABC/Disney/Hulu/whatever after he made somewhat erroneous (but relatively innocuous) comments about the man who assassinated Charlie Kirk and drew the ire of, among others, President Donald Trump. I had never heard of Charlie Kirk before his murder, and I know almost nothing about Kimmel, so, naturally, I thought it was important for me to weigh in on this topic.

Numerous friends and acquaintances of mine have taken to Facebook to offer screeds about the firing/cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel (yes, my friends and I are mostly aging Baby Boomers and thus we still think Facebook is relevant to the cultural conversation). Judging from these posts, my liberal friends consider the Kimmel firing to be a sign that free speech in America is now in serious peril. I believe that free speech in America is always in serious peril, no more now than it was in the year 2002, when ABC cancelled Bill Maher’s late-night talk show, Politically Incorrect, because Maher argued that the Islamic terrorists who crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, were brave men, after which the network replaced his program with the much more anodyne…Jimmy Kimmel Live. Back then, many of my liberal friends were outraged by Maher’s cancellation. Nowadays, due to the fact that Maher doesn’t consistently toe the liberal line, many of them loath the man and his program, which moved to HBO after ABC cancelled it and has thrived there for nearly a quarter of a century. For the record, I have never seen Bill Maher’s program. Although I believe that the 9/11 terrorists, like the killer of Charlie Kirk, were cowardly rather than courageous, I would not have endorsed Maher’s being fired for saying otherwise. Likewise, I don’t endorse the firing of Kimmel. Nonetheless, I don’t consider either firing a First Amendment issue. Corporations like ABC TV have every right to fire talk show hosts who say things on the air that the corporation believes might be harmful to its profits. That’s just Capitalism, and it is the same system that made multi-millionaires out of both Maher and Kimmel.

What bothers me most about the Kimmel situation is that most of the people screaming about how unfair it is were dead silent during the so-called Great Awokening, when cancellations like Kimmel’s were widespread and mostly the result of leftwing, rather than rightwing, activism. Food writer Alison Roman (pictured above) lost her job with the New York Times after (justifiably, in my opinion) mocking the extreme minimalism of home-design maven Marie Kondo. Roman was accused of racism, but no evidence of this was provided, other than the fact that Roman is a Caucasian of no great wealth and Kondo a Japanese multi-millionaire. This was particularly galling, because Roman’s firing came shortly after the Times had hired journalist Sarah Jeong and stood by her after she was exposed as a racist and an ageist who was fond of tweeting things such as: "Oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men." and "Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins." When I pointed out this outrage to liberal friends of mine, they mostly shrugged and said, essentially, “Asian-American women are frequently the victims of racist trolling, so it makes sense that they might want to return fire now and then. No big deal.” As an old white man, I wasn’t upset by Jeong’s snarky comments. I make snarky comments all day long. I was upset only by the hypocrisy the Times displayed by its firing of Alison Roman, who said nothing racist, and its defense of Sarah Jeong, who did. And I’m frequently confused by liberal attitudes towards Asian-Americans and race. Asian-Americans are the group of students most likely to be denied admission to an elite university because of so-called affirmative action laws. But most liberals defend affirmative action. Likewise, Asian-Americans are the highest earning ethnic group in America, out-earning their white, Hispanic, and black peers by wide margins. In fact, Asian-American women, on average, out-earn even white males, according to a 2018 study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Liberals tend to equate wealth inequality with evil rich people, but no group benefits from wealth inequality more than Asian-Americans, and yet they aren’t generally criticized for this by the left.

While we’re on the topic of New York Times writers, let’s consider the case of Quinn Norton, a tech-industry journalist (pictured above) who was hired by the Times in 2018, the same year as Jeong. Shortly after her hiring, some of Norton’s old tweets surfaced in which she used slurs regarded as homophobic. Norton, however, is a self-described “queer activist,” and such folks tend to use homophobic slurs in the same way that many black people use the word “nigger” and many women use the word “bitch” – i.e., in a way that is not meant to be offensive to the listener. It also came to light that Norton had exchanged emails with a white supremacist named Andrew Auernheimer. She claimed to have befriended Auernheimer because he is a legendary computer hacker and she thought he might prove to be a good source of information for a tech journalist. She also claimed that she hoped, via their correspondence, she could lessen his racism and other vile beliefs. But the Times wasn’t interested in Norton’s explanations of her tweets or of her relationship with Auernheimer. It fired Norton before she ever produced a single article for the company.

In a similar case, also from 2018, conservative writer Kevin D. Williamson was hired as a writer for The Atlantic. But, once again, questionable posts on Twitter (now X) arose and were used to scuttle his job. Williamson is an abortion opponent and, in a 2014 tweet thread, he argued that having an abortion ought to be a capital offense (in fact, he argued that women convicted of having an abortion should be hanged). He later noted that he was making an ironic point about the sloppiness of most abortion discussions. But irony and sarcasm are frequently lost on the heavily-online community that spends a lot of time on Twitter/X. Many of the female writers and other employees of the Atlantic demanded that managing editor Jeffrey Goldberg fire Williamson, and Goldberg, a coward, complied. To his credit, Atlantic senior reporter Conor Friedersdorf went public with his objection to Williamson’s firing. But Friedersdorf is generally regarded as a center/right journalist. I don’t know of any actual liberals who objected to Williamson’s dismissal.

Equally cowardly was New Yorker editor David Remnick, who, in September of 2018, cancelled an appearance by Steve Bannon, which was scheduled to take place at that year’s New Yorker Festival. He gave in to the objections of numerous New Yorker staff members who didn’t want the publication associated in any way with Bannon. Apparently tribal loyalty trumps free speech at The New Yorker.

In 2021, actress and martial artist Gina Carano likened “hating someone for their [conservative] political views” to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. “Shortly afterward,” notes Wikipedia, “Lucasfilm stated that Carano was no longer employed by the company, saying that ‘her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.’” Ironically, Lucasfilm is a subsidiary of the Disney Corporation, which also cancelled Jimmy Kimmel. After her firing, Carano filed a lawsuit charging the company with wrongful termination and sexual discrimination. According to Wikipedia, “Disney moved to have the case dismissed, which motion was denied by U.S. district judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett. Gina Carano v. The Walt Disney Company, Lucasfilm LTD. LLC, and Huckleberry Industries (U.S.) Inc. was set to begin on September 25, 2025, but in August, Carano and Disney settled their dispute.” Curiously, I don’t recall any of my liberal friends threatening to cancel their Disney Plus subscriptions because of the way the company attempted to cancel the career of Gina Carano.

In 2020, the New York Times forced out editor James Bennett for publishing an editorial written by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, which urged the President to send in U.S. military troops to quell the rioting that had broken out in some U.S. cities in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. The Cotton editorial ran on June 4, 2020. By June 7, Bennett was gone.

Around that same time, Times columnist Bari Weiss was hounded out of her job by coworkers who, she claimed, accused her of racism and bullied her through the newspaper’s internal Slack app.

In 2021, the Times’s award-winning science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. was forced to resign because of an accusation that he had used the word “nigger” while discussing racist language with a group of students who had asked him about the topic. Ironically, in 2002, McNeil was given an award by the National Association of Black Journalists. He was also widely regarded to have consistently providing the best coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic of any reporter in America. Rather than defend McNeil, 150 of his liberal colleagues at the Times wrote a letter and demanded he apologize for his racism.

Around that same time, Emmanuel Cafferty, an Hispanic employee of San Diego Gas & Electric, was fired after someone saw him cracking his knuckles and mistook the gesture for a “white power” sign.

In my hometown of Sacramento, California, longtime Sacramento Kings broadcaster Grant Napear, was fired in June of 2020 for tweeting ALL LIVES MATTER. (Yesterday, in my rather violent hometown, a man fired three gunshots into the building that houses the local ABC TV affiliate. This occurred just one day after a protest was staged outside the building to protest Kimmel’s cancellation. The police do not yet know if the shooting was connected to the protest.)

Also in 2020, political analyst David Shor was fired for arguing that the George Floyd riots would hurt the Democrats politically and for providing evidence to back up this claim.

Greg Patton, a Business Communications professor at the University of Southern California, was punished for introducing his students to the Chinese word na-ge, which, some students objected, sounded racist to them.

To my knowledge, none of the liberal friends of mine who are currently protesting Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation by ABC TV on Facebook and other Baby Boomer social media venues, ever protested any of these other cancellations. Like true political tribalists, they protest cancel culture only when it is practiced by the right, never when it is practiced by the left.

What does any of this have to do with pop culture, the primary subject of this blog? Seek out the essay that Jamie Palmer published in Quillette on March 31, 2020, detailing how leftwing cancel culture devastated the Romance Writers of America and threw an entire genre into turmoil. It is fascinating and terrifying. Numerous articles have been written about how leftwing cancel culture was used to viciously malign many YA authors, leading some publishers to drop titles that they had previously planned to publish. JK Rowling, one of the most successful pop-fiction writers of all time, has been targeted by would-be cancellers for her belief that trans women are not the same as biological women. Fortunately for Rowling, her writings are too widely loved for the campaign against her to do much damage to her sales. Woody Allen, who will be publishing his first novel later this year (an impressive feat for a man about to turn 90) had his 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, cancelled by its original publisher, Hachette Book Group, because of unproven allegations that he had sexually abused his daughter, Dylan Farrow, twenty-eight years earlier. Fortunately, the book was eventually picked up by Skyhorse Publishing. Speaking of Allen, his life and the allegations of child molestation made against him seem to have been the inspiration for Louis C.K.’s 2017 film, I Love You, Daddy. It’s difficult to say for sure if this is true or not, because the film never got a widescreen release, having been shelved before its release date after Louis C.K. himself was cancelled by the #metoo movement back in 2017 because of widespread reports (which he confirmed) that he had on several occasions forced female associates to watch him masturbate. Sadly, by cancelling the film, activists also robbed moviegoers of a chance to see performances by such talented women as Helen Hunt, Rose Byrne, Chloe Grace Moretz, Edie Falco, and Pamela Adlon, none of whom has ever been accused of sexual impropriety. Linda Fairstein’s impressive career as an author of crime fiction appears to have been ended when leftwing cultural critics turned against her because of her role in prosecuting the so-called Central Park Five, five teenagers who were (wrongly) convicted of raping a Central Park jogger back in 1989. Her cancellation began roughly around the time that Netflix released a dramatization of the Central Park case called When They See Us, directed by Ava DuVernay. At that time Glamour Magazine’s editors announced that giving Fairstein the magazine’s Woman of the Year Award back in 1993 had been a mistake, and they rescinded it. The Mystery Writers of America, which was set to give Fairstein its highest honor, The Grandmaster Award, withdrew the honor. Fairstein’s publisher and literary agent both dropped her. Fairstein’s publishing career began in 1994, and comprises 24 books, most of them legal thrillers. But she hasn’t published a book since 2019 and her career as an author appears to be at an end.

Leftwing cancel culture did a great deal of damage over the last couple of decades, and continues to do harm even now (Woody Allen says he can no longer get a distribution deal for his films and has thus brought to an end one of American cinema’s most legendary careers). But nowadays it is rightwing cancel culture that is on the rise. Many more Jimmy Kimmels will fall before this madness ends. I applaud those who are denouncing the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel. I just wish they had a long history of protesting other cancellations. But they were mostly silent when Louis C.K., Woody Allen, Linda Fairstein, Gina Carano, and so many others were being cancelled by the left. I suspect that most of Kimmel’s current defenders are not really free-speech lovers. For the most part, they’ve been happy to watch leftwingers stifle free speech. Now it’s their turn to squirm. Payback can be a bitch.