Cancel Culture Is a Marketing Grift

Getting “Cancelled” has become a mark of prestige within certain, more radicalized segments of the population, especially for those insulated with cash

Dave Chappelle is touring the nation to discuss cancel culture. “If this is what being canceled is, I love it!”

The term “cancel culture” has been in our vernacular since 2016 and is often used as a shield by celebrities and politicians who demonstrate harmful behavior to dismiss critics as triggered radicals, the reality of it remains unchanged: Cancel Culture doesn’t exist.

At least not in the frame that has it been presented to the public- always by a high profile figure being held accountable for their venomous words or egregious actions that inflict distress on a person or communities of people in the general public.

From some perspectives, criminals like R. Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and even Jefferey Epstein are victims of Cancel Culture rather than participants in their own demise. According to Insider, the origin of Cancel Culture emerged as adjacent to the #MeToo movement, wherein powerful and influential men who had committed abusive, threatening, or oppressive acts weaponizing sex or sexual harassment were called out by the victims after living or working in a toxic culture the valued their silence over remedy.

These events were not symptomatic of some nefarious Cancel Culture uprising, but instead a long-overdue reckoning with consequences for criminal behavior that had been suppressed by fear of retaliation. Unfortunately, by design, most people have existed under the impression- even accepting of it as a cold reality- that consequences were a system designed only for the weak or powerless, the poor, the marginalized.

Some have even blamed Cancel Culture for the removal of Confederate-era statues from public display or names of buildings being changed- these effigies celebrated historical figures who were murderers, torturers, and individuals who fought a bloody war in pursuit of owning Black people like cattle. For over a century, people of color have had to exist beneath the gaze of monuments that honored with pride the savage, devastating history endured by…