The First Cancellation

Looking back on a relatively quaint era of internet slacktivism

Let me start off by saying that I absolutely hate the words “woke” and “cancel culture.” They’re so loaded and overused that it’s impossible to utter them and not sound like some aggrieved Boomer. I prefer the more accurate (although much less succinct) terms “social Marxism” and “being a whiny asshole online,” respectively. However, for the purpose of clarity in this essay, I’ll be using them here.

The concepts of woke and cancel culture have been so ubiquitous for so long, so baked into the cake of American discourse, that it’s almost impossible to remember a time before their existence. The other day, I tried to recall where it all started. What was the inciting incident that kicked off this past decade of backlashes and public shamings and backlashes to the initial backlashes, followed by backlashes to those backlashes explaining how the original backlash was good, actually? Then, recalled from the recesses of my memory, one hashtag sprang to mind. #CancelColbert.

It seems impossible to imagine, but there was a moment in recent American history where Stephen Colbert drew considerable ire from the left. Yes, that same Stephen Colbert whose current late night show wouldn’t have a point of view if he didn’t utilize President Trump as a foil at every possible turn. Yes, that same Stephen Colbert who gave us timeless cringe classics like “The Vax Scene” and “Skibidi Biden.” But this wasn’t Late Show Stephen Colbert that got into trouble, it was Colbert Report Stephen Colbert.

For those who don’t remember, Colbert used to have a show on Comedy Central that aired after The Daily Show called The Colbert Report in which he played a caricature of right wing talking heads like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. In March of 2014, he did a segment about the Washington Redskins refusing to change their name and paying lip service to Native Americans by creating a charity called The Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation. After the episode aired, the show’s official Twitter account posted this line, lifted directly from the segment that aired on TV:

Wow, look at that ancient Twitter interface! A blast from the past.

It’s a little clunky out of context, but the joke here is obvious. You’d think everyone would just move along after seeing it, right? You thought wrong. Enter Suey Park.

This is just a small sampling of Park’s #CancelColbert tweets

My first thought after looking back on these tweets is to marvel at how there was a time when people earnestly used hashtags. They’ve existed as a punchline for so long now that you forget they were once central to the Twitter experience. My second thought is to recall Park’s aggressive and obstinate style during this moment, how off-putting it seemed at the time, and how normalized it became over the rest of the decade.

Look, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to Park’s argument here. If you’re a minority, it has to be annoying to see a smug liberal white guy throw around slurs, even (or maybe especially) if it’s done in the context of being an “ally.” But she did herself no favors with how obnoxious she was throughout the entire process. Her hall monitor attitude didn’t bring anyone over to her side.

You can see it in the initial tweet, which ended with two words: Trend it. She might as well have included two other words: Or else. Wokeness has always operated with an implicit threat lurking beneath the surface. Get in line, or suffer the consequences.

The consequence she was trying to enact here was to cancel Colbert. Not Colbert the person, “cancelling” him in some metaphorical sense. She wanted The Colbert Report to be literally cancelled and taken off the air. There’s some debate here as to whether this was her true aim, or if she was just being hyperbolic to draw attention to her message. Either way, she was calling for Comedy Central to cancel the actual show. I don’t know if this was the true origin of the term, but it certainly was the first time I ever heard the word “cancel” used in the context of political grievance.

Once other leftists hopped on the bandwagon, #CancelColbert ended up trending on Twitter and the mainstream media latched onto the story. From a modern perspective, it’s hilarious to look back on their reaction to Park’s campaign. They were completely against it at the time. If this incident had occurred just a couple of years later, they’d be cheering her on. But the prevailing sentiment back then was that Park did not understand satire and should not be taken seriously. Watch this interview she did (With the Huffington freaking Post of all places) which is conducted under the assumed premise that she’s an insufferable idiot.

I distinctly remember watching this interview at my desk at work and thinking to myself “Oh, this woman is mentally ill.” The breathless, rapid fire way she spoke, the complex academic jargon she used, and her entire political worldview came across as so abnormal, so divorced from everyday reality, that it was impossible to take her seriously. I chalked it up to the rantings of an overeducated leftist getting their moment in the sun and went about my day. Surely, I thought, this was just an isolated incident. No sane person would ever actually want to act this way.

But, as we all know, this wasn’t some odd blip on the cultural radar. Park’s affect and belief system were merely a sign of things to come. #CancelColbert was the canary in the coal mine.

Park’s point of view went from fringe to mainstream in a relatively short amount of time. Pretty soon everyone was talking about concepts like allyship, white privilege, marginalized groups, and a bunch of other buzzy leftist phrases. But all along that initial feeling I had while watching Park’s interview, that there’s something else animating these beliefs and enforcement methods, stuck with me. I maintained a healthy skepticism of the left, especially as I watched their philosophy take over most of the New York comedy scene.

Comedians continued posting jokes about current events on Twitter and Facebook like they always had, but from about 2015 onward the jokes featured a more prominent streak of left wing politics. Same goes for the jokes they told on stage, particularly in the leftist stranglehold of Brooklyn. Over time, it felt like there wasn’t much of a difference between certain comedy shows and the homepage of Mother Jones. Much ado was made about the rise of “Clapter” during this time period, and with good reason. I was there man, it was fucking brutal.

I’ve heard Clapter you people wouldn’t believe

It got to the point where, whenever something particularly egregious happened, comics would abandon all pretense of jokes and post an earnest statement, much like a politician would. But everybody that was reading their post already agreed with what they were saying anyway. This was the mid-2010s, the peak era of echo chambers on social media. So what was it that made comedians act this way? It was The Woke Sword of Damocles that hung over everyone’s head, ready to drop at a moment’s notice if you didn’t demonstrate the proper pieties. Nobody wanted to be the one person who didn’t post about social justice online.

I remember when Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people at an all black church in South Carolina, there was the usual round of sincerity posting done by comedians. I don’t mean to make light of a mass shooting, but what did these posts ultimately accomplish? What was the point? It was in this moment that the incomparable Nick Mullen (Who in my opinion is one of the funniest people on the planet) posted the following. It’s not available online anymore because his previous Twitter account was nuked by the old regime, but I remember it word for word because it was so perfect:

Guys, I’m going to say it. I’m going to be the only one brave and smart enough to say it.

The shooting was bad.

This has been another serious post brought to you by one of the good white guys.

Doesn’t that say it all? Doesn’t it lay bare the empty and performative nature of this specific kind of political theory, at least in the way it's practiced online? It has no true bearing on reality, it doesn’t change outcomes for any of the groups that it purports to help. It exists only as a social game, a pathway for status and acceptance

And look, I was guilty of this stuff too. Let he who has not posted a black square on Instagram cast the first stone. There have been times in my life where I was psyoped into aligning with prevailing leftist orthodoxy. The panopticon of New York comedian social media is a powerful one, especially when getting booked depends on how much other comics like you. But looking back it’s kind of wild that, culturally, we got in as deep as we did for so long. What was considered fringe in 2014 became compulsory by 2020. You could get in trouble at work for not vocally supporting these ideologies.

It looks like we’re starting to leave all that behind, thankfully. We probably did hit “Peak Woke” in 2020, and the wave is now receding. The Democrats lost the last election so badly that you now have 2028 DNC frontrunner Gavin Newsom hosting Steve Bannon on his podcast and saying biological men don’t belong in women’s sports. How unthinkable would that have been just a year ago? What’s next, Bronze Age Pervert stops by The View for a chat?

It also makes me wonder what “woke” and “cancel culture” even mean anymore now that the New Right is culturally ascendant. I mean, AOC took her pronouns out of her Twitter bio. Sweetgreen is advertising salads with high protein and no seed oils. The White Lotus, HBO’s flagship Sunday night show, just featured a five minute monologue about autogynephilia. After more than a decade of rule, the left’s cultural hegemony is over.

Some right wingers, including a handful of comedians, refuse to give up the ghost. Much like modern-day Colbert needs Trump as a constant villain because he has nothing meaningful or interesting to say on his own, so to do right wing comics need the specter of wokeism to rail against. It’s almost like they want some blue haired maniac out there attempting to defund the police just so they can complain about it. Without “You can’t say anything anymore!” they simply have nothing to say.

It’s time to move beyond all of that. The battle is over, and woke lost. I know there are still idiots out there setting Teslas on fire and drawing swastikas on Cybertrucks, but they’re starting to feel like the exception that proves the rule. The best antidote to the cultural insanity of the far left is not continuing to fight it but to look past it, to create an alternative so superior and convincing that no doubt remains as to what path society should take. Their side never had the numbers, they were just the loudest. Normal, everyday people don’t want anything to do with their ideology.

I agree with Substacker

Librarian of Celaeno

that what is needed now is “not a defense of what is but a renaissance of what can be, born of what has been and always is.” What that means to me is that we shouldn’t be fighting cultural battles based on the parameters set by the neoliberal order of the last 40 years. We should be aiming for something higher. By aligning ourselves with timeless virtues, instead of the constant back and forth pendulum swings of ressentiment, the Suey Parks of the world and what they stand for will become a distant cultural memory. If we stay down in the muck with these basket cases, we’ll eventually wind up right back in 2014, ready to get cancelled all over again.