White supremacy is the original cancel culture

John Kass’ column on June 26, “One wrong ‘like’ will get you canceled by cancel culture,” suffers from both a narrow and short view of history.

Kass cites Joe McCarthy’s right-wing assault on speech and ideas. He needs one such example to balance a column that lingers over the repeated transgressions by “the new thought police” who routinely attack liberals and conservatives alike, but “praise Black Lives Matter” and “appreciate antifa.”

This is thin stuff, but it might have been strengthened if Kass had dug a little deeper into the history and roots of “cancel culture.” What, after all, would you call centuries of attacks against Native Americans, betraying treaties, uprooting them from tribal homelands, forcing them into schools run by the Interior Department and prohibiting them from speaking their tribal language? A long running episode of “cancel culture” initiated and sustained by Euro-Americans?

Or consider, perhaps, the reasons why there is a moment and a movement in which Black Lives Matter very much. Is it too much to suggest that such a movement grows in response to 400 hundred years of “cancel culture?”

One other long view might help here. In the Red Scare and the witch hunts of the ‘40s and ‘50s, in which Joe McCarthy played only a short and fleeting role, university presidents, corporate CEOs and, even, panicked union bosses, fired or denied employment to tens of thousands of people. But it would appear that Kass is quite willing to “cancel” thoughtful consideration of that history.