Right wing hypocrisy on cancel culture
If you defend vulgarity from the Right, you do not get to clutch your pearls about vulgarity from the Left.
When Sam Kuffel ranted on social media about Elon Musk's awkward stiff-arm gesture at President Trump's inauguration, she was targeted by some on the Right. Her employer then fired her from her job as a television meteorologist.
My favorite justification for targeting Kuffel was the "vulgarity" in her posts. I do not approve of dropping the F-Bomb on social media, but the Right has increasingly embraced vulgarity since 2015. It is difficult for me to take this objection seriously from people who have had few or no objections to the vulgarity of President Trump and much of the "new right." If you defend vulgarity from the Right, you do not get to clutch your pearls about vulgarity from the Left. This, of course, is one reason conservatives never should have abandoned that standard.
But that's a smaller example of the larger hypocrisy in this story. Conservatives have (correctly!) railed against "cancel culture" and political correctness for the past 40 years. We have mocked Leftists for changing words or even censoring history to spare someone's feelings. But when someone on the Left says some mean words about one of "our guys," some conservatives cannot wait to see that person professionally punished.
Yes, a private company can do what they want. But if we truly do believe in a culture of free speech and the principle that the free exchange of ideas brings the best solutions, we should not cheer the professional destruction of our political "enemies" - especially a young woman no one had ever heard of before some ill-advised comments on social media made her into a national figure. We have an opportunity with the cultural backlash against wokeism that we should not squander with shameless hypocrisy.
