The Real Purpose of 'Cancel Culture'

A culture is far deeper than politics. It's a national identity encompassing history, education, arts and entertainment, science, health, relationships ... everything constituting the core values of any country.

Individualism has traditionally been the common denominator anchoring all other aspects of America's cultural distinctiveness. Valuing sovereignty of the individual makes American culture exceptional; therefore, "Cancel Culture" warrants attention.

It is understood that "cancelling" individuals, books, monuments, etc. is a form of banishment because they express something objectionable or offensive. Objectionable or offensive to whom follows, but let's now focus on the "culture" part. In essence, cancelling someone or something means erasing behavior or beliefs which really means erasing ideas.

Remember Barack Obama's 2008 Obama-Biden-ticket presidential campaign statement, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming [basically changing] the United States of America."

Now, President Biden's continuation of "transforming" America also includes "cancelling" ideas. So: America is "basically changing" into what, and who's doing the transforming and cancelling? What seems to be a "re-imagination" of an idyllic Utopia, and the transforming-cancelling is effectuated by the socially agitated and politically aggressive "Woke." *

Utopia has meant different idyllic "places" for different purposes. Sir Thomas Moore first coined the term (as a pun) by taking the Greek ou-topos — "no place" — and combining it with eu-topos — "a good place." So, ironically, Utopia means that in reality a good place is nowhere.

Marx sold communism as a workers' Utopia. Hitler sold fascism as Aryan Utopia. Today's power-players are selling socialism as nondiscriminatory, non-merit-oriented, equity-for-all Utopia.

Of course, we know from the Bible's Garden of Eden story that even Adam and Eve's idyllic Utopia vanished once their real human nature (free will) was activated by exercising choice (eating the apple) and gaining knowledge (carnal sex and the existential world).

Communism, fascism, and socialism differ in name only. In practice they are identical because they all are collectivist social systems powered by an "elite" who control the economy, the means of production, and the cultural zeitgeist.

But since outright communism (Russia) and fascism (Germany) failed, the largest socialist organization in the United States — the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — has to be more inventive in selling their brand of collectivism. The organization is a member of Socialists International which reveals global aspirations, but its name cleverly obscures the presently active but hidden agenda for America.

From the DSA's official website (operative words in bold):

We [Democratic Socialists] are socialists because we share a vision of a humane international social order based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms to achieve equitable distribution of resources, meaningful work, a healthy environment, sustainable growth, gender and racial equality, and non-oppressive relationships.

Translation: voters put us in power (democratic), but we share a vision to control globalized planning, execution of production, and distribution of goods; we define "meaningful"; we decide what is healthy and sustainable; we demand preferences for those we decide need "equality" (we define equality); and we decide who is oppressing whom.

Who now paves the way and keeps the socialists in power? The "Woke" and the implementation of "cancelling" America's culture of individualism. Woke activists find or create what can be sold to an ignorant/apathetic/indoctrinated public as racial-social discrimination or injustices while encouraging certain fabricated-into-group-members to become victims and assuring that others of different fabricated-into-group-members are made to feel guilty about the victimization.

"Cancelling" activists are silencing opposition to the Woke's claims. To facilitate cancelling, Political Correctness is employed to make the task easier by forbidding "incorrect" — free — speech, thus preventing as many independent thinkers as possible from actually saying anything "objectionable or offensive" on threat of cancelation.

Self-muzzling individuals who swallow the poison pill of Political Correctness (coated with sweet promises of Utopia to cover the venom) make the cancellers' job even easier. There has never been nor will there ever be a dictatorship that does not crush dissent one way or another.

Ergo: The real purpose of "Cancel Culture" is to obliterate the fundamental values of advanced civilization — liberty, individualism, and reason. Because of America's prominence, to accomplish that global goal this country's entire culture of individualism must be destroyed first, meaning everything from language to eating habits.

Collectivist elites are writing new scripts to old playbooks, directing the current show, and working their prestidigitation behind a curtain that now encircles the globe to surround what has become theater-in-the-round. Here are a few of them:

The first two are the biggest stars in the Democratic Socialist galaxy. Barack Obama — A Saul-Alinsky-community-activist-political-heir. His publically acknowledged mentor? Frank Marshall Davis, a card carrying communist. Bernie Sanders — "I don't mind people ... calling me a communist."

Joe Biden—a self inflated-lecturing-opportunistic front for functional elites like Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. Harris (America's next president!) is daughter of a Marxist professor, talks the collectivist talk — Medicare for all — and raised bail for looting rioters.

Buttigieg? An active socialist since a teenager. His Marxist-scholar father? A devotee of Antonio Gramsci who wrote, "Karl Marx is for us a master of spiritual and moral life ... He is the stimulator of mental laziness, the arouser of good energies which slumber and which must wake up for the good fight."** How's that for "Woke"?

The true-targeted-non-fabricated victims of all this? American culture and the sovereignty of each individual who inherited it from thinkers who understood human flourishing to be served by individual exercise of free will, rational personal choices, and factual knowledge in this here-on-earth real world instead of an existing-nowhere utopian world peddled by wannabe tyrants.

Americans needing to wake up are not the Woke. They are. . .Who? Look around, near as well as far.

* Must-read companion books: George Orwell's "1984" is a brilliant (and chilling) fictional tale of the future endgame for tyrants everywhere. Evan Sayet's "The Woke Supremacy" is a brilliant (and chilling) examination of America's current real-life fast-step march to reach the endgame of tyranny here and now.

** Il Grido del Popolo, 4 May 1918

Alexandra York is an author and founding president of the American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART) a New-York-City-based nonprofit educational arts and culture foundation (www.art-21.org). She has written for many publications, including "Reader's Digest" and The New York Times. Her latest book is "Soul Celebrations and Spiritual Snacks." Read Alexandra York's Reports — More Here.