Altercation: When the Right Cancels It, It Ain’t Cancel Culture

How’s a bigoted loon to know what’s good and what’s not these days?

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Here’s a tweet that’s gotten a lot of attention for its apparently unintentional risibility: “Update: CPAC [the Conservative Political Action Conference] has cancelled Young Pharaoh’s scheduled appearance following the publication of this article. Young Pharaoh’s information has also been removed from CPAC’s website. The theme of this year’s gathering is ‘America Uncancelled.’”

Thing is, it’s also important. What used to be called the “conservative movement” colonized the Republican Party and then was itself colonized by the Trump conspiracy-minded criminal syndicate. As such, it literally cannot handle the truth. Nor can the mainstream media handle its lies.

In this standoff, the liars almost always win. News networks and the journalists who inhabit them know they are being lied to, but they would rather stay on good terms with the Republicans than admit that lies are lies. Social media networks can barely even be bothered to pretend they care.

More from Eric Alterman

This “Young Pharaoh” fellow apparently tiptoed over the line when he called Judaism a “complete lie” and referred to “thieving fake Jews” (not everybody can be as subtle as Donald Trump). He had previously promoted the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories and falsely claimed that coronavirus vaccines will “alter your DNA.” But that was cool, especially as Tucker Carlson insists there is no such thing as a QAnon conspiracy, despite having had to fire a top staffer who consistently posted on the websites that traffic in it.

One can’t help feel just a little sorry for this Pharaoh dude. With McConnell and Trump at each other’s throats, it can be confusing even for the pros to figure out which lies and crazy conspiracy theories are the right ones to embrace and which will get you kicked out of CPAC. For instance, the same day as the CPAC tweet, the head of the entire affair, American Conservative Union chair Matt Schlapp, went on CNN to insist that the election had been stolen. “Just because you fail in court doesn’t mean you don’t have a good case,” he insisted, although 61 such losses without a single court victory really ought to. For its part, ABC News invited House Republican minority whip Steve Scalise on its Sunday show last week. They had to know he would lie about the election as he had every time he’d been asked about it in the past. And when he did, guest host Jon Karl literally thanked him before signing off.

To counter such travesties, many op-ed columnists are now advising cable and network news shows not to book people they know will lie about the election, since it cuts to the bone our democracy’s legitimacy and led directly to the deadly insurrection of January 6. There are two problems with this, however. First, it would signal a complete rejection of the networks’ standard practice of dealing with pathological Republican lying going back, well, quite far. (Need I point out, as I often do, that ex-Speaker and already certifiable crazy person Newt Gingrich was the single most booked guest on Meet the Press in 2009, the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, while then-actual Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not appear a single time?) Second, it would mean that no Republicans would be allowed on any real news network at all, as nothing upsets the network pooh-bahs more than confronting a lying politician about his or her lie with, you know, evidence and stuff. (We do not pretend that Fox is a news network here at Altercation.)

So the columnists’ advice is not going to be heeded; it’s bad for Q-ratings and future bookings and offers right-wing snowflakes more endless opportunities to work the refs by demanding that Democrats be given similar treatment, even though their lying constitutes a minuscule fraction of their Republican counterparts’. And so Republicans will continue to be invited to lie with only the gentlest pushback, leaving the rest of us to complain about it on social media, the trembling fate of democracy notwithstanding.

YOUNG PHARAOH WAS ALSO apparently upset about “all the censorship & pedophilia on social media [that] is being done by Israeli Jews,” as well as the fact that “all of these big tech [companies], media, & social media platforms are controlled by CCP [the Chinese Communist Party] & Israel through Jewish CEO & corrupt Democrats.” Should he like to get a better handle on this issue, I recommend that he take a look at the lengthy BuzzFeed News investigation of Facebook’s purposeful coddling of right-wing lies and conspiracy theories, under the explicit direction of Mark Zuckerberg.

In April 2019, BuzzFeed reported, Facebook was about to ban InfoWars founder Alex Jones when Mark Zuckerberg grew concerned. Of course, Jones was foaming that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” Yes, he was stirring up violent hatred against Muslims and trans people, and all this qualified him for expulsion from Facebook—but Zuckerberg liked having all of Jones’s followers there, clicking on Facebook ads and sharing his posts. So he changed the company’s rules and decided to allow Jones’s followers to share his lies with their own Facebook buddies just so long as they were not posted by Jones or InfoWars themselves. Zuckerberg also delayed efforts to get rid of groups like the Oath Keepers, who helped make the January 6 riot possible.

In such matters, Zuckerberg was advised by Facebook vice president Joel Kaplan, a former high-level Republican operative, who, according to one internal memo seen by BuzzFeed News, “regularly protects powerful constituencies.” The memo “listed several examples, including: removing penalties for misinformation from right-wing pages, blunting attempts to improve content quality in News Feed, and briefly blocking a proposal to stop recommending political groups ahead of the US election.” The piece also conveniently pulls together a long series of interventions by Kaplan and/or Zuckerberg on behalf of Trump and other Republican liars that have prevented Facebook from ever really coming to grips with lies, hate speech, and even Holocaust denial.

Facebook faces the same problem that the networks do. You can’t make money—at least, as much money as you would like to make—in the information economy if you don’t let crazy, dangerous, potentially violent right-wing liars and conspiracy mongers (that is, the core of the contemporary Republican Party) feel good about themselves. Zuckerberg and Kaplan are crying all the way to the bank (which they may well already own).

Will the president or Congress do something about Big Tech? Um, no, sorry. They will talk about it, which I suppose is not nothing. But while politicians like to complain about the people who carry their message to voters, they generally fear actually taking them on. When Elizabeth Warren called for breaking up Facebook, after all, Zuckerberg clearly implied that he was ready to deploy the power of the site as a weapon to “fight” what he called the “existential” threat her program presented.

IN MORE (LITERAL) BAD NEWS, The Objective—a terrific website of which I was previously unaware—offers a well-reported investigation of how “the Knight Foundation’s ties to far-right extremists undermine journalism’s future.” Knight is, as the article notes, “among the most powerful media institutions in the country and the 49th largest foundation in the world. Knight supports public media, newspapers, nonprofits, tech startups, museums, colleges, libraries, national media, and independent local news publishers.” As with Facebook, these ties are all the more important given the lack of a sustainable business model for most newspapers, their reliance on nonprofit help, and the ever-present threat of decimation from vulture-like Alden Global Capital, among others.

SPEAKING, YET AGAIN, of things that are risible, but also important, I need to make a few points about Michael Che’s joke about Israel on SNL’s “Weekend Update” last week. Both the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee are mightily upset. Also, this hysterical rant in Tablet was apparently not intended to be a parody. And neither was this typically awful Bret Stephens column, which complained about “cancel culture.” The Times’ worst columnist since Abe Rosenthal, whose hiring remains Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s greatest shame as publisher, kvetched instead about The New Yorker’s 2008 cover art of Barack and Michelle Obama giving each other a fist bump in the Oval Office. It was the “erasure” of this image—as best as I could tell from his atrocious prose—that Stephens was now demanding. OK, my points are these:

  • Che was telling a joke. You know, in the 2013 Pew survey of American Jewry, “having a good sense of humor” finished, at 42 percent, just one point below “caring about Israel” as the response to the question of what is most fundamental to one’s Jewish identity. Apparently the ADL and the AJC did not consult anyone from that 42 percent.
  • There are a great many more important issues regarding Israel-Palestine to worry about than Che’s joke. The young liberal Zionist Matan Arad-Neeman helps with a list of these on this thread.

Here’s a fine piece from +972 Magazine that explains the larger context of why this should matter. And on a related note, J Street, the New Israel Fund, and other progressive groups have sent a letter to Biden asking him to halt a Trump administration initiative to label settlement goods as “Made in Israel.”

Also, the below was apparently not a joke, care of Jewish Insider:

  • An exclusive AP report indicates that Israel has begun extensive construction near a facility in Dimona widely believed to be the site of its secretive nuclear program.
  • Satellite images of the site suggest the dig, “about the size of a soccer field,” began in early 2019, but Israeli officials, as expected, refused to comment to AP.
  • State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters yesterday that U.S. “patience is not unlimited” when it comes to engaging Iran on rejoining the nuclear deal.

Everything old is new again: The estimable former Prospect fellow Ezra Klein has a new podcast at The New York Times, in which he describes “A Radical Proposal for True Democracy” offered by Hélène Landemore, a political scientist at Yale, which Ezra presents in order “to expand the boundaries of our political and moral imaginations.” Ezra says, “She calls it “open democracy,” and the idea, as Ezra describes it, is that “we let groups of randomly selected citizens actually deliberate and govern. One in which we trust deliberation and diversity, not elections and political parties, to shape our ideas and to restrain our worst impulses.”

It’s a good idea, which is why I proposed something very much like it back in 1999, in my book Who Speaks for America?: Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy. I can’t say the idea was original to me. The political scientist James Fishkin had been working on it for quite a while and I borrowed from him (as well as, of course, from John Dewey). The book did not sell much and while it got some nice reviews from historians, most of those in the media did not credit the argument I made about the reasons for our democratic failures in order to mock the silliness of my proposal (which I made, I hasten to add, only to demonstrate how a genuinely democratically conceived foreign policy might actually operate if we ever decided we cared about the issue).

One of the most enthusiastic mockers was the reviewer selected by The New York Times Book Review, former Times political reporter Mark Uhlig. He labeled the proposal, which I included only in the book’s appendix, as a failure, because my alleged “treatment of the procedural shortcomings of American foreign policy inevitably takes on an aura of predestination, and his institutional analysis gives way to partisan exhortation.” Uhlig concluded that “in highlighting the chaos, conflict and rampant self-interest that characterize our system of government, Alterman is not so much arguing for democracy as describing it.”

Uhlig’s enthusiastic embrace of the foibles of America’s democratic practices are not looking so hot today, moments after we barely and perhaps temporarily escaped its destruction by Trump and company. I cannot help but add: The book is still in print, and I’m guessing there are quite a few copies still available for purchase. You can look it up.

Odds and ends: I would be remiss if I did not mention here two really terrific first novels I have been telling friends about. Trust me, whoever you are, on Danielle Evans’s The Office of Historical Corrections (which is actually short stories and a novella). As for David Hopen’s The Orchard: As with Levy’s rye bread, you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy and appreciate it, but it sure helps.

I was saddened to read this Axios report on the loss of so many jazz clubs during the pandemic.

If you caught the Independent Lens program Mr. SOUL! this week (and I imagine it will be rebroadcast on lots of local PBS stations over the weekend), you’ll be happy, as I was, to find that you can see the actual programs on Amazon Prime. I enjoyed the episode with Bill Withers and the McCoy Tyner Quartet, and plan to pick up with the two-part interview with James Baldwin and then Muhammed Ali, etc., as I go through it.

Here, for no particular reason, are:

The great Mr. Withers singing “Ain’t No Sunshine.”

And the star of Jeep commercials, podcasts, and ridiculous-but-dismissed New Jersey DWI arrests paying tribute to the also great Joe Strummer on “London Calling,” together with Steve Van Zandt, Elvis Costello, and Dave Grohl.

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