Vladimir Putin had a very pointed way of summing up the international efforts to sanction his country for its invasion of Ukraine. It’s all an attempt, he said Friday, to “cancel” Russia.
In a speech for a literature awards ceremony, the Russian president struck chords that seemed to have been lifted from American conservative punditry, griping about “cancellation,” a favored culture-war term that has gained traction in recent years.
“Not so long ago, they canceled children’s author [J.K.] Rowling whose books were spread all over the world in the hundreds of millions of copies, because she did not please fans of so-called gender freedoms,” Putin said. “Today they are trying to abolish an entire thousand-year-old country, our people.”
Rowling, the British creator of the Harry Potter juggernaut, has lately courted controversy with her musings on transgender and same-sex politics, but she had no interest in Putin’s attempt to cast himself as a sympathetic ally.
“Critiques of Western cancel culture are possibly not best made by those currently slaughtering civilians for the crime of resistance, or who jail and poison their critics,” she replied on Twitter.
The notion of getting “canceled” — which began life as a Black-culture punchline before it transformed into a White-grievance watchword — has become a central storyline in right-wing media’s ongoing culture wars. The general premise is that criticism or public shaming of a person for saying certain things or alleged bad behavior is tantamount to censorship and erasure.
While entertainers and politicians on the left have also lamented “cancel culture,” conservative media frequently depicts it as a pervasive sickness threatening to undermine American values — and it’s turned into a major area of coverage.
Since Jan. 1, the phrase “cancel culture” has been uttered 366 times on Fox News programs, according to a Washington Post review of television mentions. The phrase was used 2,181 on Fox News programs in 2021.
Fox News’s website has an entire section devoted to it, boasting that “Fox News is your source for cancel culture coverage, as the fear of being 'canceled’ due to unpopular political or cultural opinions, viral Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or TikTok videos, sweeps the country.” Dan Bongino, who hosts a daily radio show and anchors a Saturday night show on Fox News, is now also the star of a show on the streaming service Fox Nation called “Canceled in the USA.”