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The Political Apology-Cancellation Game
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The “Apology-Cancellation Game” has long been one of the American political left’s favorite indoor sports – one that is increasingly dominating our political discourse in the wake of Trump committing the “crime” of nominating political conservative hard-liners to important cabinet positions.
You only have to look at what they’re doing to Pete Hegseth over a totally bogus rape allegation from nearly a decade ago to see that the Apology-Cancellation game is alive and well. Here it is, along with what you can do about it if you become the target.
Here is how the game’s played. A progressive liberal who has access to CNN, MSNBC or one of the online progressive platforms, will look at something a conservative has done or said and choose to take “public offense.”
In truth, there is no offense – this is a game, not reality. Besides, progressive liberals are way too cynical to be truly offended. However, they are skilled at making something appear to be offensive, then call “foul,” loudly and publicly. Immediately, other progressive pundits will jump on the bandwagon by openly demanding an apology.
The target, almost always innocent and generally unaware that something he or she said or did might prove offensive to anybody. Sure, there are people who will not like what they said or did, but offended?
Really?
The groundswell from the far left will grow into a thundering chorus of me-tooist fellow travelers. Eventually, the conservative will want to end the game by giving in to the demand for an apology. However, that apology will never be “right” or “acceptable.”
Just how is this game played? This game has been around for a while, though it’s been refined for 2025.
Ross Perot gave a speech before the NAACP in his 2012 campaign, and in that speech he referred to “your people,” clearly meaning the black Americans that the NAACP claims to represent. The predictable progressive left cried foul, loudly and in all the left-leaning mainstream news media. It became so bad that Perot, who’d done nothing wrong, bowed to the pressure and apologized.
Shortly thereafter, he closed down the campaign – I know, because I was his “Media and Strategy” director for his campaign in the state of Nevada. Within a week of the apology, he was out of the race. He later came to his senses and tried to revitalize his campaign, but it didn’t work. He did hand the election to Clinton, but before the NAACP debacle, he had the potential to actually win. He was a long-shot, but he wasn’t completely out of the question. So yeah, this has been around for a long time.
Twenty years later, in 2012, this game was again rampant. Mitt Romney lost in a landslide, though the pre-election polls suggested it would be a tight race (apparently to keep ratings up).
Suddenly, the progressive left realized they had real power and wanted to use it. Everything a conservative said or did that might even remotely offend a far leftist was pilloried in the public news media – which was all far left of center, with the exception of Fox, the New York Post and the Washington Examiner – and in the social media of the day.
Today, the stakes are different, but the tactics are the same.
The progressive left, and especially the advocates of everything “woke,” lost the 2024 election in a landslide. They wound up looking like they had no power. Trump not only won the White House, his party also won the Senate and the House, a hat trick in Washington.
When Trump then nominated some legitimate hard-core conservatives to cabinet posts, the progressives immediately began playing the Apology-Cancellation Game, not because they have power, but because they want power.
The demands for a better apology will come along in due course. Then, the conservative who apparently “offended” some one person or more likely, some class of people, has a choice.
Tell them that what they got is what they’ll get, period. Or, recant the apology and invite the progressive liberals to put his reply where the sun isn’t expected to shine today. If the conservative offers a new apology, which will also not be acceptable, the game goes on.
If the conservative refuses to play, or drops out of the game, it’s time for cancellation.
This threat is still real, but it was a lot more powerful before Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and fired eighty percent of the employees – mostly the “gatekeepers” who did their best to deny true conservatives a shot at having a voice on Twitter. But the far left can still “cancel” somebody on the left-leaning media, both the legacy media and especially the social media.
Which is why I prefer a different approach.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/the_political_apology_cancellation_game.html
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Matt Gaetz was the first target. However, rather than play the game, when he saw that the RINO minority in the Senate was willing to play ball with the progressive left, he did the honorable thing and withdrew from consideration before he caused Trump any heartburn over the nomination. This allowed Trump to nominate Pam Bondi, a conservative, constitutionalist prosecutor and former Florda Attorney General, who is – like Matt Gaetz – very conservative, but without the potential baggage Gaetz had.
An unexpected-but-welcome win-win for Trump.
While the mainstream media remains willing to play this destructive game, the progressive left has turned more and more toward social media. While they have no monopoly on social media – especially among Podcasters, who seem to have real power in 2024 – woke progressives know how to get on far-left podcasts, then leverage those appearances with the far left news media: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and of course the fast-dying MSNBC and CNN. This is where they are best at venting their vile spleens, and the Apology-Cancellation Game is one way of doing it.
Here’s a painfully classic example of how the Apology-Cancellation Game is played. Some Republican bimbo, back in 2018, after a consensual hookup, when caught by her husband made an unsubstantiated charge of rape against Pete Hegseth. Her claim had no merit, and many witnesses were ready to debunk her charges, and probably involving the date rape drug Rohypnol. However, evidence and witnesses debunked her claim of rape and date-rape drugs. The charge – and the bimbo – went away. And stayed away until Pete was nominated for DOD head, in which case it was dusted off and fed to the credulous news media, who ran the charges but not the facts.
There is ample evidence to disprove all of this, (see Megyn Kelly’s comprehensive shredding of the bogus charges: Ep. 951 Deep Dive: Megyn Breaks Down the Pete Hegseth Police Report and Holes in Accuser’s Story – Megyn Kelly) but the progressive media has chosen to only go with the charges, not with the evidence. This is still playing out, and I hope Pete holds back on any unnecessary and unwarranted apologies. His fate depends on whether the Senate will prefer the facts or the allegations.
There is nothing new about the Apology-Cancellation Game. Yet time and again, conservatives buckle under to the demands of those who are “offended” and respond to the media as if they were actually guilty of something. If you’re ever in that position, either ignore the charges entirely, or present the facts, then move on with your life.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/the_political_apology_cancellation_game.html
The Wrong People, Doing the Right Things, Regarding Trans Ideology
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On November 19, House Speaker Mike Johnson was met by an eager press to get a statement on a resolution by Rep. Nancy Mace that would require gender-specific Capitol and House facilities to be used only by those of the corresponding biological sex.
Mace brought this resolution forward in response to the election of a representative from Delaware named Tim McBride, who now goes by the name of Sarah while pretending to be a woman.
A reporter asked Johnson a simple question as to whether freshman-elect Sarah McBride is a man or a woman.
“Look, I’m not going to get into this,” he said, smirking as if the question was of no importance at all. New members will be welcomed, he assured the reporters, and everyone would be “treated with dignity and respect.”
“I’m not going to get into silly debates about this,” he continued.
For the last five to ten years, a Republican could easily have gotten away with a non-answer like that while insulting the bulk of his constituents who happen to think this particular debate is important. After all, given that there has been a social crusade against the broad majority of Americans who recognize the simple truth that a man cannot become a woman because he puts on a dress and pretends to be one, most Republicans today aren’t willing to accept that kind of dithering to such a simple and fundamental question.
Within a few hours, after being excoriated on social media for his cowardice, Johnson conveniently found a microphone to proclaim loudly to the press that his perceived waffling was due to his having “rejected the premise” of the question, given that “the answer is so obvious.”
“Let me be unequivocally clear,” he said, “a man is a man, and a woman is a woman. And a man cannot become a woman.”
Johnson finally got the memo from the American public, and he did the right thing. He openly and clearly advocated for the truth, even though it would have violated every politically correct instinct that he would have had in the past decade to say what he finally said.
Mike Johnson was forced into this position by Nancy Mace, who has newly fashioned herself as a firebrand in the transgender debate. But she wasn’t always so committed to the truth in regard to this issue.
A little more than a year ago, she fashioned herself as a “pro-transgender rights” politician. You might be wondering what that means, considering that “transgender” people are clearly afforded all the same rights as other Americans under the Constitution and American law. What she meant at the time, according to her, was that:
If [children] wanna take on a different pronoun or a different gender identity or grow their hair out, or wear a dress or wear pants, or do those things as a minor – those are all things that most people would support…
They may decide as an adult, ‘Hey, instead of Johnny, I want to be Jill,’ – that’s OK, but let them figure that out and make that decision when they can consent.
Well, Tim McBride has decided to become Sarah McBride, and Nancy Mace suddenly isn’t comfortable with that arrangement of trans people just “figuring it out,” even well beyond the age of consent, when it comes to which bathroom he should be welcome to use.
What happened with these two politicians? Did they suddenly grow a spine and determine that speaking truth and doing the right thing was more important than toeing that line between placating the woke mob and angering normal, everyday Americans who can plainly see the truth, and don’t appreciate being gaslighted on this subject?
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/the_wrong_people_doing_the_right_things_regarding_trans_ideology.html
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I don’t think so. Rather, I think that Milton Friedman presaged the phenomenon we are witnessing back in 1975:
I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.
In other words, Mike Johnson and Nancy Mace are the wrong people who are doing the right thing, because we have created a culture in which it is politically expedient for them to do the right thing, and costly for them to do the wrong thing.
They want to be seen as courageous and important heroes, as all politicians do. But we should know better. The courageous heroes on this matter are those who advocated the truth, even when it was unpopular to do so.
The heroes are men like Matt Walsh, whose documentary “What is a Woman?” earned him countless death threats by trans activists against him and his family, but with that risk came the most important documentary yet-produced to expose the ridiculous farce that is trans ideology.
The heroes are women like Riley Gaines, the elite collegiate swimmer whom the trans mob wanted to silence as she was asked to share accolades with a man named Will Thomas as he pretended to be a woman, and who spoke on behalf of many other women who were having opportunities and accolades stolen from them by other men pretending to be women. She was relentlessly vilified by the woke mob to the point that she feared for her life, but her courage emboldened the millions of Americans who recognized that she advocated the truth.
These are just two examples, and there are countless more examples of Americans who courageously took a stand against this insane social experiment where the public is simply meant to accept that men can actually become women by pretending to be women, or vice versa.
Perhaps the most recent example of such heroes are those teams boycotting the San Jose State volleyball team for its decision to allow a man, who pretends to be a woman, to compete against female athletes.
Those women, along with their coaches and staff, and the institutions that they represent are all heroes who continue to shape the culture by standing up for the truth.
Mike Johnson and Nancy Mace, on the other hand, are not heroes. They’re just doing what they’ve always done, which is what’s good for them as politicians. And while I’m happy that a cultural movement has developed in which what is good for them and what is true and good for the American people happen to coincide, we should be realistic about what is driving them.
And what seems to be driving many politicians now, all advocates of the truth should be happy to hear, is us.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/the_wrong_people_doing_the_right_things_regarding_trans_ideology.html
The ‘Woke’ Awakening
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It is as though America has suddenly woken up from a bad dream—ironically and perhaps appropriately, the opposite of “going woke.” The list of companies and individuals dialing back from and/or disavowing DEI- and CRT-related initiatives has taken a sharp uptick. Walmart is the largest of the recent companies joining the list, and even Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has quietly and without explanation removed her pronouns from her X biography. We also see a growing number of women athletes finding their voices in protesting biological males in their locker rooms, showers, and competitions.
Now, with President Trump’s decisive victory, it is as though a once-silent majority feels unmuzzled with regard to DEI and CRT. Finally, they can say that the emperor has no clothes. People feel free to call these preposterous and racist philosophies what they really are—hokum. They are warmed-over Marxism with race, gender, and sexual identification substituting for social class for purposes of establishing the oppressed and oppressors and creating maximum chaos.
We are now beginning to see results that counter years of the unquestioned brilliance of “wokeism.” We are seeing that these disastrous policies have promoted precisely the opposite of what they purported to oppose—discrimination, racism, hatred, injustice, and lower quality.
Nowhere is this on greater display than in our military. DEI/CRT policies have devastated recruitment, savaged morale, dramatically reduced our war-fighting readiness, and put our national security in danger. The Heritage Foundation—which conducts one of the only comprehensive, non-governmental assessments of our military readiness—for the first time provided an overall rating for 2024 of “weak,” down from “marginal” in 2023.
One of the most touted studies by DEI/CRT charlatans over the last decade was a 2015 study by McKinsey & Company, which claimed to have found a link between company profitability and the numbers of executive women and minority personnel. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the inability of accounting professors John Hand and Jeremiah Green to replicate McKinsey’s results and claims. The authors concluded,
Combined with the erroneous reverse-causality nature of McKinsey’s tests, our inability to quasi-replicate their results suggests that despite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.
McKinsey felt compelled to respond, pointing out that it had never claimed a causal relationship, only a correlation, and pointing out that those are quite different. Very true, but as the WSJ rightly observed, McKinsey behaved as if there were indeed a causal relationship, frequently referring to the “benefits of diversity” as if that fact were well established. And of course, McKinsey never stopped Democrat Representative Jasmine Crockett from citing the flawed study yet again earlier this month as a reason to oppose the Republican “Dismantle DEI” bill.
Other research shows that DEI policies may actually increase hostility and racial bias. The New York Times conducted an extensive review of the University of Michigan’s DEI program. It is the largest university DEI effort to date—with some $250m of expenditures and more than 200 DEI-focused personnel.
Reviewing the extensive student and faculty survey results, the conclusion was that the program utterly backfired. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics than before the DEI program began, Black student enrollment did not increase as hoped and remained stagnant at about 5%, and students and faculty alike reported that the campus climate was actually worse after implementation of the program.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/the_woke_awakening.html
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While the seemingly new woke awakening is encouraging, the DEI/CRT leviathan is far from dead. The seeds of its beginning were in the universities, and that will likely be the last stronghold to give up the fight. In that educational arena, you will likely see the shape-shifting process for the next flavor of Marxism incubating as the leftists experiment with what concepts can find purchase.
For example, the University of Maryland just introduced an “Intro to Fat Studies” course. The three-credit course will supposedly focus on “fatness as an area of human difference subject to privilege and discrimination that intersects with other systems of oppression based on gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and ability.” Get it? Fat people are the oppressed; average-sized people are the oppressors. Sound familiar?
So, what’s next? Perhaps an “Intro to Ugly Studies”—focusing on how less attractive people are discriminated against in everything from social interactions to home loans to employment to rewards. Or “Understanding the Privileges of Competence”—focusing on how skilled people have an unfair advantage in all dimensions of life just because they happened to have developed a particular skill in plumbing, medicine, soccer, etc. Or “Intro to Oppression of the Un-Brilliant”—focusing on how people of average intelligence or less are severely oppressed by the intelligent class snobs.
You get the idea. The Marxists never gave up—no matter how thoroughly their ideas were debunked in practice—and they likely never will. They will perpetually find some other flavor of oppressors and oppressed. The goal will be the same as with all other Marxist-based initiatives—create resentment, division, chaos, anger, and ultimately revolution. But if we remain highly vigilant and persistent, we can defeat them—just as we always have.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/the_woke_awakening.html