Make This Guy Governor Of Virginia And He Will Stop ALL The Cancel Culture

Because that's something an elected official can do.

One of the reasons not-especially-swift people cited to explain their support for Donald Trump was that they were sick and tired of their friends and relatives calling them bigots on Facebook just for saying bigoted things on Facebook. Alas, during his whole time in office, he not only didn't do one single executive order forcing people to think more highly of his followers, he likely pushed those friends and relatives to think even less of them than they did before.

Some might say it would be impossible for anyone to legislate something like that, or to legislate away what Republicans call "cancel culture" — the nefarious practice of people not liking someone anymore based on a thing they have done or said. But Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Kirk Cox hopes to change that. As we can see from this campaign ad, he is running on a platform of putting a stop to cancel culture so that we may all hear the great ideas being silenced by it.

The silencing and shaming has gone too far. In order for our representative democracy to work, we have to be able t… https: //t.co/WTmTKmyZyg

— Kirk Cox (@Kirk Cox) 1613340001.0 

He says:

"There's been so much silencing and shaming because of cancel culture. It's gone too far. We can't even have a competition of ideas, and for a representative democracy to work, you have to have that. The left simply cannot be allowed to ignore other opinions, so I as governor will not stand for that."

We already have a competition of ideas. It's just that usually, in competitions, someone loses . And sometimes that person is going to be the person who comes up with an "idea" that dismisses the seriousness of the Holocaust , or the "idea" that people deserve fewer rights because they are gay or trans or a woman or a person of color or a non-Christian or all those things at once, or the "idea" that someone in the year 2018 could not possibly have known that going to an antebellum-themed party at a former slave plantation was in bad taste. No one feels they are losing out by not considering those ideas.

Perhaps Cox would like to give an example of a great idea we are missing out on due to this cancel culture. People making such claims never seem to get that far. Is the bigotry just a pre-show for these ideas and we have to sit through it to get to them?

Also why can't the left ignore the opinions of the right? Are they special? I don't see anyone on the right talking about how they need to listen to us! Mostly I hear them talking about how we are evil baby-eating Satanists. Is that one of the great ideas that needs to be exchanged more?

How would Cox legislate this, I wonder? How will he "fight back?" If the "left cannot be allowed to not listen to other opinions," how is he going to force them to? Will there be mandatory viewings of Tucker Carlson every night? What about the "reeducation camps" Republicans are always claiming we want to send them to? Will that be considered?

All of this "Oh no, cancel culture!" stuff is just the same "culture war" stuff conservatives have been crying about since before any of us were even born, repackaged. Conservatives feel they should control the culture and the zeitgeist, and the fact is, they usually don't. They're usually behind a few steps, if not fifty. It's just that this time instead of screaming about "family values" they're trying to hep it up by complaining they are being censored. Why? Because they know that historically, their attempts at censorship have not gone over well, and they always end up looking extremely uncool. They are hoping that by using this tack, they can make the left look uncool for once.

But this isn't "censorship." It's "sometimes things you like go out of style and if you stick with them, you look foolish." I don't need to listen to right-wing opinions any more than I need to sit through a YouTube tutorial on mall bangs. I know what they are and I know I don't want them.

That Cox is running on something he can't actually legislate rather than some kind of policy that might actually help people or some other great idea -- something that might make us say, "Wow, what OTHER great ideas are we missing out on by so cruelly not listening to people who say extremely insulting things all the time?" -- is all the proof we need that these secret great ideas do not actually exist.

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