Rolling Stone has never been considered a serious journalistic establishment, but at the very least, they have been know in the past as “edgy” when dealing with the mainstream taboos of the 20th century.  It's hard to pretend like you're a revolutionary, though, when your side is now allied with power elite.  

This is a great conundrum these days for the political left, which has long prided itself on the liberal roots of the 1960s hippie movement, rock n' roll, drug culture and comedy that seeks to offend.  The leftist fold spent decades thinking they were “fighting against the man” and now they find that with the help of corporations, globalist think-tanks and government leaders, they ARE the man.  

Though the woke left represents a small minority within America, they still have the backing of every major center of influence imaginable.  The Democratic Party fast-tracks their agenda and many moderate Democrats go along to get along for fear of being ostracized (canceled).  And what has the woke movement done with this newfound power?  They have gone insane, abusing it in a frothing fervor of rage, fear, envy and desire, just like any despot would.  

In the meantime, leftists continue to act as if they are still fighting a revolution against an unseen and ambiguous “patriarchy” that is supposedly holding them down.  They are willing to do anything, including lie, cheat, steal, disrupt and sabotage to gain absolute control and they feel exonerated because they insist they are being “oppressed.”  Good luck finding actual concrete examples of this oppression, however.

Rolling Stone, a property of Penske Media Corporation, is the latest in a long line of corporate spin doctors to publish materials justifying cancel culture and the exploitation of mob power to assert dominance over the public.  In a recent article titled 'Why Cancel Culture Is Good For Democracy' the magazine launches into a tirade of victimhood, a tall tale in which millions of oppressed people turn to cancel culture as their only defense against a society of white supremacists bent on holding them down.  It's utter nonsense, and here's why:

The political left uses the word “democracy” often and they do this quite deliberately.  The America they envision in the future is a pure democracy, and democracy is based on mob rule.  This is not how our nation was founded.  As James Madison noted:

“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.”

And as Alexander Hamilton stated:

“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”

America was founded as a Republic, not a democracy, which means individual liberties are supposed to be protected  regardless of what the majority says.  This is not how the left understands governance, though.  They obsess over garnering a majority vote or a majority opinion even if they have to fabricate it through fraud.  They do this because they actually believe that 51% of the population should have control over the other 49%. This is tyranny by the mob. 

Cancel culture is an exact expression of this dynamic.  Rolling Stone is right when they say "cancel culture is good for democracy", it's just not good for freedom or for America. 

Rolling Stone notes: 

“...Straight white men and other people with power aren’t used to getting pushback for the ways they conduct themselves—and cancel culture has reset the ways society can react. Those who fear cancel culture may claim they fear suppression of speech, but it’s accountability that they want to avoid.”

But who gets to determine accountability?  This argument is an extension of the old leftist claim that cancel culture is just the “free market” determining what behavior is acceptable in society.  But whose “society” are we talking about?  Because at least half the country has something different to say about what is acceptable and who should really be held accountable.

It's hard to tell if leftists are too stupid to understand how real free markets work or if they are deliberately misrepresenting the concept.  In a free market, you are welcome to take your money and your interest elsewhere if a company or individual offends you.  You are not welcome to shut them down and silence them in order to stop them from interacting with the people who are interested. Leftists don't just want to walk away from the people who offend them, they also want the ability to stop everyone else from engaging with a canceled person.  They don't want to take their ball and go home, they want to drop napalm on the entire playground.      

Rolling Stone's contributors and people like them have declared themselves the arbiters of society and the dictators of what constitutes “bigotry” and “hate.”  No one gave them permission to take on this role, they merely pronounced that they would be the ultimate purveyors of speech.  They anointed themselves the thought police because, as Rolling Stone's article laments, government is not yet doing it for them:

“Right now, bigots are protected under the First Amendment to fuel disgusting rhetoric without state-sanctioned consequence. The America that tolerated white supremacy in their policies and laws is the same country that wants to remind us how such forms of hate are still legal via free speech. Cancel culture is the poison to those in power that have benefited from unchecked free speech.”

What the political left has done is conjure up a Trojan horse to deliver authoritarianism in the form of victim group entitlement.  They assert that there are simply certain things you cannot say or do because they hurt the feelings of specific designated groups and diminish their "equity."  Who chooses this list of taboos?  They do.  Who chooses the groups that get protection from offense?  They do.  And each year the list grows longer.

Cancel culture is a methodology very similar to what Josef Stalin applied during his “Great Purge”.  The concept of mass shunning and un-personing was integral to the Marxist/Communist dynamic as a means to frighten individuals into conformity.  You might be able to think whatever you want privately, but if you even whisper against the collective, the power elites and the gatekeepers could swiftly mobilize their mindless drones to attack you or to cut you off from access to the economy.  You face possible death, and the communists pretend as if they are acting on the values of freedom of association.

In other words, the cancel culture mob believes they should have the “freedom” to destroy your access to society, thus destroying your freedoms in the process.  They can technically say that they're not censoring people's speech because they aren't putting you in prison or holding a gun to your head (yet), but you risk the destruction of your future if you speak up.  This insidious dynamic obviously leads to self censorship.  Not only that, but the population is also weaponized against each other, for if a person does not support the cancellation of a designated enemy, they might be labeled an enemy.

The big lie at the core of the Rolling Stone article's premise is that cancel culture is about giving the common citizen a means to hold the powerful accountable, but this does not happen.  Powerful corporations, globalist think tanks, politicians and money elites all engage in corruption and criminality daily with impunity and leftists don't blink an eye.  The only people who get canceled are people who question the woke ideology.  

Cancel culture is not about “justice,” it's about revenge and sterilization.  It's about making an example of the left's political enemies.  The purpose is to erase oppositional thinking and speech and inoculate future generations from considering contrary views. 

Rolling Stone gaslights its own readers with the claim that cancel culture serves to fight against oppression...by enabling the mob to oppress:

“The fact that people—both powerful and less so—have been put on notice that whatever move they make can now be checked, not only by the courts, law enforcement, or government but by the people, means cancel culture has essentially won the cultural wars. Although still rich and influential, the most powerful have now been humbled by the digital accessibility of everyday people whom they once could simply dismiss or silence.”

This is a delusional conclusion because it overlooks an important factor – Cancel culture is nothing without the support of the same powerful people leftists say they are fighting against.  They have influence because Big Tech conglomerates are mostly run by globalists that see leftists as useful fodder for attacking conservatives.  As we have witnessed with social media sites like Twitter, leftist power was throttled as soon as the old management (that worked closely with the government) was removed.  The fight has to be one-sided for the mob to gain an advantage because they cannot compete on a balanced battlefield of ideas.    

The only way for cancel culture to survive is if all power centers and all major communications networks like social media are controlled and rigged in favor of the political left.  And who is almost universally targeted by social media for cancellation?  Regular conservatives and anyone else that defies the woke cult.  The release of the Twitter Files confirmed this beyond a shadow of a doubt.            

Cancel culture is not concerned with the powerful, they are concerned with the free thinkers, the skeptics that don't bow to the whims of zealots.  It's not civic engagement and it's not protest, it's a tiny minority of degenerates and narcissists using the internet to manufacture consensus and consent. It's about innocent people being afraid of losing their job, their livelihood and their reputation because they said something against the high priests of social justice.

In reality, the influence of cancel culture is diminishing as the public grows irritated and tired of perpetually entitled and outraged leftists.  They have become an international joke.  This is why the woke movement tried to deny the existence of cancel culture for a time; it was making them look bad and they knew it.  Now, Rolling Stone's commentators suggest that the political left embrace cancel culture and own it proudly.  It's an act of desperation for an exposed ideology.  The only thing keeping the woke alive is their alliance with corrupt corporations and establishment elites – we will see how far that really gets them in the long run.  

As history shows us, when the elites are done with useful idiots, they tend to do away with them quickly.