But then again, courage is contagious too. I won’t surrender, not to the mob, not to the Chinese, and certainly not to the press. But everything in politics now is about trying to bring you to your knees. Once you are on your knees, you never get to stand tall again. You’re done. And everyone knows it.
Twitter “labeled” one of my tweets for “glorifying violence.” I explicitly and frequently speak against political violence in America. What did I tweet? That following the designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization by the Department of Justice, I hoped we would hunt them down with all the vigor with which we prosecuted our War on Terror. The threat of Antifa is real and it is here.
Patrick Underwood was killed serving our country as a federal police officer in Oakland, California. Rioters shot him. He was fifty-three. Captain David Dorn had retired from the St. Louis Police Department but was willing to help his friend defend his small business from looters. It cost him his life. Both of these dead American heroes are black. As Project Veritas proved in an explosive video series showing an Antifa-insider-turned-informant, these people intend violence and death. The only way to give them what they want is to give them everything—your submission, your fortune, your children—up to and including your life.
My oath is to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and I will keep my oath come what way—in the real world, and online. It is hard to cancel a congressman, though many try. Just ask former congressmen Steve King or Dana Rohrabacher. Fame is both weapon and shield. It makes you a target but also makes them have to work to get you. All political lives end in failure, in a sense, but some are spectacular. Better to be a spectacle than to end up having never said anything worth canceling because nobody was listening in the first place.
Federal law is quite clear about instigating mobs, at least in the real world. But the line between what is real and what is online keeps blurring. Online bullying is now a crime in most states. The consequences of an online politically correct mob can be almost as devastating as a real one. Social media has become the new public square, and every so often there’s a digital firing squad. Like the executions of old, these “cancelations” have become a regular, even routine, occurrence. Mob-instigator Twitter even has the audacity to “fact-check” its targets against the claims of left-wing groups, including criminally fraudulent hate groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.
When everyone is informing on themselves constantly by living so publicly thanks to social media, there’s a lot of fodder for self-appointed opposition researchers. Who needs the CIA when my generation had drunk Facebooking? The KGB would have loved the technology we’ve made to spy on ourselves.
Writer Scott Adams promotes the twenty-year rule on ignoring past behavior and the forty-eight-hour rule for apologies and corrections. After those spans, move on. Time will only shorten these windows.
The pressure to conform has led to an increase in suicide as young people find it hard to measure up to the Instagram version of their lives. For the young, social life isn’t mall life or sports life, it’s internet life. We don’t go out drinking on the weekends, but we do make sure every photo we have is perfect, just as we are not. There is a deep irony in Silicon Valley’s nerds creating the ideal hotbed for bullying—social media—as if they decided to make the entire world feel the pain that they felt being stuffed in lockers. Have our tweets become the new social credit score before we even realized it?
There is a still-darker part of tech-enabled cancel culture. In theory, social media elevates the best ideas; in practice, it descends into recrimination, fake news, and foreign influence. Which drug treatment should we take to avoid the pandemic? Who knows. When everything is tribal and nothing is sacred, everything is a free-for-all, forever. Cancel culture targets the weak, the odd, the different—the very sorts of offbeat people we need to make the kinds of advances that made America great and will keep her that way. We talk often of safe spaces on our campuses, but we need a safe space for the truly odd among us, so long as they aren’t hurtful.
President George H. W. Bush said upon seizing the GOP nomination in 1988, “I’m a quiet man…. I see the quiet people.” Well, maybe I’m a weird man. I surely see the weird people. It is my view that the brilliant people in our society are often rare, precious, and strange. They sometimes don’t get basic things right. But they can get complex things perfect. They are the real 1 percent who toil endlessly on the gadgets and gizmos that give us the advantages we need to advance humankind. Throughout history, many of the most brilliant have been profoundly unhappy—sometimes happy only when they are working on the sorts of problems that interest them and them alone.
Alan Turing—the father of modern computing—defeated Nazi Germany with a team he assembled based on their answers to crossword puzzles placed in newspapers. Turing happened to be gay, and he took his own life in shame. Turing and the
