The Atlantic is a Left-leaning magazine.
When the Atlantic is calling out Cancel Culture, you know that Cancel Culture has gone too far.
Stop Firing the Innocent
America needs a reckoning over racism. Punishing people who did not do anything wrong harms that important cause.
As companies and organizations of all sorts have scrambled to institute a zero-tolerance policy on racism over the past few weeks, some of them have turned out to be more interested in signaling their good intentions than punishing actual culprits. This emphasis on appearing rather than being virtuous has already resulted in the mistreatment of innocent people—not all of them public figures or well-connected individuals with wealth to cushion their fall.
The first thing that companies need to do is grow a spine. Getting pushed around by a hate mob on Twitter is pure cowardice.
There is no evidence that just because several hundred or even several thousand people send your company nasty Tweets, that turns into harm to the bottom line down the road.
The internet hate mob represents a tiny fraction of the population and most of them have the attention span of a kid with ADD on Red Bull. The likelihood that a thousand Tweets today of people saying they will boycott you turning into a measurable loss of sales next month is likely zero.
What happened to Emmanuel Cafferty is an especially egregious example. At the end of a long shift mapping underground utility lines, he was on his way home, his left hand casually hanging out the window of the white pickup truck issued to him by the San Diego Gas & Electric company. When he came to a halt at a traffic light, another driver flipped him off.
Then, Cafferty told me a few days ago, the other driver began to act even more strangely. He flashed what looked to Cafferty like an “okay” hand gesture and started cussing him out. When the light turned green, Cafferty drove off, hoping to put an end to the disconcerting encounter.
If you read this story you know what happens next. This guy, who doesn’t follow politics or pop culture gets his picture taken, which gets shared on the internet. He has no idea, but the next thing he knows, he’s getting fired for nothing.
Two hours later, Cafferty got a call from his supervisor, who told him that somebody had seen Cafferty making a white-supremacist hand gesture, and had posted photographic evidence on Twitter. Dozens of people were now calling the company to demand Cafferty’s dismissal.
As for Cafferty, his only desire, even now, is to get his job back. When I asked him whether he’d like to share anything else with me at the end of a long interview, his first thought was for the company that had fired him: “I feel like SDG&E is a victim in this as well. Some guy sent a Twitter mob after them and they were just trying to defend themselves. Perhaps I’m naive and loyal to a fault, but they were put in a bad position.”
SDG&E was put into a bad position, but they compounded it by giving in to the mob. That is rule #1. Never give in to the mob.
Corporate cowardice is at an all-time high. The mob is used to having big business roll over for them.
When they do, good people suffer.
The Atlantic ends the article this way:
First, these incidents damage the lives of innocent people without achieving any noble purpose.
Second, such injustices are liable to provoke a political backlash. If a lot of Americans come to feel that those who supposedly oppose racism are willing to punish the innocent to look good in the public’s eyes, they could well grow cynical about the enterprise as a whole.
Third, those of us who want to build a better society should defend the innocent because movements willing to sacrifice justice in the pursuit of noble goals have, again and again, built societies characterized by pervasive injustice.
One of the core tenets of liberal democracy is that people should not be punished for accusations against them that are unsubstantiated, for actions that are perfectly reasonable, or for offenses that were committed by others. No matter how worthy the cause they invoke, you should not trust anyone who seeks to abandon these fundamental principles.
The Atlantic assumes that the anti-racism activist destroying lives are acting in good faith.
The thing is, we know that they are not. They are the new Red Guard. These people don’t actually want to fight racism or injustice, they want to impose their own racism and injustice on others. The innocent suffering is not a bug but a feature. Their goal is to impose their will by making people fear them. Speak up, or fail to show sufficient deference, and the mob will come for you.
As for the backlash, it is coming. This actually makes me long for the days of yore where a company could hire the Pinkertons to bust the skulls of trouble makers. I’d applaud any company that sends a bunch of Baldwin–Felts Detectives after the mob with a Colt potato-digger mounted to the back of an armored car.
When enough blue-collar workers get canceled because they are too busy doing their hard and valuable to society jobs to bother with the sensitivities of the latest update from the grievance studies departments of the academic elite, they will get together and build a fucking killdozer and the pushback will be diesel-powered.
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