Cancel Culture Campaign Equates It With 'Totalitarianism'
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, June 9, 2022
At a time when the prevalence of "cancel culture" appears to be peaking in the United States, nonprofit free speech advocacy group FIRE is breaking new ads, as part of a multimedia campaign focusing on it.
The campaign, created by DeVito/Verdi, features out-of-home billboards (see above) and print media buys (see below), equating cancel culture to a form of totalitarianism.
The campaign follows a rebranding of FIRE, which was nearly a quarter century ago as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (originally to promote free speech on college campuses) to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to broaden its mandate toward freedom of speech overall.
FIRE asserts it is nonpartisan, but new research from the Pew Research Center reveals a significant partisan divide around the concept of cancel culture -- defined as "calling out" people in social media -- with Democrats seeing mainly as a form of accountability, while Republicans view it as a form of publishing.
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According to Politico, FIRE has raised $28.5 million towards a three-year, $75 million "litigation, opinion research and public education campaign" promoting free speech.
What these whiners miss in their endless bleating about the First Amendent is: when the general public at large calls you out for saying or doing something that's unacceptable, it's not censorship. The government isn't shaming anyone for being a jerk. It's the people. In effect, so-called "cancel culture" is the epitome of free speech.