Cancel Culture Silences ContraPoints, A Primer: The Online Left‘s Moment of Truth
The cult transgender personality’s Twitter account went dark in the middle of a mob attack. The left is at a crossroads.
Barring a surprise autumn 2020 Trump move in which he endows middle class families with a 70 percent tax cut and free ponies and thus wins over all the voters of both political sides who’ve had it up to here with his bullshit, it’s safe to say we’re seeing the final phases of the “Era of Horrible Feeling.” When Trump’s reckoning finally does come, the left, along with all the politically and financially battered middle class citizens and various minority members who’ve suffered under his eye, will face an adjustment period, during which they’ll reassess their demands and methods, and hopefully combine their myriad concerns into one coherent voice.
The left is not united; it is split into camps, as is plain to see when watching them engage in internet discussions. There are “woke” progressives, complacent liberal moderates, fist-pumping socialists, and a range of others. Denizens of the pan-egalitarian leftist internet — which actually helped allow Trump to happen by staying within the confines of their bubble and never going out of their way fully to explain themselves to regular, mainstream-media-following “normies” — stick to a set of unspoken, unbreakable rules, fancying themselves as fighters, staunch defenders of women, ethnic/religious minorities, LGBTQIA folks and any other groups that have had enough of the longstanding white-male patriarchy and are happy to pick a fight with anyone — including their own — when their worldview is challenged. Most of the fighting has been online, of course, which wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for so many things, starting with the public’s addiction to internet participation, the availability of easy-as-pie methods for creating fake trolling and bot accounts on any social media or news/blog site, and internet users’ tendency to say whatever they feel whenever they want.
The middle ground, which we’ll call “liberal Twitter” for ease of entry, comprises a loosely bound group consisting of millions of thumb-typing activists who tend to vote Democrat, support social justice causes, hold faith in what Chris Hedges called “liberal class” institutions (the Democratic Party, churches, unions, the media and academia), and, most of all, hate Trump. It’s a bizarre, cult-like space in our online Wild West. It’s a place where users go to express anger over such things as Trump’s shenanigans, right-wing transgressions, corporate overreach and various other miseries that most people would instantly agree aren’t helpful to average citizens. Often clogged with redundant choir-preaching tweets-by-the-bushel, it’s fairly easy to grow a following and fit in there; any variation on the phrase “Trump is a poopyhead” will get you a few Likes. Step out of line, however — tweet something counter to the vanilla liberal consensus — and you can get kicked off the bus, so to speak, and find that your Twitter follower count has suddenly plummeted, your tweets are being ignored, and/or maybe even that you’re being publicly attacked by other users. That’s “cancel culture,” which Dave Chappelle grumbled about, rather oafishly, in his most recent Netflix special.
Cancel culture won’t be going away anytime soon. For many, liberal Twitter is a lifestyle choice, if not a business. A lot of the more vocal liberal Twitter personalities migrated there from Tumblr, a platform that allowed them to monetize their anti-Republican, pro-social justice rants by featuring ads on their posts. With its mammoth “filter bubbled” user base providing a safe base of operation, Twitter became the go-to platform for Tumblr veterans who were still licking their wounds over Trump’s win and their own collective loss in the Great Meme War to the pro-Trump troll army commanded by Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopolous, Palmer Luckey, and other conservative operatives, a force that was headquartered on 4chan’s /pol/ board and Reddit’s “The_Donald” group.
The Meme War wasn’t about making salient points about authoritarianism, hate speech and the like. Had that been the case, the left would have won handily. The problem for the left was that the war actually hinged on internet-based meme entertainment, good one-off jokes in other words. Jokes can often be a bit edgy, though, and the left was unarmed. The reason liberals lost the meme war was because they were too hamstrung by political correctness to poke fun at their own, much less create memes and YouTube videos that were the least bit funny. Late night comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert tried to “help out,” but they were and still are heavily monetized themselves, and couldn’t push the envelope. The sum effect was that the internet-at-large came to regard the online left as about as much fun as an IRS audit.
Enter Natalie Wynn, a former PhD student in Philosophy who launched her ContraPoints YouTube channel in 2016 in an effort to provide a joke-laden, thought-provoking alternative to the overwhelming presence of cartoon-conservative thought that had come to dominate the YouTube platform. In its earliest days, the channel’s content — always delivered with a whip-smart level of self-effacing comedy and laugh-out-loud sight gags — consisted of Wynn (at that time a male who resembled a Mötley Crüe roadie) waxing comedically philosophical about topics that still generate no shortage of heated online debate today, such as fascism, cultural appropriation, and gender expression.
Along the way, Wynn decided to transition surgically to a woman. Soon enough, the channel became must-see content, not only for non-cis viewers who could relate to Wynn’s endless travails, but also for normies who had considered enlisting in the online ranks of liberal-bashers owing to their own rejection of near-militant political correctness.
Wynn’s content wasn’t for everybody (meaning humorless people, I’d submit), but she began to amass a redoubtable following, her videos often gaining upwards of a million views. Dubbed “the Oscar Wilde of YouTube,” her star was rising so quickly that I was expecting to find her guesting on Real Time with Bill Maher any day now. Her deeply thoughtful, even-handed observations, along with her katana-sharp sense of humor, largely appeared to act as an iron barricade that repelled haters of all stripes. It turned out, however, that there was a weakness in it.
For years now, the most widely persecuted class in the spectrum of minorities “under the protection” of online liberal activists (often referred to, whether or not unfairly, as “social justice warriors,” or SJWs) has been the group consisting of individuals who identify as having been born with a “non-binary gender,” ie neither female nor male. Over time, there have been many variations within that group, starting with a wave of people who preferred to be identified as non-humans (animals and such), and most recently, an influx of certain younger non-binaries — usually Gen Z kids and very early 20somethings — who increasingly favor varying shades of gray, professing gender identities that appear to the uninitiated as more of a hormone-driven attention-getting maneuver than any real genetic disposition.
The non-binary debate is literally the touchiest subject in the online world. Most cis normies understand that sexuality has gray areas and meets in the middle with bisexuality, but, owing to societal norms, they find it very difficult to take seriously people who claim to have no sexual urge whatsoever (asexuality) or any of the other off-brand sexual preferences that came into sharp focus during the culture wars and which led to the practice of people stating their preferred pronouns (he/him, she/her, they/them) when introducing themselves.
A kind society would indulge and respect someone who, for example, claimed to have no genitalia even if such equipment were physically present. It would subscribe to Kant’s ethical theory that all persons are owed respect simply because they are persons. Ours is not a kind society, however, and tends to react negatively when fire-breathing activists suddenly demand that citizens not question behaviors and beliefs that a majority may view as contrived. The root problem has always been that hardline liberal activists see no reason to explain their positions to the skeptical. They demand adherence without making any attempt to sell their bio-philosophical wares. Their impatient, go-Google-it attitude has caused a lot of blind rage on both sides of the debate on political correctness as it pertains to he/her/they pronouns and non-binary identitarians.
Meanwhile, for as long as the ContraPoints channel has been a polestar of leftist humor, Wynn has ridiculed non-binaries as much as she has any other group. In fact, as much as she’s been generally accepting of non-binaries, she’s evinced the barest undercurrent of impatience when she encounters someone whose physical appearance is “full boy mode” but who nevertheless identifies as a girl and wishes to be referred to using she/her pronouns. Wynn’s skepticism is understandable, given that her worldview is, in the end, sexually binary, and thus she’s had difficulty taking “gray-area gendered” people seriously. After all, she’s spent many thousands of dollars and undergone extremely painful surgery in order to “pass” as a woman, not 50 or 85 percent of a woman. It’s quite apparent that her preferred pronouns are she/her, end of story.
Prudence would have dictated that Wynn investigate the non-binary/gray-gender zeitgeist a bit more before participating in the discussion. But it was the act of stepping — no, gleefully pogo-sticking — into this minefield that finally forced Wynn off of Twitter. On September 1st, Wynn fired off a series of tweets in which she admitted feeling uncomfortable around pronoun pedants and that the spread of a la carte non-binary identitarianism among younger people made her feel obsolete, an “old-school trans.”
Non-binary activists felt besmirched: gray areas of sexuality is new news? Wynn’s sentiments triggered a hellacious backlash from online activists, which she’s experienced before, except this time, her Twitter account was suddenly deleted. In response to that, the entire open-minded, “woke leftist internet” on YouTube, Reddit and elsewhere, assuming that Wynn had deleted her account owing to the “dogpiling” abuse, exploded with condemnation of identitarian activists. The common complaint voiced by her defenders was that Wynn may not be perfect, but at least she’s helped spread a lot of awareness about what life is like for non-cis people. That’s true, and she’s also made people think about a lot of other delicate questions that the mainstream media wouldn’t touch with a forty-foot pole.
Not that you wouldn’t have guessed, but things got even weirder after Wynn’s Twitter account disappeared. On September 7th, a new ”ContraPoints” Twitter account came online, under a new user ID, @realNatalieWynn. The pinned tweet claimed that her account had been hacked. That’s a standard my-dog-ate-it-style excuse for internet users who’ve found themselves on the losing end of a flame war on one platform/forum or another, and the very timing of it (in the past, internet trolls and “flamers” considered a full week of absence from a discussion space a sure sign that the user had been so humiliated by an uncomfortable exchange that they’d been “officially spanked” into temporary hiding) was a bit suspicious.
Even more suspicious, though, was the fact that “Wynn” had added a link to an “Amazon wish list” to her Twitter account’s intro section, pointing to a page of products on Amazon.com that supporters could buy and have shipped to her (the list included photographic equipment and Sephora gift cards). The consensus among Twitter users who visited this new account was that it was a fake, a fact corroborated when Wynn returned to Twitter, posting under a new account that’s “managed by an assistant.”
The real Wynn, it turned out, wasn’t hacked, she was weary of the negativity she was experiencing on Twitter. Now, if she had been hacked, it wouldn’t necessarily have been perpetrated by enraged liberal trolls. Any hack — maybe even a major part of the mob attack itself — could have been the work of alt-right or conservative groups who’d had enough of losing new recruits to Wynn’s incessant sense-making.
That’s how volatile and unintelligible the internet is. Every incident has a “multi-dimensional chess” angle to it. If a hack had been perpetrated by a leftist, many would have considered it a major mistake on that person’s part. Wynn is a breath of fresh air, even a lifesaver, to many people in the trans community and beyond. Despite that, though, every sacred cow has its deniers, especially now, and Wynn has a house-sized target on her back.
So now comes the hard part. Going forward, will Wynn apologize to pronoun purists and non-binaries, or will she gently stand her ground, suffer the slings and arrows, and wait for the Trump Reich to end so that all leftists can drop their crippling burden of anger and shame and engage in normal, constructive, mutually edifying discourse for a change?
