Are We Seeing the End of Cancel Culture?

In one of last week’s episodes of The Spectacle podcast, American Spectator publisher Melissa Mackenzie and I discussed what might be called the death of “woke” — the newfound trend by which the cancel mobs that the Left has deployed virtually nonstop shout down people who depart from their various dogmas and orthodoxies — over the past few months.

Here’s how that went, if you haven’t yet checked it out:

The Spectacle Podcast: Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Burr, and Bill Maher: Woke Is Dead. Winston Marshall to Nancy Pelosi: Your Stupid Ideas are Dead Too. with hosts @MelissaTweets and @RVIVRdotcom

Available on @rumblevideo and all podcast platforms. pic.twitter.com/k5Lqpzzg0V

— The American Spectator (@amspectator) May 17, 2024

I bring this up because while the Bill Mahers and Jerry Seinfelds of the world are now openly defying the woke mobs — and that’s certainly a good thing — we’re beginning to see the cancel mobs getting sizably voluminous middle-finger salutes across the board from ordinary people who have had enough of them.

This column has talked about the counter-protesters on college campuses who have completely stolen the show from the darlings of the modern left as they spew genocidal inanities like: “Queers for Palestine.” Those counter-protesters are to be congratulated because, despite the stylistic infirmities of which some of them may have been guilty, they’re engaging directly on the front lines — if not in hostile territory.

But in other places, it’s clear that the Normals are back on the offensive.

I don’t need to do a whole lot on the Harrison Butker controversy, as that has been amply handled elsewhere at The American Spectator by Paul Kengor, Nate Hochman, and S.A. McCarthy. I even touched upon it in last week’s “Five Quick Things” column. But what’s interesting about the way in which the Butker situation is playing out so far is how very different the reaction has been despite a level of vitriol aimed at Butker that seems more intense than usual.

And there is a book to be written about why that might be. I wish I had the time to write it. Suffice to say that those four crucial voting/demographic numbers we talk about all the time in this space fit perfectly as the explanation for why Butker’s view of marriage and the importance of parenthood in a fulfilling life must be shouted down at all costs.

And, yet, it isn’t working. The Hunt family, who owns the Kansas City Chiefs, came to Butker’s defense, and his jersey is at present the single hottest seller of all current NFL merchandise.

As I posted on Facebook last week, it’s quite likely that social media and dating-site profiles will soon contain a plethora of pictures of women sporting Butker jerseys. It’s pretty good marketing, if you think about it — a girl wearing one of those jerseys is advertising that she aspires to be a wife like Butker’s, that she knows that’s what men worth having are looking for.

A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have expected anything like that to happen because the woke backlash would have been so overwhelming. But now?

Now, there just doesn’t seem to be much gas left in the woke tank. I can attest to this myself. Longtime readers of this column will note that my first political book, The Revivalist Manifesto, written in 2022, roared back to life late last year after CNN used it as bait for a hit piece on House Speaker Mike Johnson, who wrote the book’s foreword. Johnson’s staffers had a heart attack over CNN’s discovery that I called Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg “obnoxiously gay” and prayed that the whole controversy would go away.

My advice was that they should lean in and promote the book as an excellent discussion of large topics, snarky descriptions of the guy responsible for the performance of our supply chain and airports notwithstanding.

They didn’t take that advice, but the book shot up to No. 1 on Amazon’s comparative politics chart nonetheless. I can call myself a bestselling author thanks to the hatred and cancellation attempts by CNN. Five years ago, that might not have happened.

Now, if you’re an employee of Woke Corporate America, your experiences may differ.

But perhaps not necessarily. Because for another more current example, we have this:

NEW: The Kansas City Star is calling on the KC Chiefs to fire Harrison Butker and hire a female kicker after Butker advocated for traditional values during a speech.

The opinion piece quickly notified readers that this was “not a joke” and “not unrealistic.”

“For poetic justice… pic.twitter.com/uJxlrUvHpz

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 19, 2024

You really have to wonder just how miserable the Kansas City Star’s circulation numbers must be if it’s running utterly stupid, unserious editorials demanding that an NFL team engage in affirmative action hires to replace a kicker with a lifetime 89 percent field goal conversion rate.

Harrison Butker is known as one of the most successful clutch performers in all of professional sports. The people who run the Kansas City Star are known as having run off the majority of their subscribers. It’s not hard to know which side of this debate comes from a position of value.

At the end of the day, this is the problem the woke crowd is running into.

Take, for example, Cracker Barrel. The restaurant chain opted to put pandering to the LGBTQIA++ Alphabet People front and center at the start of “Pride Month” last year:

It was … less than the best move it has ever made. Cracker Barrel stock is not doing particularly well:

Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc. CBRL recently announced an update on its third and fourth quarter of fiscal 2024 financial results. The company expects lower-than-anticipated traffic to negatively impact its performance. Additionally, it announced plans to accelerate investments in organic growth by reallocating capital and reducing its quarterly dividend to $0.25 per share from $1.30. Following the announcements, the stock declined 10.3% in after-hours trading on May 16.

It turns out that the people who come for affordable, country-style comfort food don’t actually want sexual-identity propaganda mixed in with their mashed potatoes. Ergo, the market has punished this company severely.

As it has punished Target. And Bud Light. And even the makers of the brand-new, obnoxiously woke Doctor Who show.

Woke doesn’t sell. “Get woke, go broke” is no longer a funny meme; it’s marketing truth. And now we’re seeing that the same forces that have eviscerated the positive effect of leftist activism in culture and advertising have begun an active rollback.

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