New York Post, Monday, August 19, 2019nypost.com21POSTOPINION
W
E regret to inform you that
Jay-Z has been canceled.
No, it’s not his future album,
or his next concert, that has
been canceled — but Jay-Z, the
human being. He has been axed,
nixed, non-personed.
On Wednesday, NFL Commis-
sioner Roger Goodell and Jay-Z
announced a partnership be-
tween the league and the legend-
ary rapper’s entertainment com-
pany, Roc Nation. The partner-
ship would be part entertainment
and part activism and involve the
NFL’s “Inspire Change” cam-
paign, which will promote crimi-
nal-justice reform and better po-
lice-community relations.
The online backlash came
almost instantaneously. The
anger at Jay-Z involved his sup-
port for Colin Kaepernick, the
ex-49ers quarterback who
kneeled during the national an-
them in protest against police
brutality and hasn’t been signed
to an NFL team in years. Kaeper-
nick and his supporters believe
it’s because of his activism, not
his football skills, that he has
been kept out of the NFL.
Jay-Z, once a Kaepernick
defender, told
The Wall Street
Journal that
there are “two
parts of protest-
ing. You go out-
side and you
protest, and then the company
or the individual says, ‘I hear
you. What do we do next?’ I
think we have moved past kneel-
ing. I think it’s time for action.”
The online wokesters found
this unacceptable. Twitter ex-
ploded with people calling Jay-Z
a “sellout.” Jemele Hill wrote a
long piece for The Atlantic titled
“Jay-Z Helped the NFL Banish
Colin Kaepernick,” censuring the
rapper as an “accomplice in the
league’s hypocrisy.” David Zirin
of The Nation, sounding vaguely
like a Vietcong propagandist,
denounced the NFL-Jay-Z alli-
ance “a ruling-class compact.”
Can you still listen to Jay-Z’s
music? It would probably be safer
not to. After all, cancellation by
association has happened before
and probably will again. The New
York Review of Books expelled
its editor, Ian Buruma, for pub-
lishing an (admittedly lousy) es-
say by one of the canceled, Jian
Ghomeshi, who had taken to the
pages of the august literary jour-
nal to tell his side of a #MeToo
story. And Norm Macdonald lost
a “Tonight Show” appearance
after defending the non-personed
Roseanne and Louis CK.
Also canceled last week was
Sarah Silverman. The acerbic
lefty comedian revealed on a pod-
cast that she had been fired from
a movie after a
photo surfaced
of her in black-
face. She was in
blackface for a
skit on her show
“The Sarah Sil-
verman Program,” and she says
she was making a point about rac-
ism, not being racist herself.
On the podcast, she railed
against cancel culture: “If you’re
not on board, if you say the
wrong thing, if you had a tweet
once, everyone is, like, throwing
the first stone. It’s so odd. It’s a
perversion. It’s really, ‘Look how
righteous I am, and now I’m go-
ing to press refresh all day long
to see how many likes I get in my
righteousness.’ ”
Silverman is right, of course,
though she has had a good time
joining the righteous mob in the
past, when the target was anyone
on the right.
That’s what makes this latest
round of cancellations so inter-
esting. Cancel culture only really
works on liberals, by liberals.
The same week as the Jay-Z
and Sarah Silverman cancella-
tions, the online mobs de-
scended on the conservative
commentator Ben Shapiro for his
comments on the working poor.“If you had to work more than
one job to have a roof over your
head or food on the table,” he
had said, “you probably shouldn’t
have taken the job that’s not pay-
ing you enough. That’d be a you
problem.”
His critics took Shapiro’s
words out of context, but that’s
largely irrelevant. The mob
raged, tweets were posted,
Shapiro didn’t apologize and
everyone moved on.
The left has a circular firing
squad going, and the right is
largely outside of it. The prob-
lem becomes when the outrage
fetishists take the screeching
into the real world and try to get
people fired from their jobs, as
happened to Silverman.
If Shapiro answered to a liberal
boss, he might have faced similar
consequences. Containing the
crazies to the Internet, and not
letting them get their scalps
when they take their canceling
movement offline, would go a
long way toward minimizing
their damage.
Jay-Z’s at risk, too: Recall that
Nike canceled an entire line of
shoes over Kaepernick’s inane
PC complaints. In defending the
deal, the rapper said: “You can’t
just throw someone out if they
make a mistake. This is the real
world. You can’t say, ‘Oh, you
made a mistake, you’re canceled.
I’m never speaking to you again.’
That doesn’t accomplish any-
thing.”
He better hope people will be
making that argument on his
behalf, too. Twitter: @KarolCancel PC Mobs
You know things are bad when they come for Jay-Z
KAROL
MARKOWICZ‘99 problems and Kaep is one’: Jay-Z’s (r.) social-justice partnership with
NFL honcho Roger Goodell is under fire from... social-justice warriors.Getty Images for Roc NationFrom the right: Look at Prez’s Actions, Not His Words
President Trump “speaks differently from most other statesmen on the
world stage,” admits Roger Kimball in American Greatness, and often Trump’s
crudeness rankles. Yet rhetoric aside, “the most outrageous part of Trump’s
tenure to date has been the success of his economic policy” and the “princi-
pled realism” that has marked his relations with adversaries and rivals like
Russia and China. On both fronts (the economy and foreign relations), Trump
“has acted with much greater forcefulness and clarity of purpose than his
immediate predecessors” did. And besides, “what’s the alternative to Donald
Trump on any of these issues? Joe Biden? Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders?
To ask the question is to answer it.”Media critic: The Times’ Trump Obsession
If you think The New York Times is obsessed with the supposed racism
of President Trump now, wait till you see the Gray Lady as we get closer to
the 2020 election, predicts Byron York of The Washington Examiner. At a
leaked staff meeting recently, Times executive editor Dean Baquet out-
lined a new strategy, which York calls “building the Trump-is-a-racist nar-
rative.” The Times’ problem is that “the Trump-Russia hole came up dry.”
So Baquet has been forced to “transition to a new ‘vision’ for the paper for
the next two years.” As Baquet put it, “We’ve got to change [and begin to]
write more deeply about the country, race and other divisions.” In other
words, same target, slightly different focus.Foreign desk: BoJo’s Second Brain
Dominic Cummings is unelected and doesn’t have a seat at the Cabinet, yet
“he is UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s most important adviser,” reports
Bloomberg’s Therese Raphael. “Johnson wants a proven hand to carry out his
‘do-or-die’ Oct. 31 Brexit pledge and win an election,” and Cummings is just
the man for the job. But the partnership between the two goes beyond Brexit,
Raphael suggests. “At the heart of the new government are two ambitious
men possessed by a sense of history, some would say grandiosity and an
appetite for taking big gambles.” For Cummings, that means finishing the job
that Margaret Thatcher started but never could finish: “reforming the civil
service, whose inefficiencies Cummings finds maddening.” What would a
Cummings takeover of the British state look like? “Visualize,” Raphael says, “a
room resembling a NASA launch-control center in which Bismarck is hud-
dled with, say, a crack team of designers and coders on loan from Apple.”Celeb watch: Ease Up on the Feminism, Taylor Swift
At the Independent Women’s Forum, Patrice Lee Onwuka writes: “Taylor
Swift entered the political fray again at the Teen Choice Awards this weekend
to encourage her fans to fight gender inequality and the pay gap.” Specifically,
Swift championed the members of the US Women’s
National Soccer Team, who feel “gender discrimina-
tion is behind why they get paid less than men. But
before Swift unleashes her 120 million Instagram fol-
lowers on the patriarchy, she may want to do some re-
search.” In fact, “women actually earn more than men
in soccer by some measures.” The 2015 women’s World
Cup brought in $73 million in revenue, of which 13 per-
cent went to the players, compared to the men’s 9 per-
cent in 2010 (out of revenues of nearly $4 billion). As a
teen icon, Onwuka says, Swift should embrace “truth
and facts rather than emotion and misinformation.”Church beat: Lord, Save Us From Liberal Boomers
A video that recently surfaced on social media shows the aging, liberal and
uniformly white parishioners of St. Francis Church in Portland, Ore., shouting
at their young, conservative Nigerian priest. Father George Kuforiji’s sin? “He
had removed their supplement to the recitation of the Creed,” as well as lefty
“political statements from the front of their parish,” Chad Pecknold at The
Catholic Herald explains. “The protest concluded with parishioners singing
the civil-rights-era song ‘We Shall Overcome,’ locked in arms against their
black priest.” That preposterous display, Pecknold argues, is what happens
when “lay participation” becomes “lay control” aimed at “aligning the liturgy
with the rubrics of progressive pieties. George aimed, instead, at restoring the
liturgy of this parish to align with the rubrics established by the church.” Con-
cludes Pecknold: “The African Church can’t get to America fast enough.”
— Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari & Stephanie GutmannTaylor Swift