The right-wing bleats on about the dangers of “cancel culture” whenever somebody faces consequences for their actions, and it’s important to keep in mind how grossly, cynically hypocritical that is. The far right has been a dogged pursuer of the cancellation of anybody it disagrees with for as long as I’ve been aware of what politics are (more decades than I’d like to admit). It’s always been one of their main things, from the days of the Moral Majority, to the ramp up to the 2003 Iraqi invasion, when anybody who spoke out against it was demonized by the right. Their shamelessness and lies in the aim of preserving power know no bounds, and in fact it’s pretty clear by now that the more shameless they act the more excitement they get out of it. Nothing seems to please the far right more than hypocrisy.
Case in point: During their current full-strength fusillade against the ills of “cancel culture,” the far right have made it a point to “cancel” Dr. Anthony Fauci and Major League Baseball. MLB, of course, revealed that it’s not really into the idea of voter suppression when it moved the All-Star Game out of Atlanta after Georgia’s GOP rammed through tight new voter laws. Dr. Fauci, meanwhile, has long been a target of right-wing hate because… uh… he doesn’t want people to get sick? He values human life over the dollar? Or I guess because the far right media charlatans realize they need a constant target to keep their followers angry and engaged, and the doctor who regularly disagreed with their former president Donald Trump makes a highly visible one. It’s baffling, until you remember that the GOP elite is anti-science, anti-intelligence, anti-expertise, and anti- everything that doesn’t personally make them richer.
Anyway. Seth Meyers—a blast from the past—recently took a closer look at the far right’s attempts to cancel Fauci and baseball. Meyers’ sarcastic analysis of Trump-era nonsense was a popular diversion the last four years, but it’s predictably faded a bit in the public eye now that we have a president who isn’t just a daily pile-up of embarrassments and pettiness. Of course as long as the far right remains consumed by their defining sickness—the refusal to acknowledge reality and insistence on viewing everything through an us-vs.-them ideological framework built solely to sustain and enrich those in power—there will always be abject foolishness for Meyers to poke at. So let’s take a look at the latest example, shall we? The video’s below, it’s sort of funny, and it might actually take you back to those very non-halcyon days of 2017 through January 2021, when every day brought a new reason to be even more ashamed of the people in charge of our country. Check it out and if you like what you see you can watch Late Night with Seth Meyers on NBC or Peacock or just check out the best bits on YouTube.