Sobering tale of cancel culture
Ithought this past weekend was going to see New Zealand’s first Justine Sacco moment. You know Justine Sacco, right? She joined that infamous internet club where she’s not known by name, rather by her online atrocity. She’s forever immortalised as a wine-bar punchline, ‘‘that PR chick who tweeted about going to Africa and getting Aids, remember?’’
Her scalp remains the world’s original, viral, cancel-culture beheading. And I thought this weekend that NZ was about to get our first one too.
I’m talking about David Gaughan, who plummeted into notoriety over the weekend for a disgusting, racist Facebook post calling Ma¯ ori the scourge of society. I read the original post, was viscerally outraged, and predicted he’d be cancelled by Monday.
But he wasn’t. Firstly Gaughan released, I’ll admit, a sincere sounding apology. Then, and this is the part I didn’t see coming, his business sales rocketed. According to his remarks on Sunday, online sales went through the roof, people bought vouchers to support him, FB groups got behind him and, most interestingly of all, people turned up at his pub in sympathy. They were interviewed by curious reporters, and all said some variation on, ‘‘Yeah, nah, his comments were out of line, but that’s no reason to cancel him.’’
Despite early desertion by breweries (which were referenced as motivation for supporting him by locals), and his staff getting flak on Friday, he remains uncancelled.
And after it, it’s hard not to see cancel culture as a Molotov cocktail in a Bollinger bottle. Something that’s lobbed between the two elite wine bars on the left and right side of the street, while everyone in the middle just wanders on unbothered.
Recently, the Right has got really, really concerned that cancel culture is the root of all evil. In any restaurant right now, there will be a dude called Jeff (60s, well moneyed, sees John Key as his life-&-style goal) opining about freedom of speech and incorrectly quoting Voltaire.
On the leafy, lefty end of town, there’s a university-educated, younger Twitter dweller who’s equally impassioned about cancel culture being a weapon to fight for minorities (in the problematised, externalised, over-therapised language of the elite).
National Party top dogs use it as an effective new woke-bashing advertising strategy. And if you look at the few times when someone has been cancelled in NZ (Don Brash, Lauren Southern), they’re often banned from speaking tours or university speeches. Very bourgeois territory.
Whereas this weekend’s events played out in a pub. Middle NZ was asked whether it cared enough about cancel culture to stop supporting a local boozer and beer brand. Apparently it doesn’t.
That’s not to say it necessarily agreed with the appalling comments – many of them openly said that they didn’t. Rather they just didn’t think cancelling the brewery was justified. Especially after Gaughan’s apology.
Now that’s sobering. Not only because I’m one of the young, white, varsity-educated Left. And this weekend has solidified my suspicions that all the stuff we bang on about is alienating, ineffectual and utterly irrelevant to most people. (And makes us seem like aristocratic twits.)
The heartbreaking part of all this is that cancel culture used to be called boycotting, and it was one of the few effective weapons of the genuinely disenfranchised. It was the furious, white-hot fire that forged real revolutions from Rosa Parks to Gandhi.
Until we stole it. We took it off the streets, into the wine bars, and disembowelled it. Ripped out its heart and teeth. Death by gentrification. Gaughan’s not the only one who should apologise.