The GOP’S cancel culture warriors
Lauren Boebert, the congresswoman from Colorado, just blocked me on Twitter.
This comes as no surprise, given that she follows in her MAGA mentor Donald Trump’s footsteps.
In 2017, I was also blocked from then-president Trump’s Twitter account for defending the Affordable Care Act — which was keeping me alive through cancer treatments — until the courts forced him to stop blocking critics online.
The radical right wing increasingly lives in an echo chamber and a bubble of its own making, where critical voices are hushed and critical theories are attacked. The party that so loudly opposes “cancel culture” is all about canceling speech with which it disagrees.
Republican elected officials and conservative activists have banned a record number of books in Texas and elsewhere. They specifically target Lgbtq-friendly books and publications that examine the racism of America’s past and present. Reactionary conservatives’ goal is to roll back the increasing diversity and inclusion in our schools and workplaces.
Cancel culture warriors including Boebert have the thinnest skin, insisting on safe spaces for themselves online and in meetings that are closed to the media and public. For example, Florida GOP Gov. Ron Desantis has called fighting repression of conservative political speech his state’s “most important legislative issue.” He’s pushed a bill that encourages outlier parents to sue schools if they don’t like something that is taught.
Meanwhile, we see a rise in antisemitism and white nationalistism. This deadly brew turned violent in the attacks on our government on Jan. 6. Does anybody believe that’s the end of it?
This is the Republican Party’s deliberate strategy — to drag our children backward into its blinkered version of history, depriving them of the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in the 21st century.
The American people are strong enough to learn about and from our mistakes and faults. But you wouldn’t know it from the behavior of some right-wing elected officials. They want to whitewash the world around them by canceling any ideas or opinions they feel threatened by. These cowardly elected officials instead lean into bullying, encouraging their followers to do likewise.
Meanwhile, we see a rise in antisemitism and white nationalistism. This deadly brew turned violent in the attacks on our government on Jan. 6. Does anybody believe that’s the end of it?
Right-wing elected officials gin up their base to divide us, close off alternate points of view, and ignore the dangers of this radicalization.
Besides supporting the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, potentially stripping away health care from millions of Americans, Boebert voted against the American Rescue Plan, which provided nearly $1.3 billion in direct funding to Colorado. She even opposed the reauthorization of the National Marrow Donor Program, which helps patients with life-threatening blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma find a donor match to save their lives.
And Boebert voted against the Build Back Better bill, which would continue to make health insurance more affordable for millions, lower the cost of prescription drugs, and much more.
These cancel culture warriors don’t have proactive plans for health care, the pandemic, or anything else. Like Trump himself, they only offer smoke and mirrors to distract us from their attacks on our health care and on educational integrity for our kids.
We must have an honest reckoning with our past in order to do better in the future. Closing our ears and minds to the ways in which the American dream and American culture has fallen short means we’ll never live up to the promise of liberty and justice for all. Our kids will be left without the tools they need to thrive in a modern world.
We cannot allow that to happen.
Laura Packard is a stage 4 cancer survivor and health care advocate, executive director of Health Care Voter, and host of Caretalk, a weekly consumer call-in show on health care and health insurance issues in America on Mondays at 4:30pm ET. Follow @lpackard on Twitter.