Tag: cancel culture

Elvis: Pushing the Envelope

The new Elvis Presley biopic made me think.  Early in the movie, Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks, says that the acts that made the most money were ones “that gave the audience feelings they weren’t sure they should enjoy, but they do.”  Then the film focuses on the controversial gyrations that drove the girls crazy and made many people upset and uncomfortable as “The King” began his rise to stardom.  Now we laugh because those dance moves that seemed so edgy in the 1950s seem so tame by today’s standards.  This is not a new phenomenon.

Every generation, you hear the older people complaining that the younger generation is worse than theirs was.  “Kids today,” they often grumble.  The popular culture explains this by saying that old people are stuck in their ways and overly critical of the younger generation.  The media may say that the younger generations are not really that rebellious or bad, because the older generation was also seen as rebellious and bad by the generation before them.  Have you ever considered that maybe, instead of each generation being old, stodgy, and self-absorbed, that actually they are right?  Each generation really is worse than the last, because they have to one-up the previous generation by pushing the envelope further than their parents.  Yes, no generation is perfect and they all have a rebellious streak, but that does not mean that younger generations are morally equivalent to older ones.  Just because Elvis shaking his hips on stage was rebellious and controversial in the 50s, that does not mean that it is morally equivalent to Cardi B singing “Wet Ass Pussy” today.  Can we please bring back the innocence of generations past?

The worrisome part about this is that the envelope has already been pushed so far that it is hard to imagine what somebody can do next that will actually shock anybody.  The Beatles’ long hair is certainly not controversial anymore.  Drug references in lyrics that shocked people in the 60s and 70s are old news.  Maybe it would take it to a higher level if someone bit the head off of a bat onstage?  Nope.  Ozzy Osbourne already did that in 1982.  Remember when Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson’s breast in front of over 100 million viewers on live television at Super Bowl XXXVIII?  That was way back in 2004.  I fear that celebrities will become so desperate for attention in the coming years that we will see some disgusting acts being done to gain notoriety.

Will we soon see live sex acts on stage?  Will our entertainment revert back to feeding Christians to lions in front of cheering audiences?  Are we going to see The Hunger Games play out in real life?  We seem to be heading in that direction.  The good news is that there is now another way to cause controversy and gain attention.  Simply do and say good things that were once considered normal and mainstream.  As the Bible says, when people rebel from God, they begin to call evil good, and good evil.  It is definitely happening.  Think about the things that actually are considered shocking and controversial today: 

  • In June, five Tampa Bay Rays pitchers were attacked by the mainstream press and “woke” social media pundits for opting not to wear rainbow “Pride Night” logos on their uniforms.  You do not even have to go back to my parents’ generation for when this stance would have been applauded.  Now it is counter-culture. 
  • Harry Potter author, J.K. Rowling started a firestorm of controversy when she criticized the use of the term “people who menstruate” instead of women.  She also committed the unforgivable sin of tweeting her support for a woman who had been fired for saying that “men cannot change into women.”  I am pretty sure that Elvis could have said that without causing a stir.
  • Actor Chris Pratt (Jurassic World, The Terminal List) has been disparaged as “the worst Chris in Hollywood” for his public professions of Christian faith.  What a Hollywood bad boy, huh?  Personally, I think being a Christian is the best way to be a rebel because it also gets you into Heaven.
  • If you really want to be an outcast, choose not to get what is called a Covid-19 vaccine, even though it does not prevent you from getting or spreading Covid-19.  This is the most discriminated against group in America for the past couple of years (with one possible exception).  They have been banned from many places, and some have even lost their jobs.  They are controversial not for anything they did, but instead for not subjugating themselves to their overlords.
  • When it comes to controversial athletes, former baseball star Curt Schilling is near the top of the list.  He was fired from ESPN in 2015 for tweeting “A man is a man regardless of what they name themselves.  Male bathrooms were created with the penis in mind; female bathrooms were not.  Is it now necessary to have laws to teach us otherwise?  Pathetic.”  To any previous generation, that comment would not only be acceptable, but obvious.  Now it is a fireable offense and has even been used to keep Schilling out of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
  • Actress Gina Carano was famously fired from Disney’s, The Mandalorian, for taking the provocative position that she should not have to ask to be called “she,” since she is obviously a woman.  Apparently, calling a boy “he,” or a girl “she,” is now edgy.  Charlie Sheen had to work a lot harder than that to get fired from a hit show.
  • The one possible exception mentioned above as the most discriminated group in America are supporters of President Trump.  The backlash that Elvis got for dancing is nothing compared to what you can expect if you say you agree with President Trump.  If you support his policies that brought us a booming economy, less government interference in our lives, and four years of peace (including unprecedented peace agreements in the Middle East), you can expect to be attacked more viciously than an opposing sports star in Philadelphia. 

It is terrible that these things are now controversial, but there is one positive thing about it.  Entertainers want attention.  In the past, they had to come up with more and more outlandish and crazy gimmicks than we had previously seen to get that attention.  Now, all they have to do is espouse solid, traditional values, and wait for the media firestorm.

Again, this is not new.  When reading the Bible straight through, the Old Testament prophets were the hardest parts to get through because they were so repetitive that it got boring.  They were all the same thing.  Israel would turn from God and pull further and further away from Him.  He would warn them through prophets, and most of the time they would ignore the warnings and push His patience even more.  Eventually, God said that enough was enough and allowed Israel to be defeated and the people to be scattered into exile.  We are in that same spiral of self-destruction that the Israelites were in.  Each generation seems to push their rebellion a little further than the last.  We have had our modern-day prophets warning us to turn back to our morals and values of the past.  Dennis Prager, Rush Limbaugh, William F. Buckley, and others have warned us about the decay of our values and societal norms of earlier generations.  If America does not heed these warnings and keeps pushing the boundaries, we will soon run out of room to push and we will end up as Israel did. 

There is one last thing I should do before I close out.  To all the old people out there, I apologize for my generation.  You were right.

Why the Cleveland Indians Name Change Makes Sense for a Leftist

Last week the Cleveland Indians decided to change their name.  Since it was announced, the far left sports media has been heaping praise on the organization for being so forward thinking and proactive.  My initial reaction was annoyance and disappointment, but then I thought, “I should really look at it from their perspective.”  No, I don’t mean from the perspective of Indians, because as even Washington Post polling from just a few years ago shows, most Native Americans were not offended by the Washington Redskins football team name, much less the Indians.  I mean from the perspective of a leftist.

Think about it.  A great sports team name is tough, powerful, and formidable.  There are Panthers, Giants, Vikings, Pirates, Diamondbacks, Braves, Titans, Lions and Tigers and Bears.  Oh my!  Some might say that the nickname for the team closest to me, the Angels, sounds pretty harmless, but as we know from A Charlie Brown Christmas, when an angel appeared to the shepherds to announce the birth of our Savior they were “sore afraid.”  An angel is probably very intimidating.  If you are not on the left you might think Indians are also tough, but remember, we are putting ourselves in the shoes of a leftist.  The left doesn’t see Indians as powerful.  They see them as whiny, overly sensitive, easily offended wussies.  Who would want their home team represented as that?  You might as well call them the Cleveland Flower Girls.  It makes perfect sense that you would not want your team to have such a pathetic, weak name.  

About now some of you are shocked.  “I can’t believe he just said Indians are whiny, overly sensitive, easily offended wussies!  That is racist!”  Except I don’t think that.  I think Indians is a great team name.  I know that the team was actually nicknamed for Louis Sockalexis, the first Native American player in Major League Baseball.  I think that Native Americans can be tough and formidable.  It is the left that thinks Indians are fragile wimps that need protection from being seen as anything other than victims.  Apparently even leftists who want to give out trophies to everybody are too competitive to name their team after people they consider helpless victims.

I must admit, when looking at this through the eyes of a leftist I caught myself a couple of times using logic instead.  One of the first things that popped into my head was Abbott explaining to Costello that there’s only one Feller on the Cleveland Indians.  It was very hard for me to put aside my assumption that Abbott and Costello were trying to do a hilarious bit about legendary Indians pitcher Bob Feller, and instead think that they were trying to make Native Americans cry.  Then I thought about Willie Mays Hayes, Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn, and Harry Doyle chiming “juuuuust a bit outside” in the classic baseball comedy about the Indians, Major League, and realized that a leftist cannot in good conscience watch that because the film caused irreparable damage to the lives of our indigenous population.  Please don’t ask me what damage it caused because I’m new to thinking like a leftist and I have no idea.  I think I’m supposed to avoid your question by calling you a racist for even asking it.

The name change actually does make logical sense if you think so little of Indians.  People on the left will deny that this is what they are saying about Native Americans when they object to using the name Indians, but they can’t have it both ways.  Don’t let them fool you.  That is what they are saying.  If they didn’t think indigenous people are overly sensitive wimps who would be offended by hearing a sportscaster say that the Indians beat the Tigers 8-3, then why the push to change the name?  The only other option is that leftists are delusional enough to think that the sportscaster actually did mean to attack Indians by including the team in his report.  If that is the case it seems like the least successful offense against Indians since the Little Bighorn.

Intolerant Democrats Get Jewish Man’s Yarmulke Shop on Etsy Shut Down

This story starts a couple of years back when my mother started getting into family genealogy.  She mapped out what we already knew, but then had a few family members spit into a tube to send to 23andMe and Ancestry.com to find out more information.  We expected most of the interesting stuff to come from my mom’s side.  How involved was the Italian part of our family in the mob way back when?  Were we even Italian, or were we more Albanian as one of the tests showed?  Was my aunt really the mailman’s daughter as they joked with my grandparents? 

Interestingly enough, the most surprising thing we found out was on my dad’s side.  The test came back and said that he is half Jewish.  We had no idea that we had any Jewish in our DNA at all, much less 50%.  If you know my dad, his reaction was exactly as you would expect.  He took me to the Katella Deli and ate corned beef, latkes, matzah ball soup, babka, gefilte fish, knishes, challah bread, and blintzes.  I love my dad.

Fast forward to Christmas, 2019.  I wanted to get my dad something imaginative that he wouldn’t expect and would also give him a laugh.  Then an idea hit me.  I looked online for a “Make America Great Again” yarmulke.  It was perfect!  I found one on Etsy, a website where people can make crafty products and set up their own “shop” to sell their wares on.  The gift was a hit. 

Fast forward again, this time to August 27 of this year.  In my email I find a message from the guy who I bought the yarmulke from.  It began like this:

Dear Valued Customer,

Please forgive us for sending you this unexpected email, you are receiving this because you purchased a “Trump Make America Great” Kippah or Yarmulke from our Etsy store during the past two years.  First, I want to thank you for the purchase, you should know that this store was a labor of love to help my kids pay for their Bar and Bat Mitzvah’s, my family is ever grateful to you for being part of that. 

We really need you to know the recent sad events that have transpired at our Etsy shop, Etsy who sides in many leftist causes came under pressure from the social media mob and have succumbed and permanently suspended our shop where we sold these MAGA kippahs.  It appears a customer showed off their wares on TicTok and got a tsunami of leftist outrage.  We were used to getting nasty messages on Etsy but this time Etsy sided with this outrage mob and has shut us down. 

My jaw dropped.  It isn’t surprising that leftist bullies would go on the attack.  Democrats do not tolerate disagreement.  The astonishing part was that Etsy had let them get their way and actually closed down this man’s shop.  I responded to the email and asked if I could speak to him about what happened and he agreed.

We spoke on the phone last week and he asked that I don’t use his name out of concern for his kids.  He told me that his son is a supporter of the president and has been harassed at school and has even been called out on what was described as a “mean girls” kind of webpage meant to “cancel” people.  For that reason I will call him Daniel in this article.

Daniel is an interesting man with some insightful perspective on how the left is using Marxist tactics to silence anybody who disagrees with them.  You see, Daniel is a Russian Jew who fled here in 1979 at the age of 9.  He has seen the left in action in the Soviet Union and is alarmed at the similarities he sees with the Democrats in the United States today.  He fears that Democrat policies and tactics will lead to the communism that his family fled from in the Soviet Union.  He sees how the left is promoting division and pitting everybody against each other by pushing a victim mentality on people; rich vs. poor, black vs. white, gay vs. straight, male vs. female.  He sees the left trying to silence people for having different opinions. 

Daniel mentioned another tactic that is being used here in the United States and compared it to something I had never heard of before and had to look into, Josef Stalin’s “Doctor’s Plot.”  In it, Stalin falsely accused Jewish doctors of plotting to kill Soviet leaders.  Jews were denounced as poisoners and Daniel’s grandmother, who was a doctor with many patients, was reduced to seeing just a handful of patients in secret.  Daniel sees Democrats doing the same thing by spreading horrible propaganda against people and vilifying them for political purposes.  Just look at the slander the left has perpetrated against the police in our country and you can see the obvious comparison.

I told Daniel that it mystifies me that some Jews in America could ever vote for Democrats after seeing the rising antisemitism in that party.  Between Representative Ilhan Omar’s openly anti-Semitic comments, Democrat’s support of the Iran Nuclear Deal that freed up $150 billion for a country that shouts “Death to Israel,” Democrats walking out on a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama turning his back on Israel in the United Nations, some Democrats supporting the “BDS” movement, and the Democratic Convention booing an amendment to their platform that mentioned God and supported recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, it seems unfathomable that any Jew could support Democrats.  Daniel told me that many secular Jews have forgotten their roots.  He said that “Democrats have been letting Jews down for 80 years.” 

I asked Daniel what he thinks us as Americans can do.  He said that we need to focus on bringing the culture back.  He said, “The left has won the culture war.”  When we have major commercial websites shutting down shops for selling items that show support for our president, I fear he is right.  This is just the tip of the iceberg of what kind of censorship and persecution we can expect if Democrats win next week. 

Daniel had sold over 7,000 Trump yarmulkes before his shop was shut down.  Whenever he tried to contact Etsy they told him that his complaint would be sent up the ladder but he never got anywhere with them.  I reached out to Etsy and have not received a response.  I also looked on Etsy at what other yarmulkes are allowed to be sold and found many, including “Biden/Harris” and “Black Lives Matter” versions.

Daniel has moved his business over to Ebay, and although he does not want me to confirm his identity, if you would like to support him just search on Ebay for “Trump kippahs” and many of the results will be from his shop.  Just pick your favorite design and it is likely coming from him.