Canceled

We're on the verge of becoming the Third Reich of the twenty-first century, and Democrats and progressives are more interested in banishing people than reforming them.

Anthony Scaramucci (above) worked for Donald Trump for eleven days in 2017 and had known him casually for many years before.  Having seen Trump and his modus operandi up close and personal, he has made it his life's work to warn people about Trump and help anyone opposed to him - including Kamala Harris, whom he helped prepare for her first and only debate with Trump.   But Democrats made it clear to Harris that they didn't want Scaramucci in the campaign because he had once worked for Trump.

Incredible.

Democrats in general and progressive Democrats in particular don't take seriously or acknowledge at all anyone who has worked for Trump and has since "seen the light" and started speaking out against him.  Indeed, they ridicule anyone's insistence that they have "seen the light" and prefer that the anti-Trump resistance movement be populated by anyone who were against Trump from the start.  Cancel culture, once confined to historical figures and artistic media (Thomas Jefferson, prog rock) that women and people of color deem offensive, has now been extended to living people who misjudged Trump and paid a heavy price for it.

Michael Cohen, Scaramucci's fellow Long Islander and Trump's most devoted sycophant in his pre-presidential years, helped Trump ruin a lot of careers and maybe even a few lives, but he has been repenting every day for it ever since he did time in prison, warning people about Trump.  Many progressives don't want to bother with him, either.  But who better to warn us about Trump than someone who was there with him and witnessed him firsthand?  Heck, I liked the 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie when I saw it in the theaters as a kid - loved it, in fact - but I've since come to see how it misrepresented the Beatles' songs and legacy and how trying to make a rock opera out of so many disparate Beatles tunes was a fool's errand (and I couldn't have picked a bigger fool than Robert Stigwood to prove it), and now I warn neophyte Beatles fans not to see it.  Would fellow Beatles fans cancel me for having liked the movie so much that I even collected the bubble gum cards from it?  No, of course not.  (They did cancel Peter Frampton for being in the movie, and it took him decades to recover from that career misstep, but that's another post.) 

Progressives in the Democratic Party, of course, are so smug and self-righteous that they would have rejected Ebenezer Scrooge after he tried to embrace Christmas.  (Paradoxically, these are usually the same white progressives who demonstrate solidarity with their black counterparts by celebrating Kwanzaa with them in December.)  Many rank-and-file MAGA voters have dug in their heels in response to the refusal of many progressives to at least hear MAGA's grievances, many of which are legitimate, like the hollowing-out of every other industrial town in Ohio.  Bernie Sanders gets it.  He's been reaching out to MAGA voters for years, trying to gain their trust and support and make them see the errors of their ways.  But most progressives would rather refuse support from famous people burned by Trump like Scaramucci and Cohen and also refuse support from not-so-famous people who voted for Trump and got burned by him as well.  Triple Trumpers - those who voted for Trump thrice in each of the general elections in which he was a presidential candidate - are lost forever, and they should obviously be ostracized to the fullest extent.  But progressives would obviously ostracize anyone who voted for Trump even once.

Remember earlier this week, when I disparaged Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan for their hostility toward Roman Catholics as well their hostility against men of both Alpha and Beta leanings - that is, all men in general?  (They both sound like the aging high-school football head cheerleader who never stopped thinking of men as studs or nerds.)  To paraphrase Nick the bartender in the nightmarish segment of It's a Wonderful Life where Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville . . . you know, that's another reason for me not to like them.  Welch and Sullivan recently dismissed Scaramucci and Cohen for being late arrivals to the anti-Trump resistance and went so far as to mock them for saying they had "seen the light."  If those two Okies have such a self-righteous attitude, then they're just as insufferable as the most smug East Coast progressives.   Which is why I canceled them from my YouTube feed.