Should Tenacious D Be Cancelled?

The New Pro-Trump Cancel Culture

Since the shocking assassination attempt on Donald Trump, a new phenomenon has emerged: people getting cancelled for anti Trump statements and jokes. 

Given that for the past eight years it has been virtually mandatory to make such statements, this is a significant development.

And all it took was Trump nearly being murdered live on video.

The clearest example of this new world we are in was the cancellation of the ‘rock duo’, Tenacious D. Kyle Gass, AKA ‘the other one’, was asked to make a birthday wish onstage. To which he replied: ‘Don’t miss Trump next time’.

Gass almost immediately lost his agent, and the tour was cancelled, via a statement from Jack Black, in which he implied ending the tour was a unilateral decision, when many claim it was actually due to venues having to pull gigs for insurance reasons following a huge volume of complaints.

The joke was pretty awful, though I personally can’t bring myself to be as bothered about it as some of the other horrendous and utterly mental statements I’ve seen from journalists and large leftie Twitter accounts (see Tim Wise’s now deleted effort below, for example).

Maybe that’s because I have fond memories of Tenacious D from the ‘before times’, when life seemed normal and politics did not consume our every waking moment. I remember them as just a silly, fun band with surprisingly good technical skills and one good song.

Or maybe it’s because I did standup comedy for over a decade, and understand that you say things in the moment onstage that aren’t meant to be captured on video and shown to the whole world. 

Either way, I have some sympathy on a personal level about Gass being cancelled. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was the wrong thing to do.

The debate that has emerged on the right, or at least the non-left, since the incident, is between what I will call ‘Muh principles’ vs ‘Crush your enemies’.

The former group say that even if we suddenly have this new power (at least in the immediate aftermath of the Trump shooting) we should not abuse it by cancelling people just because we can, and just because the left has done it for years. We must maintain a belief in free expression even when we sacrifice a tactical advantage to do so, the argument broadly goes.

On the other side are those that say this is naive and will achieve nothing. The left will always crush us at every opportunity, and your principles are irrelevant. Perhaps when we win, we can apply new standards, but only once the current woke left are destroyed and the culture war is won.

Lately I find myself falling more into the latter camp. Though I would argue this is not just a case of me abandoning principles because there is suddenly a win to be had; rather, I had already altered my view as part of a gradual process.

Partly this has been a result of reading books like Neema Parvini’s The Populist Delusion, and The Total State, by Auron MacIntyre. Though mainly it simply comes from years of observing (and sometimes being a victim of) the culture war.

Fundamentally, it is just observable reality that in a war you can’t always spare the enemy.

Of course, sometimes you can. And here we get into the ‘case by case’ argument, the perfect example being the ‘Home Depot lady’—a low-paid cashier who was also fired for expressing regret that the shooter missed Trump.

The argument here is that even if one cancels players in the culture war—and Tenacious D as loudly pro-Biden celebrities can be said to qualify—it is cruel and mad to cancel a low income citizen who is only a political actor in the broadest sense of having the right to vote.

The counter argument is best expressed by this meme about orcs.

We are in a kind of war after all, and as I say, my feeling is that we probably do have to fight fire with fire at this point.

Where much of cancel culture is just rabid enjoyment in the adrenaline rush of the mob masquerading as virtue, my suspicion that we do have to punish these people comes despite my personal sympathy for them. 

If I was in World War II, presumably I wouldn’t hate most of the German soldiers, yet my duty would be to shoot them. 

Even if you think I’m getting carried away with that analogy (I am, after all, writing this sitting on the sofa eating crisps) let us ask a simple question: is it so wrong to want a society where large numbers of people don’t immediately rush to wish publicly for the violent televised murder of a leader loved by millions of their own countrymen?

At the risk of falling into the ‘imagine it was the other way round’ cliché, had this assassination attempt happened to, say, Barack Obama, such responses would be unthinkable. There would be weeks of outpourings from the mainstream media about the evil of attacking this great man, and anyone with a MAGA hat would probably go to jail.

The reality is that free speech really means, as Michael Knowles has pointed out, something more like ’speech standards’. The current battle is over whose morality, encoded in their wildly differing speech standards, gets to set the tone for America and the West. 

An example I gave a while ago on GB News (thus proving I haven’t just changed my mind because of the Trump incident) concerned people defacing the Cenotaph in London. The other panellists on the show said that, although it was awful, it was a question of free expression. Whereas to me, the vandals should have been severely punished.

That is because if it’s ok to abuse the memory of our war heroes, then we don’t have a culture. If there isn’t a specific law for it, that’s probably because until recently it was unthinkable that such a thing would ever happen. But by flooding our country with people who despise us, and by abusing the education system to teach our own citizens to despise themselves, we need new rules to defend our culture against those who would happily destroy it.

Of course, there probably is a law for it, but it is only applied to one side, merely proving yet again that this is ultimately about a clash of values.

Which is why I’ve said before that the term ‘woke right’ is nonsense. It is not moral outrage and its concomitant social punishments themselves that are ‘woke’; the question is over what values are behind these feelings and actions.

And I think we have established at this point that the two sets of values are not equal. ‘Encourage stable family units and work hard’ is not comparable to ‘white people are evil and children should be mutilated’. Or ‘rape is part of decolonisation’, or any other insane woke left belief we have seen play out in recent years.

Yet these insane ideas will win if we do not stand up to them with the same aggression they are prepared to show us.

Should one be cancelled for a joke? Ideally not. Will the same weapon you wield be used against you? Absolutely, and it has been for about a decade now. Will the other side ever stop if we keep saying ‘enjoy your free speech’ and failing to punish them? No.

Hence there is only one conclusion in this new era where even Mark Zuckerberg is praising Trump, and that is: Trump is king and all who defy MAGA must be destroyed.

Hey, I don’t make the rules.