The Home Depot Lady Must Be Canceled
Read William Benson in The American Mind!
William Benson, editor-in-chief of The American Postliberal, was recently published in The American Mind in response to the “controversy” surrounding the firing of a Home Depot employee who voiced support for the assassination attempt on President Trump.
You can read an excerpt from the article below and can read it in full here!
The Home Depot lady is just as much a foot soldier of the Left as any conservative X user. This woman will never have a position of power or prominence, but she does play a role in propagating her beliefs to her family and community. Therefore, when she takes to social media to celebrate the attempted assassination of a president, there is no choice but to cancel her. If she is willing to follow the Left into battle, then she should expect to be treated as an enemy combatant.
I was recently involved in an argument with my friends over this issue. I'll defend the Home Depot lady in the same way I would defend the J6 "insurrectionists." We live in a political hyper-reality. People don't think hard about their words or actions. In a sane world, anyone marching into a capitol building in session would be warned (if they were lucky) and then shot. In a sane world, anyone uttering support for threats to the life of a president would be jailed. But today, we do not live in a sane world.
Certainly leftist are happy to jail their opponents, and I understand that taking the procedural "high ground" is a big losing strategy that conservatives can't get over. But here's how I see it: if conservatives will begin wielding state power toward just ends, we could end our political hyper-reality. There are so many more egregious instances of injustice than some low level, middle aged working class woman posting a tweet wishing that Trump were killed. She didn't utter a threat of violence, and even presuming she had, no one would take it to mean she was actually planning to go try to kill Trump. Just like we don't take it to mean the J6ers were actually planing an overthrow of the government (even though, arguably, some were).
I understand your point, we need to change the social temperature, we need to fight fire with fire, we need to secure a quick victory, we need to coalesce around common causes, we need to remind people that their words and actions matter. I'm not defending her from an anti-cancel culture, anti-censorship point of view, nor from a lack of courage. I'd just rather start by going hard against criminals and drug dealers and pornographers and elites who have been fraudulent or negligent in their duties to the people. After order has been restored to politics, then we can re-evaluate. This feels like going after drug users rather than the manufacturers and dealers.