These people once said they cared about ‘cancel culture’. But look at how they are trying to cancel the children’s YouTuber Ms Rachel for featuring a toddler from Gaza on her channel
Thoughts and non-denominational prayers to all the anti-woke warriors out there. It may seem as though everything is going their way now Donald Trump is back with a vengeance, but the poor things have run into a bit of a branding problem. For years, the anti-woke crowd positioned themselves as fearless free thinkers taking on the intolerant left. The journalist Bari Weiss wrote a fawning New York Times piece in 2018 describing rightwing voices such as Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens as “renegades of the intellectual dark web” (IDW).
Now, however, the people who used to position themselves as oppressed truth-tellers operating in what Weiss’s article called an “era of That Which Cannot Be Said”, have a state-sanctioned microphone. They’ve won. But in winning they’ve made it difficult to continue the charade that they give a damn about “cancel culture”. Look around: some of these self-styled free speech warriors are doing everything they can to ruin the lives of everyone who doesn’t 100% agree with them.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
