Cancel Culture Cancelled?

The failure to cancel Marko Elez is a big deal

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You know how it goes.

Right-winger / conservative / pretty middle-of-the-road dude who simply isn’t a pathological leftist lunatic gets an important public-facing job.

Leftist journalists immediately set about digging into his past.

Leftist journalists discover some spicy Tweets from a few years back; an old college-newspaper article saying something about women’s responsibility not to get too drunk at frat parties if they’re concerned about getting raped; an accusation, elicited through repressed-memory therapy, that he once performed the “elephant trick” on a school trip to Germany—something “embarrassing” and “shameful,” at any rate.

A hitpiece is published.

Right-winger / conservative / middle-of-the-road dude promptly resigns under pressure or is fired. His employer, colleagues and friends, and the wider right-of-centre media, rush to condemn him and distance themselves from whatever it is he was supposed to have said or done.

There’s an apology, maybe even a tearful apology, and then the poor sod is sent on his way to live out a life in exile, far away from the center of things, forever to mourn what should have been.

Rinse and repeat.

We know how it goes, because we’ve seen it happen so many times before. We’ve lost count of how many times it’s happened, how many promising careers have been set back or even ended because of some callow indiscretion, and because of the right’s inability, pathological you might say, to protect their own, even when they have the institutional power to do so.

It happened to Darren Beattie, for example. Darren is a real smart cookie, and what’s more he’s got a pragmatic streak that’s wider than the Gaza Strip. He doesn’t just know his Husserl from his Maurice Merleau-Ponty—the guy has a PhD in philosophy from Duke, remember—he also knows how to get stuff done. He was a top hire during the first Trump administration, serving as a speechwriter until—of course—“something embarrassing” was dredged up by CNN. Darren had given a speech at a conference where some naughty “white nationalists” were also present. Beattie’s speech on “The Intelligentsia and the Right” was remarkable only for its unremarkableness, there was absolutely nothing “offensive” to be found, but since he’d been in the company of personae non gratae for a few hours, that was enough.

The liberal media wanted Darren gone, and his patrons didn’t have it in them to say, “No.” So he was gone.

Tarred by association, Beattie was promptly fired and spent the next seven years largely on the outside, working his way back in. He still did great things, like setting up Revolver.news and providing tireless investigation of the Jan 6 “Fedsurrection,” but what happened to him was, without a doubt, a heavy setback to his career.

Mercifully, Darren is now where he should be. Last week, he was promoted to a senior position within the State Department. Congratulations, Darren. You deserve it.

Happy endings—you may have been following the Marko Elez cancellation saga. I have, because the journalist who did the dirty on this young DOGE whizz kid had me in her sights last summer, when she still worked for Business Insider (she’s at The Wall Street Journal now). But that’s another story, which I’ve just written about in The Spectator.

What matters about the Elez saga is that it seems to mark a genuine turning-point in the history of cancel culture. With the American right in the ascendant not just politically but also culturally, how would they respond to the inevitable first attempt at public cancellation? Would the right’s Pavlovian conditioning kick in, or would they do something else? We waited with great anticipation to find out.

The Elez cancellation seemed, to begin with, to be playing out in a depressingly familiar way. The hitpiece dropped, noting some pretty innocuous tweets young Marko had posted on an anonymous account, and that was it: he was resigning.