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Notes -
Right wing cancel culture is a thing- remember when homosexuality could get you canceled?
Nobody wanted to see Trump get assassinated. Well, nobody wanted to see what happened afterwards. That makes this easy to start canceling people.
The guy who just tried to assassinate him presumably did want to see Trump get assassinated
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Except for the people expressing regret that the shooter missed.
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Not much of one. If you added up the top 10 people cancelled by the Right, do you think they would reach the prominence of James Damore? Google Trends could quantify it if you want to check.
No, I literally don't. Jack Black probably does given his age, but homosexuality has been (at least) tolerable for as long as I've been politically aware (though that could be a Canadian vs. American difference).
Does Bud Light count?
I think you can explain a large part of the higher visibility of LW cancel culture because progressive thought dominates so many public-facing institutions. It's hard to cancel someone if you don't have a high profile patrons like major media outlets on your side.
Bud Light is a brand, not a person. Dylan Mulvaney (of Bud Light fame) had the potential to be cancelled, but as far as I can tell it didn't happen. Was there even an attempt against her?
There was a pretty serious boycott targeting Bud Light specifically highlighting Mulvaney's ad. It's not clear she could be cancelled in the fired sense -- from my understanding, this sort of influencer stuff is usually done as one-off contract work, if that -- but afaict the beer company has studiously avoided committing for or against any further ads with her, the ad company cut a lot of staff after, and a couple execs 'went on involuntary leave'.
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Dylan Mulvaney is uncancelable by the right, and was not canceled. Alissa Heinerscheid, VP of marketing for Bud Light, might be said to have been canceled... but to be fired (her linkedin suggests she left AB Inbev in November last year) for angering your customer base by screwing up your job is another very non-central version of canceling.
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American rules varied a lot by state and context.
14 states still prohibited 'sodomy' at the time of the 2003 Lawrence v Texas lawsuit, including a few that might surprise you like Massachusetts. While most of these were not enforced or only enforced with 'aggravating circumstances' (prostitution, exhibitionism, or assault) in modern times, firings of people, especially around 'sensitive positions', quite often highlighted ties to the 'illegal' behavior. While a few jurisdictions had employment protections against discrimination on the basis of sexuality as early as the 1970s, only fifteen states had such laws by Lawrence's release, and some states bounced back and forth (Ohio has switches policies six times since 1983, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up drawing back some of the gender identity stuff again).
Even where firing (or prosecuting!) someone for being gay was legal, not all jurisdictions had such firings be common or even present. And while there aren't good records about the typical firing -- both parties had as much cause to not publicize the matter as possible -- but cancel-culture like stuff was documented even at that early era. On the other hand, even where such bans on firings were present and enforced the cases aren't necessarily the most sympathetic.
((This is further impacted by the HIV crisis: no small part of paranoia in the 1980s and even early 90s genuinely did reflect concerns about transmission of a pretty deadly disease!))
Most of the overt cases reflect federal policies (both in military and in civilians) in the 1950s and 1960s, with the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era getting increasingly inconsistent over enforcement, but the military specifically officially considered homosexual behavior or identification cause for an other-than-honorable discharge until DADT under Clinton (which generally involved honorable discharges barring physical abuse, albeit with some post-separation pay ramifications). DADT was a thing in the military until 2010, and while some units would put significant efforts into willful blindness, others were willing to act on a cuckold's tip. Some civilian federal offices allegedly retained similar unofficial policies, though it's controversial how much that's supported by evidence.
I've pointed to [JD Vance's grandmother being tolerant in 1993] as one of the parts of the story that seems the least plausible to me, and that's not without cause. A variant less focused on God could well be true, even for an Appalachian Borderer (arguably especially: borderers take blood and friends seriously and religion less-than-literally). But at the risk of extrapolating from tiny samples, I know of coastals getting fired over it in that very year; it was a couple years before my own far-more-urbane father had a Talk with me and my brother, informing us that he didn't care what race of a girl we brought home, so long as we brought home a girl. It took a while for Tolerance to really take off, and if you're younger it can be hard to grip how quickly it came through.
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