In its wisdom, the Biden White House apparently has decided it is now permissible to speculate COVID-19 might have been deliberately leaked by the Chinese government from a lab intended for developing biological weapons. Even the Ministry of Truth that is Facebook has ceased censoring posts making this case, now that the Biden White House has realized the story can no longer be swept under the rug. So much the better. Any victory against the criminalization of noticing things is worth celebrating. While we may be closer to understanding where the most dangerous recent physical pathogen originated, however, we are not so lucky when it comes to the most dangerous recent intellectual pathogen. I refer to wokeness, and its most infamous applied practice, cancel culture. When it comes to this particular virus, the Right has been far more confused than they were about COVID-19, and the opposition to wokeness/cancel culture/social justice/whatever you want to call it has suffered for it. Much of our analysis of cancel culture has fixated on its intellectual roots: say, in faculty lounges during the 1970s’ “deconstruction” boom. There is merit to this understanding. Just because the ideas percolated there, however, it does not follow that…
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