In an unusual change of pace, left-wingers are on the victim’s end of a free-speech issue. This one is over a supposedly-offensive panel (pictured above) in a pro-BLM, pro-mask comic.

Running in it’s place was an apology over the offending strip:

Oh wow, they didn’t just censor the panel, they dropped the entire comic. That’s a strong reaction.

So, what was offensive about the panel? Having seen it for myself, it doesn’t seem terribly offensive. There’s multiple layers of humor to be had. For one thing, a woman is pointing out the irony behind a woman wearing a face mask also wearing a shirt that reads, “I can’t breathe”. What’s more, the poor woman wearing the shirt seems taken aback by the ignorance of the woman who didn’t seem to understand the significance of the phrase to the black community.

Of course, it’s apparent that what’s being focused on is the potential for interpretation against the ironic combination of face masks and the “I can’t breathe” slogan. Lately, those on the left have demonstrated themselves as having far thinner skin regarding anything that even has a slight potential for being interpreted as against them, to the point that they’ve called for the censorship of anything that they could determine to be upsetting to them. This has given rise to “cancel culture”, wherein people start digging into the past of content creators to find a pretext for getting them censored, perhaps even costing them their jobs. An early victim was James Gunn, the director of Guardians of the Galaxy.

On the surface, it would seem that cancel culture is driven by the desire to fight injustice. In reality, cancel culture is driven by the desire to destroy. When people are young, they have a lot of restless energy, but usually no direction or outlet for their energy. Therefore, many of them will seek to bring about a change, just to have seen it come about knowing that they were the ones who made it happen. The man who destroyed the temple of Diana did so for no other reason than to be remembered for doing so. Somewhere out there, there’s someone who knows that he was the one who got James Gunn fired, and all he had to do was find an old social media post that could be used to make him look bad.

That’s the kind of cheap sense of empowerment that cancel culture hungers for, as they enable under-employed content consumers to think to themselves, “I can ruin the life of someone more accomplished than myself, and I don’t even have to drag my distended paunch from beneath my Chromebook.”

Intersectional causes are a powerful weapon in the hands of cancel culture, as they take on left-wing causes to try to get content creators canceled, and media companies don’t seem to have the nerve to resist. Seeing that it’s playing into their hands, leftists aren’t doing very much to address cancel culture for the threat that it is, but instead feed into it, believing they stand to benefit from the efforts of armchair activists.

Now that cancel culture is turning on leftists themselves, it’s interesting to see the leftists that previously fed into it complaining on free speech issues. As sad as it may be, they manufactured the conditions of their own plight.

What goes around, comes around.