by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While I’m aware that JK Rowling has gone out of her way to aggravate things with her fans over her strident anti-trans views, I still find myself becoming a little nervous over the whole situation.
What’s happened with her and Dave Chappelle is an example of an orthodoxy that has developed on the Left that is going to do democracy no favors as we careening towards a dark future in late 2024, early 2025.
I just want to tell an interesting story to millions of people, but I also know that I’m something of a drunk kook who doesn’t always follow the media narrative on issues of the day. As such, I mull over all the things I done with my life — especially in South Korea — and I wince. It’s way too easy to think of various ways someone might be aghast at this or that thing I did then or, hell, now and feel an urge to “cancel” me.
I’m just not perfect. I’m made a lot mistakes in my life — usually with alcohol involved — and now I find myself full of angst about how I’m going to explain all that if I ever “make it big.” (Not that there is any reason, at the moment, to think that is going to happen.)
I know I’m overthinking things a great deal. And, yet, I like to make my abstract fears concrete and worrying about being “canceled” when no one really cares about me at all right now is part of that.
I really struggle with the JK Rowling thing because she’s an example of someone being “canceled” that my Traditionalist relatives can point to when they essentially decide they want to vote for autocratic fascism on Election Day 2024. It doesn’t matter the extenuating circumstances, they just think “famous author life ruined because of the radical gay agenda of the woke cancel culture mob and it could happen to ME.”
That’s literally what they will think when they vote away America’s democratic birthright. Literally. How do you fix that issue?
