The left are eating themselves alive as cancel culture gets more unstoppable
Bored with taking down their usual conservative cultural targets and rapidly running out of statues, woke leftists are now increasingly turning on each other, writes Tim Blair.
Opinion
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SBS tax drain Michelle Law recently got all high and mighty about perceived racism in Mukbang after the short movie won a prize in the Sydney Film Festival.
Law, the sister of dull ABC indulgence Benjamin Law, denounced the film – about Korean eating contests – as “profoundly problematic in the way it appropriates Korean culture in order for a white girl to find herself”.
Law also decided, in the way of the woke, that giving the film an award showed “how racist and broken the screen industry is in Australia”.
She also accused filmmakers of “perpetuating a racist system from which they benefit”.
Anything involving the Law subsidy siblings can usually clear a room faster than a Victorian sneeze, but what happened next was fascinating. Michelle Law was busted for making a film seven years ago that had its own racial problems.
Then followed one of the most abject ritual self-shamings of the woke era. It’s Law’s finest and funniest work, and for once taxpayers didn’t contribute a single cent.
“Today, an anonymous Twitter account began a conversation with me regarding a blackface scene in my 2013 short film, Bloomers,” Law wrote last week on Twitter.
“The following thread is an apology and represents me owning my mistakes and errors completely.
“Firstly: an apology without reservation. The truth is, the scene we made seven years ago is racist. Jokes my collaborators and I made online discussing the scene seven years ago are also racist. I’m deeply sorry …
“Discussions and apologies regarding this scene have been made amongst POC filmmakers and industry figures over the years. I am happy to make those existing conversations public and transparent.”
Today, an anonymous Twitter account began a conversation with me regarding a blackface scene in my 2013 short film, Bloomers.
— Michelle Law (@ms_michellelaw) July 10, 2020
The following thread is an apology and represents me owning my mistakes and errors completely.
“POC”, for the unaware, stands for “people of colour”. Or, in my case, “person of Collingwood”. Do continue, Michelle:
“‘Bloomers‘ debuted at festivals in 2013. Since then, we removed it from distribution, feeling the scene depicted dangerous stereotypes. In depicting teens naively putting ash on their face – and asking themselves if it was appropriate – we created an inappropriate scene.
“I know some argue the scene doesn’t constitute blackface. For me it doesn’t matter: I think it does, and I am ashamed … if you’ve held me to account over this, I’m very grateful. I’m also sorry you had to invest energy and time to do so.”
Law then resumed “a break for my mental health”, which could run for decades.
Her problem is far from unique. Woke-on-woke mayhem is a serious issue for do-gooders, uplifters and moral scolds everywhere.
In the US, one victim last week wrote an anguished 2314-word piece claiming she was de-platformed by an organisation that exists to de-platform others.
Nandini Jammi, a black woman, says she is the co-founder of anti-conservative hate group Sleeping Giants. She is now leaving the group because, she alleges, she was marginalised by her fellow co-founder Matt Rivitz – a white man.
“Nearly four years after I began building Sleeping Giants, the campaign to make bigotry and sexism unprofitable, I’m leaving — but not because I want to,” Jammi wrote.
“Matt will never admit this, but we are equals.
“We independently had the exact same idea one week apart. He found me less than a day after I published a Medium post urging marketers to add [conservative news site] Breitbart to their exclusion list … we hit it off, and began working together immediately.”
Bliss! As Jammi tells it, their early days were a glorious parade of destruction and piety.
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“Sleeping Giants quickly became popular because we brought good news every day,” Jammi, a former advertising copywriter, exulted.
“Each day, advertisers would drop Breitbart or some other horror show. Best of all, anyone could participate.
“Together, we built a community of 400,000+ followers, who helped us lose Breitbart 90 per cent of its ad revenues, put Bill O’Reilly out of a job and deplatform hate figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos.”
Imagine meeting this chick at a party: “So, what do you do?”
“I sic Twitter mobs on to people, deny them prominence and drain their incomes.”
“And … you’re proud of this?”
“It’s a living.”
According to Jammi, it “was all a truly inspiring experience”. But then white guy Rivitz began to assert himself, claiming to be the sole Sleeping Giants founder and reducing Jammi in interviews to someone who “helps him run the accounts.”
“The work I had done for Sleeping Giants was also appearing on his conference bio,” Jammi complains.
“The vagueness that once helped us look like a mysterious group bigger than we were was now being claimed solely by him.”
That “bigger than we were” line also applies to the Australian arm of Sleeping Giants, which is basically run by a lone Western Australian academic. But back to Jammi and the moment that shattered her Sleeping Giants dream
“In June, I saw Matt posting from France on Instagram. ‘Are you in … Europe?’ I asked,” Jammi recalls.
“He said yes, I’m speaking at Cannes. Days later, he sent me a DM of him accepting a Cannes Gold Lion, the ad industry’s biggest award.”
Leftists love prizes almost as much as they hate conservatives. Missing out on a shiny French trinket wounded Jammi deeply.
“I felt humiliated,” she wails. “I spent the week unable to eat, sleep, or function … was I just here performing free labor in service of a white man’s personal brand?”
Seems like it, sister. It ain’t easy being woke.