Cancel Culture Trickles Down: An Up-Close Look – The American Spectator

Here’s how bad it has gotten. In a small Republican-leaning town, in a Trump +20 county, the local library board felt free to “disinvite” from speaking a mainstream conservative author with a dozen C-SPAN Book-TVs under his belt.

That author happens to be me. I had been reading about cancel culture for years, but I had never experienced it firsthand. Given the intimacy of a small-town environment, I have been able to document in detail how the whole process played out. As I learned, there is a banality to this kind of soft-core silencing that makes it even more insidious than an outright ban by hard-core censors. (READ MORE: UW-Madison Needs to Restore Fredric March’s Name)

By way of background, when I received the invitation to talk about my new book at the Darwin Barker Library in Fredonia, N.Y., I thought I would read the part of Untenable: The True Story of White Flight from America’s Cities most relevant to the regional audience.

Small-Town America: A Home To Return To

I grew up in a collapsing Newark, New Jersey neighborhood called Roseville. My wife Joan, a distinguished professor of English, grew up about a mile from the Barker Library. We’ve been spending summers in Fredonia for the last 35 years. Joan donates to the library.

“I was taken aback by the very constancy of her world,” I wrote of my first visit to Fredonia. “Many of her friends remained in place. Others who had gone away were home for the holidays. They gathered in the same bars they had always gathered in. They ate at the same restaurants, shopped at the same shops, attended the same churches.”

“I found myself envying Joan and all the young people across America who could go home again,” I concluded. “By 1970, I and my friends from Roseville could not. There was no longer any home to go home to.”

I had originally planned to call the book Dispossessed: The Untold Story of America’s Great Ethnic Diaspora, but I settled on Untenable. The original title tested too abstract and indirect, but the theme remained.

In the 1960s and 1970s, millions of Americans were compelled to leave their homes in cities big and small, and, incredibly, no one had told their story. As one reader noted on Facebook, “I hope the people who CAN go home again will read this book and understand those of us who can’t.”

Given the tone of what is in large part a memoir — “I confess, I cried several times,” wrote one reader — I was surprised to receive the email I did from Graham Tedesco-Blair, the director of Barker Library.

This classic of Orwellian doublethink opened with the small-town pleasantries needed to buffer the “however” section lurking a few sentences in: “However, after careful consideration and consultation with our stakeholders, we regret to inform you that we must disinvite you from the scheduled library appearance on September 9th.” (READ MORE: The Limits of Appeals to ‘Cancel Culture’)

Like most other censors in the land of the free, Tedesco-Blair made a paradoxical nod to free speech. “We believe that the diversity of perspectives is crucial in creating a rich and informative dialogue at our library events,” he told me. The library is, after all, “inclusive and welcoming.”

That conceded, certain “recent developments” led him to reevaluate the “suitability” of my “view and opinions” for his “diverse audience.” To be disinvited is a rare honor. Institutions prefer to keep their spaces “safe” by not inviting those whose views threaten the local orthodoxy. The uninvited go unnoticed.

The “disinvites,” however, inevitably garner attention, much of it negative for the institution doing the disinviting. In 2014, for instance, Brandeis University announced its intention to award an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the courageous Somalian feminist and author of the bestselling memoir Infidel.

Certain “developments,” however, caused Brandeis to rescind the invitation. These developments almost inevitably involve an angry protest by some belligerent faction of the multicultural coalition, in Ali’s case, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper denounced Ali as a “notorious Islamophobe” and “one of the worst of the worst of the Islam haters in America, not only in America but worldwide.”

Having endured a clitorectomy as a young girl, Ali deserved her right to criticize Islam, but not in the eyes of the clueless campus progressives or the anxious Brandeis brass. Out of fear or sympathy, they threw in with CAIR. For Ali, the cancellation was a “moment of shaming.” For Brandeis, it was a public relations disaster.

That said, the fear factor at Brandeis was not irrational. Angry Muslims have been known to enforce cancel culture with extreme prejudice. Ali knew this better than anyone. Her partner in the film Submission, Theo van Gogh, was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam 20 years ago. The Moroccan-born Mohammed Bouyeri took exception to his and Ali’s depiction of Muslim women.

In its own small-beer way, my cancellation is as ominous as Ali’s. Conservatives wrote off universities a long time ago. As the Barker Library cancellation shows, we should not have. Unchecked at the university level, cancel culture has trickled down to small-town Republican America. The speech suppressors are no longer some distant others. They are our friends and neighbors.

There’s a History of Cancel Culture in Small-Town America

It did not take much to intimidate the worthies on the Fredonia library board. “Very soon after our website posting which announced Jack’s appearance at the Barker,” library board President Jeff Adams wrote in an email to my wife Joan, “we began to receive numerous correspondence ranging from general disbelief to adverse protestations from within the local community,”

“Oddly,” Adams added, “all of this response came from women.” There was nothing odd about it. Women have long taken the lead in controlling what they see as harmful behavior. In 1873, for instance, The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at the Fredonia Baptist Church, a stone’s throw from the current site of the Barker Library.

In recent years, however, liberal female activists have increasingly come to see just about all forms of conservative speech as harmful. I got a taste of this censorious impulse 20 years ago at the famed Chautauqua Institution, a half-hour drive from Fredonia. (READ MORE: Government’s Attack on Free Speech Can Only Be Stopped by Congress)

At the invitation of a dissident Christian group at Chautauqua, I gave a talk about the liberal media, specifically their curious tolerance for socially conservative Islam. Joan Brown Campbell, the institution’s director of religion, had my speech recorded.

At the beginning stages of a futile outreach to Muslims known as the “Abrahamic Initiative,” Campbell had little use for contrary opinions, and she said as much in a Chautauquan Daily op-ed. After the obligatory preamble about the Institution’s commitment to free speech, she announced my ban from future speaking engagements. “Jack Cashill stepped outside the boundaries of civil discourse,” she explained. “Several of his comments were not only provocative, but potentially harmful.”

For Campbell and Chautauquan leadership, Islam was a religion of peace. End of discussion. Beguiled by their own wishful thinking, they offered little in the way of security to author Salman Rushdie when he spoke there just a year ago last August.

Apparently, Hadi Matar did not get his marching orders from Joan Brown Campbell. He got them from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1989, the Ayatollah put a fatwa on Rushdie’s head for his irreverent 1988 book Satanic Verses, a fatwa that has never been rescinded. In August 2022, the knife-wielding Matar attacked Rushdie on the main stage at Chautauqua and very nearly killed him.

Still protective of Islam and indifferent to knives as weapons, the major media had no more interest in trumpeting an attack of this nature than did the Chautauqua Institution. To this day, Matar rots away in the local county jail, forgotten by just about everyone outside of Chautauqua County.

The Fredonia library board, however, remembered Matar. In addressing the local furor that followed my disinvite, board president Adams compared me to Rushdie, not as a writer, but as a threat level. “That [attack] was in the back of my mind,” said Adams, equating a few local Karens with an Islamic assassin. “How were we going to manage that?”

Other board members joined in the scramble to justify what they knew to be…