Cancel culture. Do you buy it? I mean, when you hear the term do you think, Aw, they’re full of shit, or do you gnash your teeth and curse the Woke Mob?
The latest complainant to shriek he’s a victim of the dreaded CC is — wait for it! — one John Warnock Hinkley, Jr., the noted Jodie Foster fetishist and gunslinger who used President Ronald Reagan as a moving target on March 30, 1981.
Yep. Hinkley, who’s now a free man after being declared no longer deranged by shrinks and a federal judge in 2016, has been trying to break into the music biz as a folk singer/songwriter. Hinkley’s YouTube channel boasts some 36,000 subscribers. He’s also been booked to play at several small venues and therein lies his grievance.
The New York Post on Wednesday reported that Hinkley’s bent out of shape because his gig at a Connecticut hotel had been scrubbed. That concert, coincidentally or not, was to occur on the 43rd anniversary of his attempt to kill the President of the United States. “I’m a victim of cancel culture. It keeps happening over and over again,” Hinkley told a Post reporter.
Imagine that! This cancel culture stuff has gotten out of hand when a would-be assassin can’t make an honest living anymore.
Hinkley first was blacklisted in 2022 when his scheduled show at Market Hotel in Brooklyn was…, y’know, canceled. Since then, he claims, he’s been slated to appear at a total of a dozen venues. “They book me and then the show gets announced and then the venue starts getting backlash. The owners always cave; they cancel,” he told the Post.
The question arises: Do the bookers know, when they schedule John Hinkley to perform at their places, who he is? Or was? Are there folks unaware that he’s far more notable for that horrible moment in time than for his ability to croon the tune, “You and I Are Free”? Yeah, that’s the title of one of his ditties. Fitting, I guess.
Or, do they book him mainly because he pumped lead into Reagan, press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, and DC cop Thomas Delahanty. Such a notorious figure ought to pack the house, no?
Reagan, of course, swiftly became mythologized in the aftermath of the shooting. Whereas other presidents might have been such snowflakes that they died after being shot up, old Dutch took a bullet to the chest — and lived! USA! USA! USA!
Hinkley was tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity. He wrote an undelivered sentencing speech saying the shooting was “the greatest love offering in the history of the world.” He also compared Foster and himself to Romeo and Juliet and Napoleon and Josephine.
Hinkley was released from a mental institution, having been diagnosed sane 35 years after pulling the trigger. He immediately set about to establishing himself as a professional musician. Only cancel culture thus far has quashed his dream. So he says.
Hidden in plain sight within the two words, cancel culture, is the nightmarish hallucination of a seething mass of bullies silencing all who dare to dissent, be that dissent from the Left or from the Right. Although it seems those on the Right wail and wring their hands the most while crying cancel culture. And then there are people who make the whole idea a farce. Like John Warnock Hinkley, Jr.
People have indeed been silenced, from Milo Yiannopoulos to Al Franken. Some of them regain their voices. Some never do. This may shock you, but I was made awfully uncomfortable by the then-Twitter kicking Donald Trump off its platform. Edit his distortions, misrepresentations, smears, and outright lies? Sure. Silence him? Uh-uh. Of course, weeding the deceits out of his rhetoric would leave his speech sparse. That’s his problem, not mine.
But cancel him? Nah. As for Hinkley, well, there are scads of folk singer/songwriters we can listen to. Refusing to provide a venue for one who happens to be the attempted murderer of a world leader and three other innocent souls and is now technically rehabilitated isn’t a terribly disturbing violation of the principle of free speech..