Joe Concha on cancel culture: 'You say something that the woke mob doesn't agree with and you will be eliminated'
People in America are not allowed to debate anymore as they risk losing their livelihood, The Hill's media reporter Concha says
People in America are not allowed to debate anymore as they risk losing their livelihood, said The Hill's media reporter Joe Concha on Monday, describing cancel culture as a "dangerous time."
“You say something that the woke mob doesn't agree with and you will be eliminated,” he told “Fox & Friends” on Monday. “Boy, is that a scary time right now.”
Concha made the comments reacting to statements on cancel culture made by former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss during an appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday night.
“In order to do our job well, writers and editors, we need to have a level of bravery and thick skin and fearlessness and when you are living in fear of an online mob… that's extremely dangerous,” Weiss said on Friday. “What cancel culture is about is not criticism, it's about punishment… The writer Jonathan Rauch [of the Atlantic] has called it something like social murder.”
Weiss shocked the media landscape in mid-July with her stunning resignation letter to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, in which she wrote she was bullied by her own colleagues for her different point of view.
On Monday, Concha noted that Weiss “was maybe center for the New York Times, maybe a little bit left-of-center.”
He added that he found her conversation with Maher on Friday to be “fascinating.”
Concha pointed to a point she made that he found “very interesting,” which was “when you take away civil debate and you lose the ability just to simply disagree on things, but find a common ground, the next logical step is violence.”
He went on to say that that is what “we’re seeing that on a nightly basis in cities like Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, New York, Atlanta, across the country.”
Cities across the country have been experiencing protests, many of which have turned violent, since the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
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“We can't even debate anymore,” Concha said. “Now it's just OK, burn it down because it's not just about correcting somebody or disagreeing, to Bari Weiss’ point, it’s about making somebody radioactive and taking away their livelihood and that's a dangerous time now.”
Concha brought up the resignation of Times editorial page editor James Bennet as an example. Bennet resigned after publishing an op-ed written by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., in which the senator called for the U.S. to deploy the military to quell nationwide riots.
The paper's decision to publish the Cotton piece sparked a major backlash among Times employees.
“We saw it at The New York Times, Bari Weiss’ old paper, where an editor was literally eliminated, forced to resign because he ran an editorial from Tom Cotton, [a] Republican, advocating for the use of the military during mass protests that get out of control that get violent,” Concha said.
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“A majority of the American people agreed with that according to polling, nope, not good enough, the woke mob came for that editor and now he doesn't have a job today and we are seeing that across the country.”
Fox News’ Joseph Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
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