A Media Attack on Musk Drops Right on Schedule
Morning peeps. This is Subculture Zero, where we round up free speech and media trends so that you don’t have to dumpster dive on Twitter.
Going on this week:
💔 Amber Heard pays for cancel culture’s sins, Johnny Depp is a voice for due process
💣 A mainstream media attack on Elon Musk drops right on schedule
🔷 Culture Bytes: The Disinformation Governance Board is out; more Twitter censorship is in; saying bio men shouldn’t play in women’s sports is “hate speech;” Jen Psaki joins MSNBC
Depp vs. Heard chaos is a referendum on cancel culture
This trial is not just a contest over which drug-abusing celebrity is more toxic.
Now that Amber Heard has been revealed as a hoaxtress, the internet has turned against her. Her tearless cry-face out-memed everything else on social media this past week. Memesters even wrote a sardonic theme song for her lawyers.
Witnesses and experts have revealed Amber’s numerous lies, her secret paparazzi submissions to humiliate Johnny Depp, her doctored photos designed to showcase bruises, fights where she yelled at Johnny while he “cowered,” her revenge-poop in the marital bed, a perjurious past (Australia—google it), exhortations to Johnny to “suck my d**k,” and even her own admission that she, in fact, physically attacked Johnny.
Ok. But who cares?
Amber is one scorned ex — not a super-villain, and not the personification of cancel culture itself. But she has become the main target on whom the public unloads their frustration.
Johnny Depp is one of many people “cancelled” in the past few years on claims that were never investigated. People vilified and professionally destroyed with dubious (if any) evidence of misconduct are in the news daily.
People like David Sabotini, the tenured MIT professor and cancer researcher at the Whitehead Lab, who was accused of sexual harassment. He dated a colleague. Then he ended it. She subsequently accused him of sexual harassment. He was cleared of “harassment,” but was fired and blacklisted anyway. And now, any suggestion that Sabotini may be innocent galvanizes vitriolic mobs, as we saw at NYU last month when the university tried to hire him. Now, Sabotini – once a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize, is unemployed. And the ex who accused him runs her own lab.
If you publicly defend a Sabotini (or even question the extent of his guilt), Twitter mobs may ruin your life. An exaggeration, you say? The NIH (National Institute of Health) received complaints that Dafna Bar-Sagi, the female Vice Dean of Science at NYU’s Langone Health, was creating an “unsafe work environment” after advocating for Sabotini.
But Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard? The truth is out. It is no longer a partisan issue. You can now defend Johnny without losing your job. And you can publicly admonish Amber.
And the people engaging in the ridicule have racked up tens of millions of views across social media.
Should Amber Heard really pay for all the sins of cancel culture?
Of course not.
As it turns out, she’s not even the solo protagonist in her own story—let alone a mastermind in the subculture of weaponizing of #MeToo.
It turns out that the ACLU ghostwrote the Op-Ed about Johnny Depp on Amber’s behalf. And then the Washington Post did their usual level of fact-checking and ran it.
But this case offers the first high-profile exoneration (at least in the court of public opinion) of someone smeared in slanderous hoax leveraging the momentum of #metoo. And people get to be upset about it.
One still cannot, however, suggest that Dr. Sabotini was decommissioned from his research without due process, or ask whether Princeton fired classics professor Joshua Katz improperly, or wonder whether other dubious cancellations are justified without putting their own reputation on the line.
Which brings us back to Amber Heard.
She has unwittingly become the receptacle for society’s frustrations with cancel culture, with the weaponizing of #MeToo, and with the ever-dropping journalistic standards supporting character indictments that go mainstream.
Simply put, people are sick of cancel culture, but still have no recourse against it. Mocking Amber Heard is the one thing they can do.
In an ideal world, we’d hold the bigger players accountable for ruining lives as well. Memes would mock the unethical media and their quasi-political brethren like the ACLU who mastermind these takedowns.
But Amber Heard is an easier target. So here we are, making poop memes of Amber doo-dooing in the bed.
And Johnny Depp is the unlikely new face of civil due process.
An Elon Musk hit piece by mainstream media drops right on schedule
This Business Insider headline has been causing pandemonium online:
“A SpaceX flight attendant said Elon Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex, documents show. The company paid $250,000 for her silence.”
This story dropped May 19th amidst Elon Musks’s tweet storm in support of free speech.
Twitterati who support opinion-suppression have been coming at Musk for weeks. They’ve said Musk is a white supremacist, a run of the mill racist, a misogynist, that buying Twitter is colonialism, Musk will inspire another apartheid, etc.
There was no official character impeachment of Musk, however — until he crossed the line. On May 18th, Musk tweeted that he plans to switch his vote from Democrat to Republican.
The sexual misconduct story dropped 24 hours later.
Other problems? Let’s re-read that headline:
The unidentified flight attendant doesn’t actually “say” anything. The source is an anonymous friend who ran the story without a greenlight from the alleged victim. With friends like that, who needs enemies, right?
Also: “documents show.” Really? Show to who? We don’t see them. Show to Business Insider journalists?
But hey. No source? No problem. People don’t need to read an article—much less think about it— to spread the word. A catchy headline and willing subjects are all an algorithm needs.
Culture Bytes:
Jen Psaki left her job as Biden’s White House Press Secretary to join MSNBC. She’ll run her own streaming show starting 2023. Of course, now that she’s officially a “media personality,” she’ll have to adjust her style to deliver information more subjectively, with narrative and spin. Oh wait…
The Disinformation Governance Board has been “paused” thanks to reasonable humans across the political spectrum.
But Twitter couldn’t live with no censorship, so they’ve escalated their content moderation policies instead of relying on the government. As of last week, Twitter users will now be stopped from liking, responding to, or forwarding tweets that receive a “warning label” in “times of crisis.” Until and unless the Elon Musk deal goes through, Twitter doesn’t seem to be learning, and is getting more controlling—not less.
This post from Senator Blackburn apparently violated Facebook’s policy on “hate speech” and had to be muted:
This viral Tweet from Bishop Talbert Swan, however, is apparently not hate speech and is totally fine:
Bishop Talbert Swan@TalbertSwanWhiteness is an unrelenting, demonic force of evil.8:18 PM · May 16, 20222.65K Reposts · 6.8K Likes
Thanks Twitter, for your meaningful content moderation policies and for making the internet a kinder place.
So that’s a wrap folks! On that uplifting note, please subscribe and share this newsletter with your friends.