- by Shea Angus

Jordan Peterson. Ben Shapiro. Shane Gillis. Dave Chappelle. Donald Trump. Jemele Hill. Bill Maher. Don Cherry. Jess Allen.

Recognize any of these names? Chances are you know who they are because people tried to deplatform, fire, or otherwise shut these people down.

This is just a small list of the “victims” of cancel culture.

Since the attempts to shut down these people, they’ve gone on to become best selling authors, grow their own brands, go on international tours, expand their audiences, and one of them even became the President of the United States. All because people tried to shut them down. Whoops!

I’ve struggled to properly articulate my feelings about this Don Cherry situation which seems to be ever evolving even days after his firing from Sportsnet. Since then, Jess Allen weighed in with a controversial take of her own, generalizing hockey players as “white boys” who weren’t “very nice, they were not generally thoughtful, and often bullys” that Don Cherry is a “walking and talking representative of”. Yikes.

What has the fallout been? Well it seems all of the people outraged that Cherry was fired are now suddenly in favour of firing people for controversial statements that they disagree with. You’ve seen it too. Heck, you might even be that person!

Aside from the glaring hypocrisy on display from all sides who condemn one person while passionately defending the other, what nobody has seemed to try and realize is the consequences of their actions.

Let’s take a look at Google Trends. Search results for “Jess Allen” and “the social” are up over 130% from normal. Let’s check in on Don Cherry.

For the sake of brevity I won’t run all the names through this to demonstrate my point, but I encourage you to look up the names I shared and note the peaks of their popularity. Of course part of that traction online is people seeking to cancel them, but the undeniable truth is that these efforts often backfire spectacularly and leave these individuals with more of a platform than they had before the efforts to “cancel” them.

Before this week, I did not have a clue who Jess Allen was or that “the social” was even a show on TV. Even if Allen were to get fired, the amount of interest in her would only leave her better off than she is now. Mark my words. Cherry will not only recover from this, but he will enjoy a platform that offers him more money and more time than a small slot during intermission on Saturday nights.

Cherry generalized immigrants in his statements by saying they didn’t wear poppies. Not a single person in this country has any substantive evidence to suggest that is the case, and Cherry even admitted to mispeaking, saying he should have said “everyone” instead of “you people”. If you take a quick peak online though, many people claimed Cherry was “speaking for them” and saying “what we were all thinking”. A truly fascinating take given the lack of any reputable source on immigrants and poppies.

Allen on the other hand was the only person to actually directly mention race and she went on to make targeted derogatory comments generalizing a group of people to a round of applause on her show. Similarly to Cherry, you have people reaffirming her point of view, citing their own anecdotal examples while ignoring the seemingly much more substantive and larger case of say the Humboldt Broncos and how the hockey world and indeed our entire country rallied around the victims of that tragedy.

If you are an immigrant or a white hockey player, maybe you feel more strongly about one comment over the other and that is okay. But please, don’t make this a race to the bottom. Both Cherry and Allen are wrong but neither of them deserve to lose their jobs as providers of opinion for simply stating their opinions.

The world is divided. Half of the world disagrees with you on everything we can have opinions on. We can’t even agree on facts anymore. Stop being afraid of people that say things you don’t like. Instead of demanding they apologize or calling for their termination, challenge them. Grant them the opportunity to clarify themselves. Actively search outside of your bubble for things that challenge you and your point of view because if the only people that had jobs in news and entertainment were the people we all agreed with, there wouldn’t be news or entertainment.