Fox News contributor Tomi Lahren brought right-wing media’s obsession with so-called “cancel culture” to its inevitable full circle on Tuesday, calling for conservatives to “start canceling” the companies that engage in “cancel culture.”
After devoting multi-day outrage cycles over Mr. Potato Head and The Muppets being the latest victims of a supposed cancel-culture mob—neither of them, of course, were actually canceled—Fox News spent much of Tuesday complaining about the news that six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published due to racist and insensitive imagery.
“These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises said in a statement on Tuesday, which coincided with the late author’s birthday. “Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ catalog represents and supports all communities and families.”
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While FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate about the Capitol riots and right-wing extremists’ role in the insurrection, Fox News early-afternoon panel show Outnumbered instead kicked off its broadcast by discussing how the late children’s book author was the most recent casualty of cancel culture.
“Canceling Dr. Seuss. Why, why, why?” Harris Faulkner dramatically asked atop the panel conversation.
The Fox News anchor then somehow contrasted the police killings of George Floyd and others to a book publisher taking a handful of books out of rotation due to offensive imagery.
“You know, I’m looking at this and I know where we’ve been since the death of George Floyd last May 25th and others,” Faulkner declared. “And you wonder why in this country we can’t have a real conversation about what justice and race and all those things look like; how you can do it by loving police officers and people of color at the same time.”
She continued: “You wonder why we can’t?! We can't even handle a Dr. Seuss book that might offend us. We can't even go there!” she said before teeing up Lahren: "I literally can rant on this forever but it’s not my turn. Tomi, it’s yours.”
Lahren's suggested solution to all problems is “always more speech,” adding that if there is something offensive in a book, then that just needs to be discussed. “That’s how people are able to decipher what’s acceptable and what’s not,” she said. “More speech, more ideas.”
From there, she warned that liberals and progressives are “going to cancel everyone” and, therefore, the only recourse conservatives have is more cancel culture.
“It's time we start fighting back,” the pro-Trump firebrand exclaimed. “It's time we start canceling the companies that cancel other people, that cancel other ideas and say, ‘Hey listen, we don’t like how radical you’re being with your cancel culture so we’re not going to shop there.’”
Lahren added, “It's time that we join together in numbers like the way the cancel culture mob has done so and fight back!”
The Fox Nation host went on to say that we need companies with a “backbone” in order to “end cancel culture” and say “enough is enough.”
