Kareem Abdul-Jabbar endorses cancel culture: 'stars deserve the harsh backlash'

Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar took to the pages of the Hollywood Reporter to endorse canceling celebrities he disagrees with in an op-ed published Wednesday.

Abdul-Jabbar claimed in his op-ed that fame and fortune can give celebrities a "too famous to fall" mentality, leading them to promote ideas which he considered to be unacceptable with an aura of credibility. He approvingly quotes the famous line from Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." In Abdul-Jabbar's estimation, the villainization of celebrities who do not tow the progressive line is only sensible.

He starts off by comparing celebrities who do not toe the progressive line to notorious serial rapists such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, who he correctly stated "committed heinous acts to obliterate their achievements." He goes on to suggest that social media, like drugging and raping women, can cause celebrities to "commit instantaneous career suicide and destroy any good-faith legacy they spent a lifetime building."

The first example of such "career suicide" Abdul-Jabbar cites is that of Rudy Giuliani, who's "post-9/11 demeanor of calm authority" began to diminish over time, he alleges. He repeats the false claim that Giuliani was caught touching himself in front of a teenage girl on the set of Borat, ignoring the fact that Giuliani was never told the age of the actress, who was in fact a 24-year-old playing a teenager. If Giuliani had any doubts about her age, the fact that she was offering alcohol during a live interview would have sufficiently suggested that she was, at the very least, of legal drinking age.

A quick glance at the movie also reveals clearly that Giuliani was not touching himself. Abdul-Jabbar writes dismissively in parentheses that "Giuliani insists he was tucking in his shirt," and while deceptive editing does make it appear as if Giuliani was touching himself, which the director and star Sacha Baron Cohen insists was the case, it does not take much fantasy to believe that an overweight 76-year-old would need to lie down to tuck in his pants, which the actress had originally untucked. When Borat storms into the room, sparking Giuliani's departure, Giuliani's shirt is tucked in again. So if the former New York City mayor was not tucking in his shirt on the bed, why was it tucked in during the subsequent footage? When did he have time to tuck it in?

None of these questions matter to Abdul-Jabbar in his quest to justify cancel culture, where the existence of criticism itself is held to be more important than the substance of the criticism.

Such attitudes are even more exemplified when Abdul-Jabbar turns his attention to Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who he offers no substantive criticism of aside from the fact that she was criticized. He cites her "anti-trans tweets" supposedly leading to her "tainting her entire literary legacy," but could not even be bothered to bring up an example of such tweets, let alone explaining why they are wrong. Instead, he points out that Harry Potter stars such as Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson have publicly criticized her positions on these matters, as if these celebrities carry any more credibility than the ones he's criticizing.

Abdul-Jabbar criticizes the very concept that celebrities should be taken as authorities on anything, a fair but entirely different question from whether they deserve to be "cancelled" for wrongthink. Of course, unlike other celebrities, Abdul-Jabbar insists that he should be taken seriously, justifying himself by stating that he has been "writing books and articles about history, culture and politics for 30 years to establish [his] credibility." Apparently writing books which channel deeply with archetypal thoughts and ideas, as is the case of JK Rowling, or reducing murders by well over 50 percent in America's largest city, as is the case with Giuliani, does not qualify oneself for seriousness, unlike Abdul-Jabbar's highly impressive credentials of "writing books and articles."

The left-wing YouTuber Natalie Wynn, known more commonly by her online persona ContraPoints, published a video in January where she discussed the essential characteristics of cancel culture, describing it as "a teensy bit of a reign of terror situation on our hands," referring to the phase of the French Revolution whereby a public spectacle was made of guillotining opponents of the revolution. She describes two major steps in cancel culture, essentialization and guilt by association.

Her video on the subject was prompted by her own "cancelling." Wynn was villainized by the online mob after she was accused of being "truscum," a slur directed towards people who are accepting of transgender people (or, as in Wynn's case, are transgender themselves), but feel more apprehensive about accepting identities such as non-binary or other gender identities which have cropped up in the past couple of decades. Essentially, it is the belief that "true" transgender people are people who transition from male to female or vice versa. While Wynn does not hold such views herself, and has in fact made videos defending non-binary gender identities, she was given this label after allowing transgender porn actor Buck Angel to read a single quote in one of her videos, and Angel has criticized non-binary gender identities in the past.

The two steps of cancel culture can be clearly seen here. Wynn was "essentialized" as a "truscum," or someone who hates gender non-conforming people, based on her guilt by association.

Wynn also brings up the example of James Charles, who was cancelled after being essentialized as a "sexual predator" and many of his former fans, seeking to avoid any guilt by association, unfollowed him. Charles is a gay male makeup artist on YouTube who's fall from grace came after one of his competitors created a manufactroversy because he allegedly flirted with straight men and "tried to convince them that they were gay." Lack of evidence aside, such an endeavour does not seem like it would be fruitful with anyone who wasn't already questioning their sexuality.

Abdul-Jabbar falls into the tropes which Wynn describes as essential to cancel culture. He implies that JK Rowling can be essentialized as a transphobe for her criticism of trans activists, and uses guilt by association by pointing out that people who she was formerly associated with, the actors who performed in the Harry Potter movies, no longer want to be associated with her.

It can be easy to defend cancel culture when its wielded against people with a radically different moral basis for politics. Cancel culture relies on faux-moralistic criticism, and it's easy to deliver such criticism when the person being criticized has a moral outlook which is irreconcilable with your own. It is much harder to defend when cancelled individuals are ruthlessly disgraced for such ridiculously shallow reasons.

Abdul-Jabbar does not mention either of the cases brought up by Wynn, either because he doesn't know about them or he doesn't care, but they are important to mention. In the case of Wynn, a belief system which demands increasingly greater ideological purity will end up cancelling people for the most trivial of reasons. In the case of Charles, cancel culture can be weaponized by slick competitors seeking a petty admonishment of their competition, even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

After admonishing several celebrities, Abdul-Jabbar turns his attention to social media fact-checking, which he insists "needs to be done with more consistency and vigilance." He suggests that since fact-checking isn't widespread enough on tech platforms, "there can be a backfire effect in which content that isn't flagged, even when inaccurate, is perceived as true."

Once again, Abdul-Jabbar leaves out key examples which would challenge his own point. Many social media companies took to fact-checking and even outright deleting posts about the Hunter Biden controversy which began to crop up in October after being reported on by the New York Post. It later turned out that not only were these stories not false, but Biden was already under investigation by a District Attorney's office in Pennsylvania in connection with the allegations described by the newspaper, and had been under investigation for well over a year. In this case, not only did the fact-checkers on tech platforms suppress true information, but such suppression may have even swung the election in Biden's favour.

"The irresponsibility of tweeting irrational and harmful opinions to millions, regardless of the damaging consequences to their country or people's lives, proves that those stars deserve the harsh backlash," Abdul-Jabbar writes. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that Abdul-Jabbar will face any serious backlash at all for writing irrational and harmful opinion pieces which justify bringing damaging consequences to the lives of innocent people for the crime of disagreement.