South Africa is a constitutional democracy that is deeply rooted in the rule of law, justice and equality. The South African government has not confiscated any land.

The recently adopted Expropriation Act is not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal…

— Cyril Ramaphosa 🇿🇦 (@CyrilRamaphosa) February 3, 2025

Is this what cancel culture achieved : The Atlantic

Over the weekend, the artist and entrepreneur Kanye West, now known as Ye, let loose a blitzkrieg of appalling screeds to his 33 million followers on X. "IM A NAZI," he proclaimed. He reiterated his position that "SLAVERY WAS A CHOICE," contended that "JEWS WERE BETTER AS SLAVES YOU HAVE TO PUT YOUR JEWS IN THEIR PLACE AND MAKE THEM INTO YOUR SLAVES," implied that domestic violence is a self-sacrificing form of love, and shared a screengrab tallying the sales receipts for a White Lives Matter T-shirt sold on his Yeezy website. By Monday, the only product for sale on the site was a white T-shirt adorned with a black swastika, and his X account had been deleted.

Remarkably, this was not the highest-stakes or most widely discussed racist controversy on that social-media platform during the same time frame. On Friday, Vice President J. D. Vance defended Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency office, who was revealed to have posted (pseudonymously), "I was racist before it was cool," "You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity," and "Normalize Indian hate."

When Ro Khanna, the Indian American representative from California, inquired of Vance—whose wife and children are of Indian descent—whether, "for the sake of both of our kids," he would ask Elez for an apology, Vance became apoplectic. Toward Khanna. "For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up," he fumed on X. "Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don't threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children."

Elez resigned from his post, and Musk asked his 217 million followers on X what they thought: Should he be reinstated? Almost 80 percent of those who replied said yes. Later that day, Musk confirmed that Elez would be "brought back" to DOGE. Not only was a self-professed racist like Elez not canceled—on the contrary, he was transformed overnight by some of the most powerful (and pugnacious) men in America into a national cause célèbre.

Incidentally, this was the same week that Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, announced that it had hired Daniel Penny as "a Deal Partner" working on its "American Dynamism team." Penny, a former Marine, was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide after he held a mentally ill man in a choke hold on the subway, and the man died. In an internal memo reported by The New York Times, an Andreessen Horowitz partner praised him for showing "courage in a tough situation."

If a vogue for virtue signaling defined the 2010s and early 2020s, peaking in 2020 during the feverish summer of protest and pandemic—a period in which pronouns in bio, land acknowledgments, black squares, diversity statements, and countless other ethical performances became a form of social capital—something like the exact photonegative of that etiquette has set in now. The reassertion of brute reactionary power in the dual ascendancy of Donald Trump and Elon Musk has brought us to a cultural tipping point. Virtue be darned: Now we are living in an era of relentless, unapologetic vice signaling. Of all of Ye's deranged posts, one was particularly confusing. "DO YALL THINK I CAN TURN THE TIDE ON ALL THIS WOKE POLITICALLY CORRECT SHIT," he asked. Here it seemed the infamous trendsetter was decidedly behind the times.

After a decade and a half of progressive dominance over America's agenda-setting institutions—corporations, universities, media, museums—during which everyone was on the lookout for the scantest evidence of racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, and every other interpersonal and systemic ill, it is not at all frivolous to ask what has been achieved. What, to put it bluntly, was all that cancel culture for?

If the genuine but ill-conceived goal was to create a kinder, friendlier, more inclusive and equitable world for all (often paradoxically by means of shaming, coercion, and intimidation), the real-world effect has been an abysmal rightward overcorrection in which norms of decency have been gleefully obliterated. We have not merely been delivered back to the pre-woke era of the early 2000s. Nor is what we're seeing some insubstantial vibe shift in manners and aesthetics, confined to the internet.

Consider: We had a #MeToo movement characterized by sometimes disproportionate reputational sacrifices; now we have a presidential Cabinet populated by men with credible sexual-assault accusations on their records. The stifling racist/anti-racist binary of the anti-racism movement has led to the wholesale dismantling of DEI initiatives in both the government and the private sector. The insistence that "no human is illegal" has ended with an unconstitutional attempt to retract birthright citizenship. And the push not just for tolerance but for the equivalence of trans athletes with cisgender athletes has culminated with the president banishing "gender ideology" and surrounding himself with a multiethnic crowd of beaming girls to sign the "No Men in Women's Sports" executive order. On every single issue that mattered to them, progressives now find themselves in a weaker position than before.

In The Opium of the Intellectuals, the French sociologist Raymond Aron observed that utopian programs are "refuted not so much by their failure as by the successes they have achieved." In the blistering weeks since Trump's inauguration, we can say that this has been axiomatically true of the movement we look back on now as "wokeness."

AOC says she's NOT pregnant. She just "ate a lot of food at Thanksgiving. It happens." pic.twitter.com/1L2uhwodGJ

— Libby Emmons (@libbyemmons) February 12, 2025

Checking out some fragrances today. Unlike most of you apes, I don't rely on my "natural musk" or "urinating everywhere" when out in the wild to attract mates. On one page, I found a couple o comments that might go against the mindset that only homosexuals wear perfume.

Advance&Conquer; 02/08/25 14:01  

boffin1979 you nailed it!

(scrolls down to see comment because I'm a retard and don't understand CTRL + F.)

boffin1979   01/31/25 23:04

Exactly the same as Tobacco Blaze, but with a more vegetal leaning evoking more of a masculine bias. Very nice. If you like "different" this one is for you. Not recommended for gays and nancyboys.

So, ladies, do you want to smell like a or are you a ?

Women be crying

I posted about this too... I hated him being abusive and now this "he died" gaslamping stuff is giving me serious panic

I'm 16 but I feel like I grew up to fast. I still feel like Im 8-9, my age dysphoria is bad I hate birthdays, I hate telling people my age, and I hate being around people my age or older because I feel little and even ppl who are 13 feel older than me :(. and I try my best to dress like an 8-9 year old even though I'm tall and don't look like a little kid :(, why don't people take me seriously when I say I'm trans age? I just want to be respectful and validated and taken seriously. I'm not a creep, I just have age dysphoria and I still feel like I'm mentally 8-9

Congratulations Best Country Album winner - 'COWBOY CARTER' @beyonce 🎶 #GRAMMYs pic.twitter.com/jLVnG5T6aw

— Recording Academy / GRAMMYs (@RecordingAcad) February 3, 2025

Beyoncé won the Grammy for the best country album.

Even she knows it's rigged pic.twitter.com/NzncvWTal2

— TaraBull (@TaraBull808) February 3, 2025

There’s no way Beyoncé deserved to win a Grammy for Best Country Album for “Cowboy Carter”. It’s not even good! She only won because she’s a black woman and the Grammys are woke af. This was a DEI award. pic.twitter.com/7FVMZg6R40

— Right Winged Angel (@RightWngdAngel) February 3, 2025

Beyonce can shut the frick up now. You see the win for #GRAMMYs and she's NOT country. That's fricking dog shit music. And you know that they paid for that best of country album. Wonder how much Jay Z paid the academy to get that shit for her?

Fricking pitiful. No wonder I skip it.

— Danny 🇺🇸🏒⚾️🐈✝️ (@HawkeyeRoad) February 3, 2025

the CMAs didn’t even consider beyonce and she still won best country album at the grammys. i know those racists mad #Grammys pic.twitter.com/9Maotr5m9r

— ‏ً (@drivenbyfilms) February 3, 2025

Imagine they tried to play Beyoncé at the country music awards by not even giving her a single nomination, meanwhile she won a whole butt Grammy for Best Country Album. pic.twitter.com/YRMw8gm15E

— goodaz. (@tsunamitaj) February 3, 2025

Kacey Musgraves was SO PISSED about Beyonce winning Best Country Album 😂 #grammys pic.twitter.com/u95FYUm2vg

— Don Chenz (@DonChenz) February 3, 2025

Taylor Swift presenting Beyonce with the Grammy for Best Country Album is sure to make MAGA heads explode. pic.twitter.com/i93W2dCUJV

— Art Candee 🍿🥤 (@ArtCandee) February 3, 2025

I don't care about Beyonce or country music and have never listened to a second of this album, but I think it's pretty obvious this is how Kamala can still win.

Got axed. Not going to say which agency.

I've always considered myself extremely tolerant and willing to love people as they are… even if we don't agree on everything.

I've never been an Orange Man supporter, but I've kept it civil with friends and family that were. Some of them liked having a civil conversation about him. Some were belligerent about politics, so we didn't bring it up and tried to enjoy each other's company.

Getting cut from a great job that I really believed in with no notice has been extremely traumatic. It's still raw, but I feel so personally betrayed by those that voted for him. I can't see past the politics anymore when I look at these people I care/cared about.

Some have been contrite and apologetic, but then turn around and support him and VP Musk on social media.

I just can't right now.

I'm thinking about posting something and wishing the whole herd all of the best, hope they have a good life, but I won't be in it. Or maybe I just quietly block all of them and focus on myself for a while.

I do know that I will need to talk to my in-laws. I've always had a great relationship with them, but thinking of going to their house and watching Fox News almost makes me sick.

AITAH for feeling this way? Does it make me an AH for cutting all these 20+ year relationships off? Am I overreacting and acting out of emotion?

My parents are at the Maha Kumbh Mela, the largest human gathering ever—~450M people over 6 weeks!

It happens every 144 yrs, based on planetary alignment.

Hindus believe a dip in the sacred river purifies the soul.

They say it's incredibly well-run; quite the spectacle. pic.twitter.com/o356JZfxu8

— Sheel Mohnot (@pitdesi) February 14, 2025

Compare the posts in the thread to my example:

https://rdrama.net/post/342112/rddt-is-in-freefall-after-daily/7787580#context