Next Time Cancel Me for Something I Actually Said

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, September 19, 2024

 

Everyone in my business takes lumps for things they say. That comes with the territory. What’s different is getting smeared for something you verifiably didn’t say.

 

This has been the project of malicious accounts on X the last few days that have insisted that I said a racial slur during an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show last weekend.

 

These ridiculously false accusations on social media — that have been rebutted even by people who disagree with me politically — have now resulted in cancellations in the real world.

 

I was scheduled to speak at Indiana State University in a couple of weeks, but the university has scrapped my appearance “in light of recent developments and following the advice of our public safety officials regarding campus and community safety concerns.”

 

This is a classic pretext, often used by university officials to dispense with speakers they find inconvenient. They’d really love to have them, don’t you know, but it will take as much security as is required for Donald Trump to play a round of golf, so, sadly, it just isn’t possible.

 

Like all cancelers, the university wants you to believe that this is just an exception to its scrupulous fair-mindedness: “It is important to stress that this cancellation is not intended to limit our neutrality on different political viewpoints.”

 

Uh-huh. Taking the side of a woke online fringe and giving it what it wants on the basis of an almost certainly nonexistent security threat doesn’t speak to political neutrality.

 

And if there is a real security threat, what does that say about Indiana State University? If the young people under its care and tutelage are liable to storm a lecture hall if I show up, that is an indictment of them, not me.

 

It pains me to say I’ve also been canceled by the Badger Institute, the right-of-center think tank in Wisconsin. The president called on Tuesday to ask me to withdraw from an address at an upcoming dinner, and when I refused and asked him what I’d done wrong, he only said something or other about “the environment.” When I flatly asked him whether he was disinviting me, he said, “Yes.”

 

Cowardice is contagious.

 

I don’t want to suggest this is anything on the order of what other people have suffered in losing their livelihoods and reputations to cancel culture. This episode is worth dwelling on, though, because the underlying phenomenon is so pernicious and stupid, and people who don’t have gallons of ink to defend themselves the way I do and don’t work for a conservative organization the way I do are particularly susceptible to this kind of cut-rate McCarthyism.

 

Bear with me for a minute to go into a little detail.

 

On Megyn Kelly’s show, I was discussing the Springfield, Ohio, controversy, and, in the course of saying “Haitian migrants,” I started to mispronounce the word “migrants.” I began to say it with a short “i,” the way you say “immigrants,” instead of the long “i” that you use for “migrants.” I caught myself in the middle, before shifting to the correct pronunciation.

 

So, I said what you might call the “M-word.” You can try to look up the M-word, but you will fail — because it’s not a word, let alone a racial slur. It happens to rhyme with a racial slur, but that doesn’t make it one.

 

If you want to go to absurd Zapruder-film lengths, you can slow down the clip and hear more clearly that what I said begins with an “m,” and that my lips are pursed, which is what you do when you are saying “m,” but not “n.”

 

None of this matters, of course, to an online mob that operates on the principle, “Shoot first, worry about discerning the truth never.”

 

Some stories said things like I “appeared” or “seemed” to say a racial slur, which is weaselly innuendo. What does “appear” have to do with it? I either said it or I didn’t. Since, upon careful listening and viewing, anyone can discern that I obviously didn’t, writing that I “appeared” to utter it is just a way to make the charge without the evidence.

 

Same with stories declaring in a gotcha tone that I “denied” saying a racial slur. Yes, of course I denied it — because I didn’t say it. But these stories apply a classic “when did you stop beating your wife?” logical fallacy to imply that my denial of a completely fabricated charge implies a sort of guilt.

 

Then, there are the stories suggesting that because a bunch of people who either make a living off of dumb distortions, or just amplify them for personal enjoyment, accused me of something on X, there must be something to it. Where there’s bullsh**, there must be fire.

 

The fundamental idea behind these charges is that I suffer from a kind of racist Tourette’s syndrome: I walk around and occasionally blurt out racial slurs, and somehow this condition hasn’t been evident throughout 30-something years of speaking in public — until I happened to stumble on the word “migrants.” Then, the terrible truth was revealed.

 

It’s too risible for words.

 

Even people who don’t share my politics have stepped up to point this out — John Harwood, Tom Nichols, and Patterico, to name a few. Some others deleted or retracted their original smears, with varying degrees of remorse.

 

If you consider all these people amateurs on such a question, then there’s a highly respected linguist, John McWhorter, who also says I didn’t say it.

 

If memory serves, when NPR ran its initial story on the controversy, its headline said that I “appeared” to say a racial slur, an example of the innuendo noted above. Then, the headline changed to, “Conservative editor-in-chief says mispronunciation led to accusations of using slur.” Which is at least more accurate. Initially, the story also put “[slur]” in place of the M-word in quoting me. It then changed it to “[word],” which is better but still not quite right . . . because it was not a word.

 

Finally, NPR added a comment from its media reporter, David Folkenflik: “After watching several times, even slowing this down to 0.25 speed, I believe Lowry garbled migrants and immigrants just after saying the word ‘Haitian.'” He continued, “It is startling to hear what emerged. Nonetheless, critics can best grapple directly with the substance of what he is saying.”

 

So here is someone who is from an outfit that defines elite respectability and who doesn’t consider it his job to do conservatives any favors saying that he looked at it with extreme care and concluded — rightly — that I didn’t say it.

 

But no one, despite Folkenflik’s counsel, is going to grapple with the substance of what I said. That’s not what this game is about. The cliché about lawfare is that the process is the punishment. When it comes to cancellation, there is no process — there’s merely accusation and then punishment.

 

Again, these couple of cancellations aren’t anything like what others have gone through, and I’m proud to say NR has been robustly on the side of people who have been unjustly targeted over the years. I expect there are more cancellations in my future, though. If so, fine. Do your worst. I will call you out, and excoriate and mock you, as appropriate. But I won’t cower or apologize.