Cancel culture comes to Virginia. Anna Grace Calhoun, a first-year engineering student at the University of Virginia, detests Dominion Energy. She regards Dominion as a predatory, monopolistic, rate-gouging and environmentally retrograde blight upon Virginia, and she has distilled her-left-wing critique into a letter published in the UVa student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily. She is entitled to her views, of course, and many people share them. What warrants mention in the Virginia Annals of Political Correctness is that she goes beyond criticizing the utility to calling for the university to disassociate itself from the company. “If the University and its associated organizations take seriously their espoused goal of producing positive leaders,” she writes, “they need to think harder about what careers and corporations they’re funneling students into.”
That’s how the so-called “cancel culture” works — define your enemy, stigmatize it, ostracize it, and and drive it from the public sphere.
Another hate hoax. It was a big story in the national media when a 12-year-old African-American student accused three white male students at Immanuel Christian School of holding her down in a school playground a week ago, covering her mouth, making racist comments about her “nappy” hair, and cutting her hair with scissors. Not only did the story feed the stereotypes of modern-day liberals and progressives — white, male Christian kids acting atrociously, like the MAGA hat-wearing kid smirking at the Native American drummer — it offered as a delicious bonus the fact that Vice President Pence’s wife Karen Pence was a part-time art teacher there. After a Fairfax County police investigation, however, the girl has recanted her story about the school-yard incident. Refreshingly, in this case the mainstream media was quick to update and correct the story.
