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Please Cancel the Norman Mailer Panic
Accusations of “cancel culture” built on manufactured facts end up manufacturing facts of their own
Don’t ever fall for “cancel culture” caterwauling. Ever. Don’t fall for it from Michael Wolff, or Joyce Carol Oates, or David Rieff, or anyone else who has been peddling Wolff’s “scoop” that a junior staffer at Random House quashed a planned volume of Norman Mailer essays because they didn’t like the title of “The White Negro.” And if you fell for that story, kick yourself in the gonads as a reminder not to be such a simpering chump. Norman Mailer would approve of the self-corrective.
Wolff’s “Random House canceled a planned volume of Norman Mailer’s essays” moral panic piece has been debunked by…Norman Mailer’s heirs, Random House, and Wolff’s own agent. Of course Wolff is standing by his story, because he has once again put all his credibility on the line making a sensational claim that he now has to make true somehow.
Fortunately for Wolff, the astroturfed right-wing outrage machine has already trained enough simpletons to slobber at the alert-phrase “cancel culture” such that Wolff’s confection will have those tools baying about Norman Mailer’s “cancellation” for years to come.
