Where’s the powerful progressive youth voice against Trump?
When everything’s being canceled?
Jeffrey Denny
Maybe HuffPost “Editorial Operations Coordinator” Alexandra Niforos missed a text.
In trying to re-cancel Shane Gillis, the arena-packing, self-owning toast of fellow comedians, after his second pretty decent SNL hosting stint, Niforos is still performing the old humorless buzzkill judgy elite progressive material that put a dictator back in charge of America to cancel culture as we know it.
Gillis has draped himself in sackcloth and ashes for stupid quips he made on a podcast eight years ago that got him canceled on SNL in 2019.
Not good enough for HuffPost.
“Shane Gillis Is Making His ‘SNL’ Return — And It Reveals The Show’s Troubling Double Standard,” Niforos huffs in her March 1 post. “Whether it’s due to being out of touch or desperate for a boost in ratings, scandal has trumped integrity on ‘SNL’ in recent years.”
And, “With Gillis’ hosting stints, the message from ‘SNL’ seems to be that hate speech, even comedically employed, may rob you of ensemble work, but it surely won’t stop you from getting to be the star of the show someday.”
Niforos, per her LinkedIn, has no real journalism experience. After UMich and before HuffPost, she was a sales associate for fast-fashion clothier Madewell that’s been criticized for hiding climate-sustainability and labor policies.
Yet she clambers atop her moral steed to chastise SNL for “Comedy-washing extremism … morality crisis … spineless amid rampant bigotry and power-hungry leadership in this country … a place where hatred is casually celebrated … and sure does seem hell-bent on platforming those who perpetrate and represent them.”
She had me at “platforming,” a progressive buzzword, the kind that SNL writers love to parody.
So, upon SNL’s 50th anniversary, piling on like the right-wing ninnies who’ve forever slammed the show for being too liberal (even after letting Trump host), a snotty Zillennial who’s done little discernable for anyone sits in her Brooklyn apartment like a Freaky Friday MAGA smugly crapping on the brilliant actors, writers and producers performing under impossible pressure week after week for two decades before she was born.
Also notable is that HuffPost has been a corporate plaything for decades since its co-founding by Arianna Huffington, a millionaire progressive influencer and former spouse of a wealthy LGBTQ Republican congressman, and Andrew Breitbart, a millionaire regressive influencer for the anti-LGBTQ set. Verizon, loved by millions of customers that hate the connectivity they pay for, also owned a stake.
This is not to slam Niforos, but more her ilk.
Despite her overconfidence, she and her HuffPost editors and followers seem oblivious to the weatherman who knows which way the wind blows, that it blows for cancelers. Or perhaps HuffPost, now owned by BuzzFeed, Inc., which is owned by hedge funds, Morgan Stanley and other large investors, is just pandering to unfrozen cave progressives for ad wealth.
That’s the sad part. The shameless part is that the Puritanically preening, Pecksniffian shaming progressive gotcha gang doesn’t realize it’s been canceled due to a deadly lack of appeal to sensible public hearts and minds. Like when “Happy Days” jumped the fake shark.
Canceling is a sport like Pickleball — wildly popular and satisfying among a certain set, irritating to everyone else, and easy to score cheap points that don’t matter.
But the stupidest problem with canceling is that the targets surely weren’t the irredeemable MAGA bigots, misogynists, and other haters who love Trump because he hates their fellow Americans too. It’s that canceling mostly guilted and censored Democrats who failed to be liberal or progressive enough to keep up with the latest HuffPost “toxic things you should never say to anyone.”
Leading to silence, which progressives say is violence.
To confess, I’m a lifelong “woke” Democrat.
One who’s written with and for countless woke leaders, institutions and causes, including DEI.
I also happen to live in an 80% white, 80% college-educated, 90% Democratic ward that’s far more privileged than our historically Black city. Or the nation. Or the world.
And I lost count how many times in private social gatherings my fellow Democrats look around to see if they’re in a safe space — a Maxwell Smart Cone of Silence — to confide, “I would never say this in public, but that whole progressive woke cancel culture thing is utter bullshit.”
Many seem anxious about being judged by their anxious yet brilliant, progressive Ivy or shamefully sub-Ivy college legacy kids. The ones they’re spending $400,000 on for a BA in intersectionality. After paying $200,000 for their elite private high school academy degree, plus the cost of college application consultants and admission fixers, the Range Rover they need to drive or be driven a block or two in their walkable, transit-rich communities to their climate-teaching schools, and third-string intramural nongender field hockey travel and trophies.
Apologies if I’m triggering any smart young progressives who are struggling, suffering and working hard every day to make America woker in their own image.
I don’t mean to victimize the victims.
But where were the powerful progressive youth voters when Trump was triumphantly elected again? Fewer youth turned out than in 2020, more youth and People of Color voted for Trump, and most voted wallet over the vaunted progressive concerns about climate, equality and Gaza.
Where are the powerful progressive youth voices rising up as Trump’s revenge and retribution reign of terror and error proudly, gleefully targets, trashes and erases everything they care about?
Where are the elite college students who shut down and shit on their colleges as Trump does it worse? Or was all that college protest nothing more than performative theater like Trump does?
An ally wants to know. And warn progressive youth that if you don’t rise up against Trump when everything you care about is in true mortal danger, then nobody will ever care about what you think.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
