Conservatives Got Mocked After They Begged Gen X To Put A Stop To ‘Cancel Culture’

Conservative media is entering week three of frothing at the mouth over kiddie stuff. They’ve accused the left of “canceling” the Muppets, Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, Pepé Le Pew, even Peter Pan and Dumbo. In truth, all are doing just fine. You can still buy and/or watch all of the above. But right-wing commentators are still convinced — or trying to convince those who pay attention to them — that there’s some cultural purge afoot. And when some of them tried to reach out to a certain group for help, it did not go well.

It started with a column in The New York Post, by an op-ed editor for the Wall Street Journal, with the promising headline, “Cancel culture is out of control — and Gen X is our only hope.” He then reached out to people from his own generation to stop…companies from putting warnings over certain episodes (The Muppet Show, some old Disney classics), no longer publishing a small number of books (Seuss), or simply retiring a grabby cartoon skunk. (To say nothing of the non-troversy that was the Potato Head fracas.)

“We grew up in a country that didn’t ban books,” Hennessey wrote. “We all agreed that witch hunts and blacklists were bad. Censorship was an outrage. The 1980s were not that long ago. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

But Gen X by and large didn’t know what he was talking about, perhaps because so few of them read The New York Post. It was a screed filled with Tears for Fears references and lines like, “If Gen Xers want to spare our own kids having to live in the new East Germany these woke maniacs are trying to build, we can’t go on wearing our sunglasses at night.”

By Monday, when Fox News correspondent Gillian Turner amplified Hennessey’s message, calling on those born between 1965 and 1980 to stand up to those born between 1981 and 1996 — and not the companies that inspired this culture war kerfuffle in the first place — they got a firm answer: Nope.

Some reminded everyone that these were the people who invented canceling, when they called it “boycotts.”

Or other things.

Some thought it was more fun to sit this war between generations out.

And wouldn’t you know it? Eventually Ted Cruz got involved.

Of course, there’s another way for conservatives to put a stop to this: Simply stop fomenting nonsense culture wars.