After Cardi B took to the Grammy stage in what appeared to be a costume from a never-aired Showgirls/Power Rangers crossover film, and writhed about on a large bed while lip syncing to her X-rated hit “WAP,” many people pointed out the obvious irony. Here was a major pop star flopping around the stage, screaming about her genitals, during primetime on a major network, even as certain Dr. Seuss books, Looney Tunes characters, Muppet films, and Disney cartoons have recently been criticized, censored, or taken out of publication for their supposedly objectionable content.
It would seem that our culture has a rather confused idea about what sorts of material might be damaging to impressionable children, or impressionable adults. It might be more accurate to say that our culture doesn’t really care about protecting kids from damaging material and only uses those concerns as a vehicle to enact sweeping cultural changes. Either way, the contrast between WAP and Dr. Seuss is as instructive as it is depressing. It’s also the kind of conversation that would cause previous generations, if they looked through a crystal ball and overheard it, to throw themselves off of cliffs en masse.
Yet the really profound cancel culture hypocrisy, as it relates to Cardi B, can be found not in her music but in something else. Recall that the singer, only a few years ago, confessed on camera to drugging and robbing men. In a deleted Instagram video, she boasted of having lured men — she didn’t say how many, but it would seem that there were numerous victims — from the strip club where she worked back to a hotel room where she committed these felonies against them.
When this video resurfaced in 2019, Cardi B addressed it but never used the phrase “I’m sorry.” She merely admitted that she’s “not a perfect person,” which may be the only understated thing she’s ever written or said, and explained that “whether or not they were poor choices at the time, I did what I had to do to survive.” This is a justification, not an apology. It’s also a lie. In interviews, the rapper has bragged that she earned upwards of $3,000 dollars a night from stripping. By the age of 21, she claims, she had 20 grand in singles saved. By 22, she was starring on the reality show Love & Hip Hop: New York. When, exactly, was she so poor and destitute that she had to drug and rob people just to survive?
It does not appear that Cardi B views drugging and assaulting people as any kind of serious action requiring desperation to justify. Even if she did view it that way, she’d be wrong. But her own words suggest otherwise. In a different video, while dispensing some helpful relationship advice, she said that if a man cheats on her, she’ll “take him out,” drug him, then enlist a “tranny” to sexually assault him while he’s inebriated.
It’s not clear if she’s actually done this herself or if she’s simply recommending it as a course of action. Nobody has thought to ask because none of this has been judged important by our cultural overlords.
A contestant on The Bachelor attended an Old South-themed frat party in 2018 and that past infraction — made at around the same age when Cardi B was allegedly committing violent crimes that would land the less privileged in prison for three decades — has been judged so severe that multiple tearful apologies are not enough to rectify it. We have seen people canceled for tweets, and jokes, and off-the-cuff comments, and other sins which caused no physical harm to anyone. We have seen people lose their jobs and their livelihoods for opinions they expressed or words they said, no matter the context or intent or how long ago it was.
Cardi B has survived all of these rounds of canceling. The cancel mob has not just passed her over but given her a pass from all present and future cancellations.
She is afforded this privilege for obvious reasons. For one thing, the primary transgression that will get you canceled is having white skin. Cardi B has not committed that violation. For another, the leftist cancel mob truly considers an offensive opinion, joke, tweet, or word to be far more dangerous and evil than drugging and robbing men. It is not as though they are gritting their teeth and merely putting up with Cardi B in spite of these terrible things she has boasted of doing. They simply don’t care. Or, worse, they love her even more for sticking it to the Patriarchy by means of violent felonies. In a culture where feelings are king, the worse thing you can do — even worse than violent crime, a lot worse — is have unapproved feelings or opinions, or offend the feelings of someone who has approved opinions.
What all of this means is that we can at least put to rest the flimsy rationalization that cancel culture is really a matter of “accountability.” If that’s all that the mob was doing — holding people “accountable” — then certainly Cardi B would be in line for a little accountability of her own. She might, at a minimum, be expected to reach into the ample profits she’s earned from singing about her body parts and repay the men she allegedly robbed. That wouldn’t even come close to full accountability — full accountability would involve her sitting in a jail cell until sometime in the 2050s — but it would be something. Instead, we get nothing.
We focus on holding random Bachelor contestants accountable for the frat parties they attended, and newspaper editors accountable for a single word they said on one instance in an entirely innocent context two years ago, while apparent sociopaths like Cardi B carry on, making their millions, spewing filth into our children’s ears, and never having to apologize for anything.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.