The Return of (Some of) the Cancelled

A couple celebrities brought down by liberal cancel culture are making their way back to public life in a shifting climate. What does it mean?

The vibe shift is here. Trump 2.0 is considerably different from the first go-round. This time, his administration is brutally efficient in carrying out its goals dismantling the federal workforce, for good and ill, while the impotent Democrat response vacillates between libs protesting Tesla dealerships, retreating to Bluesky, and fantasizing about their own loudmouth TV clown Stephen A. Smith as a potential presidential challenger.

Whereas in 2017, the mainstream was fully against Trump, and Twitter was still the greatest propaganda tool the Democrats and their security state allies ever had, things are a bit different now. Trump’s popular vote victory makes it more difficult to pull the “not my president” stuff. The wokies have been largely culturally sidelined by the Isreali lobby once they began protesting what is happening in Gaza. Racist DEI policies are being rescinded. Twitter is now X, awful in a different way, and owned by Trump’s top ally. Meta and The Washington Post are proposing changes that signal they’re no longer part of The Resistance™.

One interesting upshot, however, is at least a few figures cancelled by liberals during their time of authoritarian identity politics are making their way back.

This past week, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers announced that the franchise is returning Super-Bowl-winning former head coach Jon Gruden to its ring of honor, four years after removing him when emails of his containing filth-flarn-filth were leaked to the press by an outside source. Slimeball stenographer for power Peter King, despite a lifetime of worshipping Bill Parcells, another coach who publicly said things worse than anything in Gruden’s emails, clutched his pearls and suggested Gruden should never be allowed to coach again on any level.

Gruden at the time of the release of the emails had to resign as head coach of the Raiders. Up until several months ago, he had basically been dwelling in cultural limbo until Barstool Sports brought him back with a media job.

Actor Armie Hammer is also undertaking a comeback from a cancellation that took place in 2021, when sexual assault allegations resulted in an investigation but no charges filed. A few racy texts leaked where he called himself a cannibal, which he maintains were selectively edited and were ultimately just a bit of outlandish flirting. He’s been cast in an upcoming Uwe Boll movie titled “The Dark Knight.”

Keeping in line with the 2021 cancellations turned comebacks is Andrew Cuomo, who was a pandemic hero to Democrats despite sending a small army of senior citizens to their death. When Cuomo was only accused by one woman of sexual misconduct the following year, both Saturday Night Live and The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd mocked his accuser, and Times Up leader (and Moira Donegan lawyer) Roberta Kaplan helped him strategize how to get past it. The Dem power brokers will always break their supposed principles to protect their own and reflexively condemn every other man. But then many more allegations surfaced, establishment Dems realized they couldn’t give Cuomo the Biden treatment, and they forced him out.

All of a sudden, Cuomo is back, likely entering into the NYC mayoral race, and has some centrist Democrats looking to him as a potential presidential candidate. Sure, you colossal losers, keep throwing shit at the wall, see what sticks.

I very much doubt we’re going to see a thoroughgoing appraisal of all the most ridiculous cancellations of the last decade. Not that those victimized don’t deserve it; they absolutely do. But that’s not the way scumbag corporate media and our zero attention span society works - redemption will be offered to a handful of big names that were enmeshed in the more sketchy cancellations where there’s some disagreement on just how badly the celebrity or prominent figure behaved, and conduct media blackouts on the rest. It’s undoubtedly unfair, though I have a hard time seeing it play out any other way.

Progressives will use these comebacks to lie through their teeth and proclaim that their cancel campaigns were totally harmless. How do I know? They’ve been doing it since 2017 when Louis CK was able to continue getting stand-up gigs despite being cancelled by corporate liberals. “See!?!?!!” they said, “He can still work, this stuff doesn’t hurt anyone,” not realizing (or willfully ignoring) the benefits and protection his celebrity affords him doesn’t apply to the other marginal people liberals destroy. Nevertheless, Louis had a movie nixed and won’t be on TV again, but since he was the bigget star in comedy when he as brought down, he could still be booked for standup gigs.

Is there any more nauseating story than Biden, amid his own sexual assault controversy in 2020, making a big public show of returning Louis CK’s campaign donation as grandstanding stunt in order to help clear his name? Fault Louis for still wanting to donate to the Dems after they crushed him, sure, but I know it takes time to reorient yourself after you’ve been knifed in the back.

Like Jon Gruden, I’ve been doing a little work lately for Barstool, except on a smaller and less visible scale. For a little over than a year, I’ve been doing “research” for two podcasts hosted by my former coworker, PFT Commenter / Eric Sollenberger.

In late 2023, my main job was at a moving company in its slow season, so even though it was a full-time job, I was only getting 20-25 hours a week. Falling behind on my bills, I reached out to Eric to see if there was any extra work I could get. My public person was/is radioactive, and I had criticized Barstool in the past, so I told him it could be a non-public-facing role, if that made it easier.

What we settled on was me coming up with five pages of notes and interesting tidbits for the topic each week on Macrodosing, and during the NFL regular season on Friday football preview shows for Pardon My Take. He pays me a fair amount for it, and I’ve since gotten a slightly better day job. Financially, I’m not exactly good, but no longer in crisis. It’s also nice to play even a minor role in a project given how alienated I am in all other facets of my life at the moment.

PFT doesn’t tell me anything going on within the inner circle of Barstool, and I don’t ask. I’m not trying to fuck up anything for him, and I know he has a lot to lose. At this point, he’s a big enough figure that he’s likely safe regardless, but once upon a time, the same Deadspin/Defector shitheads who destroyed me tried to come for him as well.

As much of a sports media star as PFT Commenter has become, when Eric first emerged in the digital sports community in the early 2010s, no one aside from me wanted to give him a chance. SB Nation didn’t think his intentional misspelling shtick would work, and didn’t bring him on as a writer until after he found an audience at Kissing Suzy Kolber. Barstool snatched him up years later when he was already a burgeoning star.

When Eric/PFT’s profile started to take off during those KSK/SB Nation days, he would get writeups in other media outlets, at the same time many in lib media circles were trying to distance themselves from KSK. There are several reasons for this. For one, KSK frequently criticized journalists as corrupt water-carriers for power, and they don’t like that so much. The second was that, as the woke era began setting in during the mid-2010s, a lot of media people who were once unabashed KSK fans in the Aughts began to see the site as woefully problematic for some of its edgy humor.

So when PFT got a writeup in Slate in 2014, I was happy for him. What caused me dismay when I read the article was that PFT was only credited as a writer for SB Nation. Oh, so the site that wasn’t even willing to take a chance on him gets the credit for discovering him and a traffic bump? The corporate lib outlets were always gassing up our competitors and ignoring us. I don’t think it was an innocent mistake. I asked Eric to get with the writer and see if we could get a correction, which we did. Nevertheless, I often look back on this incident when I think about how when Uproxx was sold to Warner Music, the KSK archives were immediately taken offline, and still can’t be accessed. 10 years of my hard work has been obliterated without a trace.

In terms of pure success, Eric has eclipsed me many times over. I did alright for myself in my time, but it’s not even close. In fact, one of the sad ironies of my recent struggles is that one of the nearly 2,400 DoorDash deliveries I’ve had to do over the last two years to keep myself afloat involved dropping off one of his Pardon My Cheesesteak meals that were created a part of a brand partnership between Barstool and IHOP. That order ended up going to a firehouse. Way to keep the first responders fed, Eric.

PFT success-mogging me is fine. He’s clever and he’s worked hard. I didn’t get into media to be a clout chaser or a starfucker, so it’s not a status game for me like it is for others. I deliberately did things over the years that I knew were not part of the easy, cynical path to personal brand expansion but ultimately were the right things to do. It’s only now that I’ve been ripped apart by chickenshit careerists like Megan Greenwell, Drew Magary, and Moira Donegan - and had other chickenshit careerists like Freddie deBoer and Ethan Strauss refuse to help - that I have any regret for not pursuing a path that got me as much status as possible. I don’t regret sticking to my guns - I have more courage than all of these losers put together - but had I been a bigger star, more people would be willing to listen to the obvious injustice carried out against me and maybe do something about it.

It sucks to think about, how by and large only the most cynical people get ahead these days. Sure, the dizzying heights of professional success have always been the domain of soulless bloodsuckers, but nowadays one can’t even have modest gains without compromising yourself to an insane degree.

Back in 2016, I got in a private argument with Amanda Mull, who is now a senior staff writer at Bloomberg but at the time was still toiling in obscurity at PurseBlog, about careerism in media being a cancer, both personally and for the world at large. Her response to me: “That’s just what you have to dooooooo.”

Now I want you, dear reader, to sit with that statement.

Here is a supposed “professional” journalist, a woman who did quite a bit of scare-mongering at the outset of the Covid lockdowns, making it clear that the surest path to success in the media world is to believe in nothing, and contort yourself to meet whatever the demands of the bosses are at any given time. Media careerists deserve neither your respect, support, nor your trust.

I’m wise enough to the ways of the world that I’m aware that being an unprincipled flunky for power is a reliable way to advance your career if that’s the only thing you care about, but you also have to live with yourself and the consequences of your disgusting lapdog behavior.

Amanda knew from the outset that Megan Greenwell was the source of my false accusation. For a while, I gave her credit for not immediately cutting me off as a friend, as some others had, when the list leaked in October 2017, however as things continued to worsen for me, she would sometimes kick me while I was down, then publicly take a different stance on the issue than what she would say to me directly.

Privately, Mull would express sympathy for the “cruel” things done to me, yet on social media he would cling to the prevailing liberal media orthodoxy on the matter, tweeting that because some at the time were following and enjoying OJ Simpson’s Twitter feed (RIP Juice) that cancel culture “doesn’t exist.” That’s already a ridiculous argument - people laughing at OJ’s Twitter antics doesn’t mean he had been restored to polite society. Moreover, Amanda PERSONALLY KNEW someone who had been wrongly cancelled and smeared by corporate media without evidence. Disgusting two-faced behavior.

By further that dishonet narrative, one accepted by shitlibs living in denil of the awful things they had done with their reckless callouts and mob-like tactics, she was helping to ensure that I would never see justice.

When Amanda got a job at The Atlantic in the summer of 2018, she told me as a means to explain our diverging professional trajectories, “I’m objectively good, and you’re not.” It’s one of the meanest things anyone has ever said to me, and reveals her as an insanely insecure person. When you have to compromise yourself completely for success, you probably resent the people who don’t, which I’m sure helps to explain her shittiness toward me, but it sucks to deal with all the same. We didn’t talk much for a few months after.

Then, when Deadspin shut down in late 2019, and all of NYC lib media was rallying around the staff like they were heroes, Amanda made sure to shout Megan out on Twitter and tell her followers to send the Deadspin staff money for drinks, clearly because doing so earned her brownie points with the rest of the Brooklyn journo set, since the Deadspin mass resigntion was a big to-do in media circles at the time. There were plenty of shitlibs already kissing their ass. Amanda could have sat that one out. If you knew that one of your friends had his life destroyed by someone, would you be on social media telling strangers to give that person money? You would if you’re a rotten backstabbing piece of shit who only cares about building clout in your field.

Amanda claims to have been raped at some point in her past. After she showed support for Megan, I told her to give me the name of her rapist so I could send him money, much like she encouraged others to send money to the woman who falsely accused me.

Suffice it to say, we don’t talk anymore.