Following last year’s efforts to ban Trump Administration officials from speaking on campus, Harvard University students are now circulating a petition that calls for revoking degrees from Trump supporters and aides who attended the elite Ivy League institution
The much more accurate term is “to unperson“, to create:
an individual who usually for political or ideological reasons is removed completely from recognition or consideration
What “cancel” does is unperson people. This is the opposite of an invented person or deep fake, an event or individual created entirely for the narrative. One of Winston Smith’s jobs in Orwell’s 1984 was to invent people.
“Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready-made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances. . . . It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.”
Who’s to say Ogilvy never existed? Or that so and so had such and such a law degree? If you follow the news closely you will notice how it continuously manufactures and deletes people and events from the spotlight. In the end it’s all the same to the Narrators. As Winston Smith noted:
“Within twenty years at most, he reflected, the huge and simple question ‘Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?’ would have ceased once and for all to be answerable.”