As DJ Disruptarian, I have been writing and ranting about this for a long time. Blogs, songs, radio, podcasts. The temperature around “cancellation” has gone from social shaming to something a lot closer to violence, and that is why I keep coming back to it.
If you want the sanitized, mainstream definition, you can read the Wikipedia entry on cancel culture or Politico’s analysis on how both parties weaponize it for power and clout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/06/05/cancel-culture-politics-analysis-491928
I am talking about what it feels like inside the blast zone.
Back in 1999 I registered one of my first websites, “behindzioncurtain.com”. I do not own it anymore, but you can still dig it up on the Wayback Machine at archive.org. Even then I was writing about what we now call cancel culture and what it feels like to be pushed out for opinions that sit outside the approved box.
Growing up as the ultimate disruptarian
When I was a kid in Utah, I took that disruptarian label seriously. I grew up in a lower middle class home, in a pretty wealthy neighborhood in Mapleton, Utah. I felt boxed in and repressed.
By age 12 I was obsessed with rock n’ roll and wanted to be a heavy metal musician. My parents were semi-supportive. They tolerated the dream, but not the look. When my hair got “too long” and I had earrings at 12, my father, often drunk, would call me “faggot” and “little girl”.
Eventually he bribed me to go to Brad’s Barbershop in Spanish Fork, Utah. He promised they would “just trim it” and only take half an inch off. Instead, I felt six inches of hair hit the floor. The second he took that first huge chunk off one side, I jumped out of the chair, unloaded every version of the word “fuck” I knew, and walked about 12 miles to my grandmother’s house with a half butchered haircut.
I decided to keep it and turn it into something else. I shaped it into a mohawk, dyed it permanent electric blue and silver, and when I had the energy before school, I would spike it up into a full charged mohawk. I lived with my grandma for about two years until she finally kicked me out.
After that I bounced around. I lived with cousins for a while. One of my cousins was a lesbian with a partner, and between them they had five kids from previous heterosexual relationships. When that situation got tense, mostly over politics, I moved in with another cousin I had basically grown up with since I was about four. She also used to live with my grandma and sometimes with my parents when we were younger.
She was dating a very angry teenager, a few years younger than her and a bit older than me. By the time I met him he had a small swastika tattooed on his ankle. He later covered it with a German flag. His best friend, Steve Jeffs (RIP), had a swastika tattooed on his shoulder.
Skinheads, tattoos, and S.P.E.A.R.
While I was living there, I had two very good Hawaiian friends in my dad’s neighborhood. Around that same time I started sort-of dating a girl who was full-blooded Navajo. She taught me and my friend Lisa how to drive in her Geo Tracker when we were 15.
So there I was: living with guys who had Nazi tattoos, while my friends and the girls I liked were Hawaiian and Native American. And on top of that, I had fallen in love with skinhead reggae and ska after seeing the Mighty Mighty Bosstones in Provo a few years earlier. I shaved my head and at 15 I got a spider tattooed on the side of it.
My friend Irick used me as a canvas, I was more than willing. Anyone from that scene knows who I am talking about. Between him and me, by the time I was 12 I had already started tattooing myself, and by 15 I had a lot more ink from him.
The sick, selfish ideology of the Nazi skinhead scene disgusted me, so I pushed in the opposite direction. I tattooed the word “S.P.E.A.R.” on myself. That was something I came up with: Skins and Punks Everywhere Against Racism. It was my way of planting a flag. I might like the music, I might hang out in the same circles, but I was not buying their racist garbage.
Later, when I was 17, I got a more professional S.P.E.A.R. tattoo from a guy named Brian, a tattoo artist in Cedar City, which now I have a collection of the tatoos dating back 33+ years now.
Now, to be totally honest, when I lived with my cousin’s boyfriend, I did buy a flag with a swastika on it and hung it in our apartment. This is where some of the family drama comes in.
The swastika flag and the big “F you”
I feel like I have had to explain this because certain family members have used it to smear me for years. I have a gay cousin I lived with, and my brother, who both say I had a swastika tattoo. My reply is simple: prove it.
I never had a swastika tattoo. Not once. Not anywhere.
Yes, I did hang a swastika flag in that apartment. But my reason was not “I love Nazis”. It was a giant middle finger to the system, to censorship, to the culture of “you cannot say that”. It was my “FUCK YOU” to what I saw as oppression and anti-free-speech culture in the Mormon church, which has a history of suppressing dissent. Look up “The September Six” if you do not believe me.
At that time I worshiped the Sex Pistols. Sid Vicious wore a shirt with a swastika on it, not because he loved Hitler, but as a way to shock the system and offend the people who wanted everything sanitized. That exact shirt later sold at auction for a big pile of money. Same idea: not pro-Nazi, just maximum offense aimed at the pearl-clutchers.
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- Kanye West swastika
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- Syd Vicious saying FUCK you with a swastika shirt
So yeah, as a kid, years away from even turning 18, I hung that flag up as my own “FUCK YOU”. Not as a message of racial hate, but as a dare. I was daring people to cancel me before “cancel culture” was even the phrase.
I was done with people’s judgment. I pulled back from everyone. I had been the life of the party, but drugs and depression slowly erased that version of me. I isolated more and more.
And for the record, to my brother and cousin who keep repeating that lie about a swastika tattoo: I have posted pictures from those years. Me shirtless. Me in the ocean. Me in school. Me after I found Christ at 19. If your story was true, there would be evidence. There is none. You are making the claim, so the burden of proof is on you.
From chaos to Christ and into the culture war
Now fast forward. I am in my 40s. I found a relationship with Christ almost 30 years ago. I built a family. I now have five kids. I went through a divorce from a woke ex-wife who is into some very strange gender ideology.
And I look at the culture around me and I am honestly sad. I thought things were bad in the 90s. It feels worse now.
We have a whole cultural category called “cancel culture”. Both sides, left and right, race to destroy each other over opinions. People do not say, “Let’s argue it out”. They jump straight to the social guillotine.
From the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, to the successful assassination of a beloved free speech advocate, to the growing list of people beaten, fired, and silenced for saying something “wrong”, you can feel the pressure rising. The academics and pundits will debate whose fault it is, who started it, and whether cancel culture is “real”. Again, there are polite write-ups of this stuff on Wikipedia and in Politico. I am telling you what it feels like from the ground.
For decades I have tried to do the opposite of that mentality. On Utah Pirate Radio, Sensi Life, XCannabis, Disruptarian, Clovis Star, and in print newspapers I circulated in seven states, I have hosted people I did not always agree with. I brought on guests to talk about cannabis legalization, economics, and social issues. If I thought a topic or a viewpoint was worth wrestling with, I wanted it on air.
If you want to see some of how I have talked about this in real time, I have covered pieces of this story in videos that can be found at my archive at the Way Back Machine
The point was simple: promote free speech, get censored opinions into the light, and scramble the narrative pushed by the so-called “mainstream media”, which is basically a few giant corporations who each own thousands of outlets and pump out the same worldview over and over.
From boycotts to brawls
The cancel culture energy is not just about boycotts anymore.
We see riots and brawls when conservative speakers show up on campus. Think about what happened on November 10, 2025, when TPUSA held their event at UC Berkeley to honor Charlie Kirk. Protesters, including people identifying as Antifa, showed up, set off smoke bombs, clashed with police and attendees, and turned it into a street fight. It is not the first time. It probably will not be the last.
This kind of thing keeps happening whenever speakers like Christina Hoff Sommers, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and others show up. When ideas are treated like violence, violence eventually becomes just another form of debate.
So for me, pushing back on cancel culture matters more than walking on eggshells.
Even some of my own kids want to cancel me because I will not repeat the current scripts about gender ideology, including the idea that biological men can simply become women and vice versa.
Ironically, I publicly supported legalizing gay marriage on YouTube before it was legal anywhere. I thought the state should not have the power to tell adults who they can marry. But the more this “woke” culture turns authoritarian, the more I regret supporting anything that helped build that machine.
Even so, I will keep trying to talk to people. I am not going to stop.
Far left nut jobs shutting down free speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqmJ9lrQvyU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWuxH7kkdEU
The Nick Fuentes problem, and why the reaction scares me
There is one thing that really bothers me right now, on top of the assassinations and street violence.
Anyone who even says the name “Nick Fuentes” out loud seems to get thrown into the fire. Tucker Carlson got blasted for talking with him. Red Scare co-host Dasha Nekrasova just got dropped by her agency and pulled from a movie for having him on her show and letting him talk.
Megyn Kelly laid it out in detail after that episode blew up:
https://www.megynkelly.com/2025/11/18/dasha-nekrasova-cancelled-in-hollywood-over-red-scare-fuentes-interview
For the record, I do not know a lot about Fuentes personally. I hear people call him a Nazi. Corporate media brands him a white nationalist and a whole list of other labels. I hear he hates most mainstream conservative influencers. People say he appeals to young, angry men who feel shut out.
The first time I even heard his name was after the beloved free speech advocate I mentioned earlier was murdered. A Disruptarian radio listener messaged me and claimed Fuentes might somehow be behind the assassination. That was my introduction.
You know what? That is how cancel culture and conspiracy culture feed each other. People are so busy trying to wipe someone off the map that they end up turning him into a mythic villain. You can hate his ideas and still admit that overreaction is giving him more power than he would have on his own.
Silencing speech is like putting duct tape over a smoke alarm. The fire is still burning, you just cannot hear the warning anymore. Cancel culture keeps taping over alarms and then acting surprised when the house burns down.
My own mini “cancellation” and the receipts
So when I see this play out on a national level, I cannot help but think about my small version of it.
Lord knows I have had my own circle of critics: my cousin, my brother, old friends, people who cannot stand that I supported some of Trump’s policies or that I preferred him over the alternatives. The jealousy, the weak-minded gossip, the whisper campaigns. The lies about me being a Nazi. The claim that I had swastika tattoos.
Again: I grew up with you. I lived with you. If this was true, where is the evidence?
I have posted pictures from those years. Me with my shirt off. In the ocean. At school. After I found Christ at 19. No swastika tattoos. Not one.
So here is my challenge to the haters:
Why are you the only two people in my entire life who claim I had swastika tattoos?
Where is your evidence?
You are making the accusation. It is your job to back it up. I have already backed up my side with photos and a public record.
Ironically enough, this brother of mine, branded himself, with the same funny haircut that I kept after the barbershop incident, with the half shaved head and the bangs in his face.
I have one picture of that here, but it's ironic because in this picture you can see him with this funny haircut, and me with my SPEAR tattoo, when we were both teenagers. Both of these iconic looks were invented by me.
ryan and brad thompson
This photo album shows the same history, but no evidence of swastikas
Why I refuse to shut up
Cancel culture did not start with hashtags. It started with people who cannot stand the idea that someone somewhere might be thinking out loud in a way they do not control.
From the mohawk kid in Mapleton, to the skinhead flats and S.P.E.A.R. tattoos, to behindzioncurtain.com, to pirate radio, to podcasting platforms and print newspapers, I have been wrestling with this same beast my whole life.
I am not perfect. I have made mistakes. I have offended people on purpose. But I will not bow to a culture that thinks disagreement is violence and actual violence is just politics.
People like me see cancel culture as a dare. A challenge to speak louder, not softer. If all it takes to “piss people off” is to tell the truth about your life and your beliefs, then I guess I am going to keep being a disruptarian.
Sources
General background on cancel culture
Dasha Nekrasova, Nick Fuentes, and Hollywood cancellation
My related videos and commentary
Trump, political violence, and security incidents
Campus unrest and conservative speakers
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