{"id":17532,"date":"2025-11-23T09:04:52","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T09:04:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/disruptarian.com\/blog\/?p=17532"},"modified":"2025-11-23T11:23:04","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T11:23:04","slug":"lets-talk-about-cancel-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/disruptarian.com\/blog\/lets-talk-about-cancel-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s talk about cancel culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

As DJ Disruptarian, I have been writing and ranting about this for a long time. Blogs, songs, radio, podcasts. The temperature around \u201ccancellation\u201d has gone from social shaming to something a lot closer to violence, and that is why I keep coming back to it.<\/p>\n

If you want the sanitized, mainstream definition, you can read the Wikipedia entry on cancel culture or Politico\u2019s analysis on how both parties weaponize it for power and clout.
https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cancel_culture\r\n \r\n <\/g><\/svg><\/span><\/a>
https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/magazine\/2021\/06\/05\/cancel-culture-politics-analysis-491928<\/use><\/svg><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

I am talking about what it feels like inside the blast zone.<\/p>\n

Back in 1999 I registered one of my first websites, \u201cbehindzioncurtain.com\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n

Growing up as the ultimate disruptarian<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

By age 12 I was obsessed with rock n\u2019 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 \u201ctoo long\u201d and I had earrings at 12, my father, often drunk, would call me \u201cfaggot\u201d and \u201clittle girl\u201d.<\/p>\n

Eventually he bribed me to go to Brad\u2019s Barbershop in Spanish Fork, Utah. He promised they would \u201cjust trim it\u201d 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 \u201cfuck\u201d I knew, and walked about 12 miles to my grandmother\u2019s house with a half butchered haircut.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Skinheads, tattoos, and S.P.E.A.R.<\/h3>\n

While I was living there, I had two very good Hawaiian friends in my dad\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The sick, selfish ideology of the Nazi skinhead scene disgusted me, so I pushed in the opposite direction. I tattooed the word \u201cS.P.E.A.R.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n