Trumpist Insurrectionists Have Now Created a Systematized Mechanism for "Cancelling" People and Groups—and It's the Most Comprehensive Cancel Culture America Has Ever Seen
The number of brands explicitly targeted for cancellation by Patriot.Win is staggering, representing a cultist/militant rejection of both the American free-market system and American democracy itself.
Introduction
To “PWN” someone is to—per the odd digital slang of our age—“utterly defeat” them. And that’s exactly what the home base for Donald Trump’s so-called “America First” insurrection aims to do (see below) to the scores of companies, websites, media outlets, and persons it now aims to “cancel.” As Proof has reported on at length before, as head of the Republican Party Trump is now overseeing the most militant cancel culture our nation has ever seen—one that threatens American markets and American democracy.
The most ardent adherents to a self-described billionaire’s “populist” movement claim to be animated by what they say is the worrying spread of “cancel culture” in America. If their complaint seems not just hypocritical but even delusionally self-contradictory, do remember that that’s the point: Trumpism is about attributing to one’s opponents whatever it is one is doing oneself that one cannot defend, whether it’s encouraging violent attacks on persons and property, undermining U.S. elections, or “cancelling” so many companies, websites, media outlets and persons through concerted digital action and even (see below) a systematized protocol for cancelling entities that there can no longer be any doubt that Patriot.Win is now the chief “canceller” in the United States.
The Patriot.Win Website
Patriot.Win is an insurrectionist outgrowth of the now-defunct pro-sedition website TheDonald.Win, which latter address now redirects to America.Win. Patriot.Win has two badges it uses to warn its users about companies, sites, media outlets and persons:
The Orange “Warning” Badge
The Red “Cancellation” Badge
Any company receiving either badge from Trump’s fan base immediately has its entry in the website’s index of links changed from white to (as is consistent with the badge) either orange or red. Links receiving the red badge above also receive strikethrough treatment from Patriot.Win, meaning that they are visually “cancelled”—that is, a line is drawn through the link text—and users are recommended to perpetually avoid them.
Notable in this Trumpist-devised systematic cancellation lexicon is that none of the companies, websites, media outlets, or persons so cancelled have been conclusively determined to have done anything wrong prior to their permanent cancellation—a truly remarkable oversight for a movement that’s made opposing cancellations of any kind (warranted or otherwise) an unshakable pillar of its worldview and its cultural agenda.
Badge #1: The Orange “Warning” Badge
Patriot.Win’s orange badge and link—indicating a need for users’ caution—uses three key “weasel words” to underscore that the site owners can’t actually confirm any of the allegations leveled by the site against any companies, websites, media outlets, and/or persons it’s so tarred: “appears”, “leaning”, and “influence.” Precisely to whom a given company, website, media outlet, or person “appears” to be “left-leaning” to a sufficient degree to receive an orange badge is unclear, though a likely group, surely, is the site’s anonymous editors. While the site links to articles attacking each company, website, media outlet, and/or person it cautions its users against, the quality of that sourcing is about what you’d expect, ranging from notorious fake-news websites like The Gateway Pundit to far-right propaganda outlet Breitbart, from the op-ed site The Federalist to random online videos (one such video purportedly establishes that users should avoid the far-right website Newsmax—which happens to be run by longtime Trump friend Chris Ruddy—because it has, and no I’m not joking, “left-leaning” predilections per a single video of “[Newsmax anchor] Bob Sellers and Mike Lindell” in conversation).
{Note: Lindell is a recovering crack addict who now sells pillows and claims that former president Trump will be reinstated as President of the United States by August of 2021.}
According to Patriot.Win, a link to an interview with Lindell somehow establishes that there’s the “appearance” of a left-“leaning” “influence [upon]” the Newsmax website. Note that the notion of an “appearance” of a left-“leaning” “influence [upon]” a company, website, media outlet, or person doesn’t even rise to the level of the following:
A demonstrated leftist predilection within the entity; or
a demonstrated left-leaning predilection within the entity; or
a demonstrated leftist influence upon the entity; or
the appearance of a leftist predilection within the entity; or
the appearance of a left-leaning predilection within the entity; or
the appearance of a leftist influence upon the entity.
No—all that is required is the appearance of a left-leaning “influence” for users of Trump’s insurrectionist digital headquarters to be warned against using, crediting, or trusting a given company, website, media outlet, and/or person. No better example of a “cancel culture” (or perhaps “cancel subculture”) can be found in the United States.
The Red “Cancellation” Badge
One might think that when a website is putting links in red; crossing out the names of companies, websites, media outlets, or persons; and adding a “stop hand” icon to an index entry for a company, website, media outlet, or person it is doing so with clear, significant, and corroborated evidence of indisputable malfeasance (though of course, given that the America First “movement” opposes all cancellations, we’d really expect even clear, significant, and corroborated evidence of indisputable malfeasance to be insufficient for Patriot.Win to try to cancel anyone or anything).
But it’s not so.
Per the Patriot.Win’s red cancellation badge, if there are even “reports” of “alleged” misconduct that even unintentionally could have a “chilling” effect on any Trump supporter, a company, website, media outlet, or person must be instantly cancelled.
Note that the standard used here—a “report” of “alleged” conduct—doesn’t even rise to the level of the following:
Direct evidence of since-confirmed misconduct; or
direct evidence of unconfirmed misconduct; or
second-hand reports of since-confirmed misconduct that did chill someone; or
second-hand reports of unconfirmed misconduct that did chill someone.
Instead, all that’s required is a report of alleged conduct that could have chilled someone, which given the “snowflake” tendencies of Trump supporters would require almost no effort at all. What sort of sources qualify as a “report” of “alleged” misconduct? Per the Patriot.Win website, sufficient sourcing includes entries from the blog of Ben Shapiro (Daily Wire); a random tweet from a “writer, filmmaker, [and] rabble-rouser” named Christopher Rufo; and a website called Reclaim the Net.
So Who’s Been Cancelled By the Trumpists?
A review of Patriot.Win confirms that Trumpists will cancel almost anyone, at any time, for any reason or no reason at all—again, a mere “appearance” of an issue or “allegation” of an “influence” or even a merely potential “chilling” effect is enough—and that upon such cancellation Trump’s supporters will systematically try to cut off traffic to the company, website, media outlet, and/or person they are trying to cancel. To be clear, they don’t do this by tweeting out—as sometimes occurs on the political left—detailed criticisms of the company, website, media outlet, or person under fire that can be responded to through public discourse, but by simply crossing out the entity in question as seen in the screenshot from Patriot.Win below:
You’re reading the above image right: Trump’s supporters have officially cancelled every single third-party payment intermediary in the United States except far-right Christian website GiveSendGo, which is currently being used by domestic terror leader Ali Alexander to hide from federal law enforcement.
You may also have noted the use of a category heading in the image above. Patriot.Win has indeed indexed all its official cancellations (as well as its endorsements) into these sixteen—yes, sixteen—categories:
Broadcasting
Education
Financial
Flags
Gaming
Humor
Memes
Music
News
QAnon
Shopping
Social
Technology
Travel
Video Platforms
Visual Art
This appears to be the most comprehensive cancellation protocol on the internet. The only categories in which Patriot.Win issues no orange “warning” or red “cancellation” badges are—perhaps not surprisingly—Flags, Humor, Memes, and QAnon.
Among the 11 flags endorsed by the Trumpists are the Jolly Roger Flag (the “skull and crossbones”), not just one or two but five Revolutionary War flags that have absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump or neo-fascist authoritarianism or Trumpism in any form, and (inexplicably) the Black Flag of Anarchy. As to which self-confessed QAnon sites are deemed acceptable, it appears that basically all of them are.
With all that said, here is a complete listing of the companies, websites, media outlets, and/or persons that Patriot.Win seeks to keep Trump supporters nationwide from in any way patronizing (entities being listed for the first time in this article are in bold):
Orange “Warning” Badge Recipients: A Compendium of Those Who “Appear to Have Left-Leaning Ideological Influence” (55 Entities)
23 and Me
Activision
AirBnB
Anastasia Beverly Hills
Aritzia
Atlantic Records
Axe
Billie
Biossance
Blizzard
Brooklinen
Bungie
Chik-Fil-A ^
DECIEM
Devolver Digital
DoorDash
Dropbox
DuckDuckGo
FashionNova
Firefox
Fitbit
For Love and Lemons
Ford
Ganni
Gatorade
General Motors
Glossier
Goya ^
Hourglass Cosmetics
Ilia Beauty
Intel
Kosas
Lululemon
Minecraft
Nabisco
Newsmax ^
PetSmart
PlayStation
Pluto TV
Pokemon
Pretty Little Thing
Pusheen the Cat
SavagexFenty
Skillshare
Spanx
Square Enix
Stitch Fix
Target
That Game Co.
Tinder
TOMS
UbiSoft
UGG
Warner Records
Yelp
^ This is not a typo. Chik-Fil-A, Goya, and Newsmax are somewhat famously run by far-right figures, so presumably they appear on this list because they pushed back insufficiently, in the view of Trumpists, on what was perceived as left-wing criticisms.
Red “Cancellation” Badge Recipients: A Compendium of Those With “Reports of Alleged Censorship, Suppression, or Chilling Effects” (82 Entities)
Amazon
American Airlines
American Express
Angie’s List
Apple
AT&T
Bank of America
Bed Bath & Beyond
Cash App
Chase Bank
Coca-Cola
Coinbase
Cisco
Costco
Dell
Delta Airlines
DigitalOcean
Discord
Disney
Etsy
Facebook
FactCheck.org
Fox News ^
GoDaddy
GoFundMe
Goodyear
Google
Grubhub
HEB
Indiegogo
Instagram
Kickstarter
Kohls
Lehigh University
Levi Strauss
Mailchimp
Marriott
Mastercard
Medium
Microsoft
Morgan Stanley
NordicTrack
Okta
Papa John’s ^
Patreon
Patagonia
PayPal
Pinterest
Poshmark
Ravelry
Reddit
Robert Gordon University
Salesforce
San Francisco Public Schools (SFUSD)
Sephora
Shopify
Slack
Snapchat
Southwest Airlines
Squarespace
Streamable
Stripe
T-Mobile
TikTok
Twilio
Twitch
Twitter
Under Armour
United Airlines
Vari
Vimeo
Visa
Wagner College
Walmart ^
Wayfair
Webflow
WhatsApp
Wikipedia
WordPress
Y Combinator
YouTube
Zendesk
^ This is not a typo. Fox News, Papa John’s, and Walmart are somewhat famously run by far-right figures, so presumably they appear on this list because they pushed back insufficiently, in the view of Trumpists, on what was perceived as left-wing criticisms.
Post-Cancellation Profile of a Contemporary Trumpist
Here’s an overview of the ascetic life that Trump’s movement now apparently demands of its followers (if they love him enough to respect the cancellations loving him brings).
(1) You can go online, but in doing so you must avoid all of the following companies (in any of the many permutations they may appear to you): Amazon, Angie’s List, Apple, Cisco, Dell, Discord, Etsy, Facebook, GoDaddy, Google, Indiegogo, Instagram, Kickstarter, Medium, Microsoft, Patreon, Pinterest, Reddit, Shopify, Slack, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch, Twilio, Twitter, Vimeo, Webflow, Wikipedia, WordPress or YouTube.
(2) You can travel by car or plane, but you must not patronize any of the following while you are doing so: American Airlines, Delta Airlines, Disney, Goodyear, Marriott, Southwest Airlines, or United Airlines. {Note: Remember that you also cannot use any of the digital services above or financial services below while you are traveling by car or plane.}
(3) You can conduct telephonic and/or digital communications and/or transactions, but not via any of the platforms or service providers listed here: American Express, AT&T, Bank of America, Cash App, Chase Bank, Coinbase, Mailchimp, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, T-Mobile, Visa, or WhatsApp.
(4) You can eat food to survive, but not with the aid of any of the following service providers: Costco, Grubhub, Papa John’s, or Walmart. {Note: And as noted above, you must also be extremely wary of Chik-Fil-A, DoorDash, Gatorade, Nabisco, Target, and Yelp.}
(5) You must be vigilant about the products you purchase, for instance by avoiding all of these: bedding from Bed Bath & Beyond; Coca-Cola products of any kind (this includes literally hundreds of brands, from Bacardi to Barq’s, Capri Sun to Crush—when it’s sold in Peru—Dannon to Dasani to Dr. Pepper, Fanta to Fresca, Minute Maid to Mello Yellow, Pibb Xtra to Powerade, Schweppes to Smart Water, Vitamin Water to Vanilla Coke); no news from Fox News; no clothes from Kohls, Levi Strauss, Patagonia or Under Armour; no perfume from Sephora; and no furniture from Wayfair.
Trumpists also can’t use Substack, as the site’s third-party-payment vendor is Stripe—which is funded by now-cancelled U.S. seed money startup accelerator Y Combinator.
Conclusion
Cancel culture is destroying the lives of Trumpists, who now have so many brands and services they’ve been ordered to cancel that it makes continuing to live in America in 2021 virtually impossible. While no one doubts that on occasion an internet mob has bullied someone who didn’t deserve it—for instance, what Trump ordered his minions to do to now-retired U.S. army lieutenant Alexander Vindman or to the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovich—as a systemic ailment in American life the entirety of the danger from anything answering to the description “cancel culture” is one that threatens the health, welfare, and happiness of exclusively Trump supporters. And it does so, moreover, as an exclusively internal threat that the anonymous leaders of the America First “movement” at Patriot.Win and similar websites have ginned up.
Needless to say, Trump himself is avoiding exactly none of the brands and services that his followers are being told to eschew.
Given the ruthless scope and militancy of the cancellations being ordered by Trump’s minions with Trump’s tacit approval—a cancel culture so brutally comprehensive that it creates a veritable cultural prison that all Trump supporters are told they must inhabit—it’s worthwhile for America to begin a discourse on the right-wing scourge of cancel culture before it destroys the lives of even more insurrectionists than it already has.
While Trumpist insurrectionists are admittedly willing participants in the cancel culture they’ve imprisoned themselves inside, the rest of us nevertheless owe it to democracy to make sure that the sort of militant, cultist asceticism that has firmly taken root on the political right doesn’t threaten either the American free market or our democracy.
Certainly we owe it, at a minimum, to the children of the insurrectionists—who can’t even drink Capri Sun juice-boxes now, per Trump’s neo-fascist totalitarianism—even if we don’t have enough empathy for their parents to try to save them from themselves.
It seems to me it’s just a back door way to funnel all these consumers into the few shoddy right-wing-run companies that “pass muster,” thereby inflating their customer base and no doubt providing Trump Inc with kickbacks for the favor. It’s not so much about who the faithful shouldn’t do business with, but who they MUST do business with. It will always be about the money with Trump.
The most striking angle to this, for me, is how it all reinforces their cult. They are closing the ranks of what is acceptable as reality. The more closed their world gets, the more it all reinforces the nonsense, lies, and conspiracies they believe and frames the real world and truth as an enemy.