Bill Clinton and James Patterson appear as guests on British morning show Lorraine.
(Picture: Photo Credit: Lorraine/YouTube.)While Republican politicians often blame the ‘snowflake left’ for the emergence of ‘cancel culture’, former US President Bill Clinton claims that it was people on the right who created it.
The politician appeared alongside best-selling author James Patterson on British Morning show Lorraine, promoting the duo’s newest book, The President’s Daughter.
“A madman abducts Keating’s teenage daughter, Melanie—turning every parent’s deepest fear into a matter of national security,” the Amazon description reads. “As the world watches in real time, Keating embarks on a one-man special-ops mission that tests his strengths: as a leader, a warrior, and a father.”
Perhaps we missed that part of the Clinton administration?
During the discussion, presenter Ross King asked Clinton about “cancel culture,” asking how he would have personally handled the phenomenon while still serving in the White House.
“Look, I think part of this is a problem with cloudy definitions,” Clinton said in reply. “The first cancellation I ever lived with throughout my life was the cancelling that people on the right tried to do to people who weren’t.”
“Then it became tempting, and the demographics changed, to go the other way,” he explained of how the social phenomena went onto be adopted by, and therefore associated with, the left.
Clinton continued that, if we listen to his book (good promotion!), “Criticism works better than cancelling.”
“I always listen to my critics,” he concluded, but not before acknowledging a US founding father like a Very Good American: “Benjamin Franklin said our critics are our friends because they show us our faults.”
“You can’t keep this country going unless you can argue back and forth,” he said — an interesting theory.
Clinton did not explicitly define the alleged “cancellation” to which he was referring, though it can be surmised to have been in reference to his having been impeached by the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives in 1998.
Clinton was impeached on the grounds of perjury and obstruction of justice for following his highly-publicized affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old White House intern at the time. (Today, Lewinsky has an amazing Twitter feed.)
Clinton also confessed to having a “nightmare” after leaving office, concerned about “what else could go wrong with our country.”
If only he knew.
