Despite having its origins in one of the worst thinkers of our times, the sentence “We’ll see who cancels who,” has now entered the lexicon of one of the most memeable phrases of all time.
Last week, former professor and current self-help author Jordan Peterson was banned from Twitter for tweeting a transphobic statement about the actor Elliott Page, which Twitter said violated its rules against “hateful conduct.”
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Rather than remove the tweet or introspect in any way about why deeming some human bodies as “criminal” is a bad idea, Peterson has repeated the strategy that propelled him to infamy and a benzo addiction that ended in a medically induced coma in Russia: doubling down with a fourteen minute video about why he’s not mad and actually he is laughing. I don’t recommend watching it, because there are so many other better uses of your time. I do recommend watching all the memes that people have made from the video, however.
What first stood out for people was Peterson’s ominus “we’ll see who cancels who” statement, which sounds perfectly natural coming from the mouth of a megalomaniacal video game villain.
Here, for example, the same line is seamlessly cut into Red Alert, a game known for its outrageous live-action performances (Tim Curry has much better delivery though):
The same line and setting for Peterson’s video rebuttal are also a perfect fit for an ethereal bureaucrat you might encounter in Remedy’s excellent and surreal video game Control:
It could also be the last thing you hear before a character in Fallout blasts you with a shotgun:
Or a codec message from a Metal Gear Solid character:
Or perhaps it’s something you’d hear from Saturday morning cartoon villain, like Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget:
The scariest possibility is that Peterson is alluding to aHalf-Life 2– like future dystopia, in which he, as some kind of panopticon ruler, who sees, hears, and cancels all before they can cancel him:
Although the transphobia that Peterson espouses isn’t undone by any of these memes, and trans and other LGBTQ people are still marginalized because of hateful opinions that people like Peterson spread, there is one cold comfort in this. If you’ve ever had to suffer through any of Peterson’s speeches or writing, it’s nice to see it being treated by so many people as the joke it is.
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