A video game developer who was hounded from his position as CEO of the software company he co-founded for publicly expressing his pro-life views has given a powerful explication of how cancel culture works in the real world today. Former Tripwire executive John Gibson’s harrowing testimony does not speak well for human nature in 2022 America, where citizens are regularly pressured to accede to things they know are wrong.
“I call it social terrorism. It is an effort to use fear and intimidation to cause people to change,” Gibson told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a riveting late-November interview. It is designed to get people to “either hide or pretend that they’re not what they are, really, so that they can keep their jobs, so they can keep their status,” he stressed. “And I just think that’s just a terrible thing for the world.”
‘There Was One Person Within the Company’
A pained Gibson related how other higher-ups at Tripwire readily acknowledged that what was happening to him was not right yet recoiled at standing up against an injustice being inflicted on one of their close associates out of fear of the personal cost they might have to pay.
“There was one person within the company, a lady that was resistant to what they were doing to me,” he said. “And she was fairly senior. And I really appreciated her sort of standing up and pushing back. But it was difficult for her, too. She was outnumbered.
“But also in the position she was in, she was having to deal with a lot of the fallout. And that’s how this social terrorism works,” Gibson continued. “You make people scared, you make their jobs more difficult. You make them worry that people are gonna leave the company if they don’t throw the person who disagreed with their political positions out of the boat.
“So, she really couldn’t overcome the wave of sentiment of the other folks.”
Gibson then touched on what assures that cancel culture succeeds: acquiescence to a social evil by those who feel they have “too much to lose” to do otherwise.
“And then the other people that agree, they’re afraid to speak up,” he said. “They don’t want to be next. I had one of the other owners of the company, politically we’re very, very aligned. He thinks cancel culture is bad, he thinks abortion is bad, and he said, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to be canceled next.’”
Cancel Culture Takes Cruel Personal Toll
Gibson’s story is as old as human history – and there are numerous warnings from the past to raise the alarm about an unfolding process essential to the construction of any grand tyranny. The most vital component is compelling the personal surrender of formerly free citizens to that which their very nature rebels against by means of intense social pressure. It is not about getting people to believe the Big Lie. It is about getting them to know in their hearts that it is a Big Lie and still be willing to adapt and conform to it.
As Liberty Nation noted in December 2020, a time when Americans were being locked down in the name of public health, Czech Soviet dissident Vaclav Havel wrote the following in 1978 as the Iron Curtain still sealed off half of Eastern Europe from the fresh air of freedom:
“Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”
(Photo by Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
It can be spiritually annihilating for a person of principle to feel the full wrath of such a social system. “Words can hardly convey how crushed I was,” Gibson told Carlson. “I shared something with my wife. I’ll tell you what I said to her. I said, ‘I just want to die because I don’t want to live in a world that’s this unjust.’”
“I got depressed. I got, of course, angry, suicidal, not wanting to leave the house,” he added. “It destroyed me, and I have lived through 13 months of hell.”
That his longtime business cohorts could sit back and watch all this happen from the comfort of plush office suites should shake all Americans of good will to the core. Not out of easy outrage at perceived personal weakness that can be derided from afar but rather as a sign of how advanced the machinery of “social terrorism” has become in our communities and workplaces today.
