The Corrosive Cost of Cancel Culture
Los Angeles, 1998. White supremacists Dave Mazzella and Mike Barrett board a plane bound for Chicago to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show. Their behaviour is so racist, belligerent and even physically abusive, that Oprah throws them off the set. Thirteen years later, Dave and Mike return to the show and apologise for their behaviour. In the conversation that follows, Mike explains how he saw the error of his ways while he was in prison.
The crew they put me on was entirely black. Including a black sergeant. So here I am, the only white guy, and what hit me was, these guys accepted me for who I was. They already knew about my past because it was tattooed all over my back and my neck — I had swastikas all over me and things like that. But they treated me like a human being. And it just taught me that everybody’s a human being.
Chicago, 1987. Fourteen-year-old Christian Picciolini is recruited by a group of Neo Nazis. After seven years immersed in hatred and violence (including a fight where he nearly beats a black teenager to death), Christian’s life changes when he opens a store specialising in racist and white supremacist music:
What I didn’t expect was that people of colour, people who were gay, people who…
