SPENGLER: Mediocrity’s Envy of Genius: The Dirty Secret of Cancel Culture.

The Cultural Revolutionaries at the New York Times this week reviewed the witch hunt against classical musicians, who stand accused of racism simply because the great Western composers happened to be white. Cancel culture is despicable in all of its manifestations, but I take this particular instance personally: I trained in the school of musical analysis founded by Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935). My principle teacher was Carl Schachter, who also taught Prof. Timothy Jackson of the University of North Texas, the target of this particular witch hunt.

It’s all about envy.

Read the whole thing. As Kevin Williamson wrote in his 2019 book, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics, “David Foster Wallace argued that aspiring amateurs who envy professional athletes suffer from the ‘delusion that envy has a reciprocal.’ They believe that if only they could get themselves on the other side of the envy equation, then all of the loneliness and dissatisfaction they feel in their current situation of envy would be transubstantiated into joy and contentedness equal in weight and scope. Envy and spite are two cocktails with a heavy pour of the same brand of hatred—and both are methods for trying to make that interior pain exterior.”