The political and religious musings of a Right-leaning, libertarian, formerly Orthodox Jew who emphasizes rationalism, pragmatism, common sense, and free, open-minded thought.
Last week was the ten-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical magazine. In the 2010s, Charlie Hebdo published a number of cartoons criticizing Islam. This included satirizing the Islamic prophet Mohammad in cartoon form. While not explicitly banned in the Quran, it is commonly considered verboten in Islamic society to make an image of Mohammad. Some even consider it blasphemy in Islamic law, and therefore punishable by death. On January 7, 2015, two French-born Algerian brothers thought precisely that and targeted Charlie Hebdo employees. They killed 12 people and injured an additional 11 people.
Unfortunately, this was not the first nor the last Islamist attack in world history. More recently, there was the attack in New Orleans earlier this month and the attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany last month. This also is part of a much larger trend of increased Islamist attacks. As the French think tank Fondation pour l'innovation politique shows in its database, there were 66,872 Islamist terrorist attacks between 1979 and April 2024, 84.4 percent of them having occurred within the last decade.
I can imagine someone pointing out this reality and calling it "Islamophobic," much like those on the Woke Left like to call almost everything racist. The term "Islamophobia" is a confusing term. There are people who sadly discriminate based on the color of skin. We use such terms as "racism" or "xenophobia" to describe the problem. There is no race of Muslim people. There are nearly two billion Muslims belonging to various ethnic groups across the planet.
Islam refers to a religion, a faith, a system of ideas. Criticizing Islam means criticizing various ideas, not a racial demographic. We do not use the term "Christophobia" or talk about anti-Christian sentiment in that way. Nor do we use such terms as "Marxophobia" or "Free-market-phobia" to describe antipathy towards given ideologies. To quote philosopher and author Sam Harris:
Honestly criticizing the doctrine of Islam does not entail bigotry against Arabs or any other group of people. It is not an expression of hatred to notice that specific Islamic ideas--in particular, beliefs about martyrdom, and jihad, and blasphemy, and apostasy--inspire terrible acts of violence. And it's not an expression of phobia--that is, irrational-fear--to notice that violent religious fanatics don't make good neighbors.
Per the suffix "-phobia," it implies that there is an irrational fear. Rational fears exist and the problem in this instance is that there are rational fears to be had. It is precisely the ideas and the implementation of said ideas that Islam's critics, myself included, have found to be so problematic. So what is there to fear?
If you are gay, I would say there is plenty to legitimately fear. There are nine Muslim-majority countries in which a gay man can be executed for consensual gay sex, not to mention additional Muslim-majority countries that use the law to punish and incarcerate gay people. What about women in Iran or Afghanistan who have to worry about the morality police, women in Sudan who can be punished for talking to a man who is not her husband, or the female genital mutilation that is all too common in Somalia? And what about a Muslim who loses their faith? Apostasy is punishable by death in Islamic law. I am sure that author Salman Rushdie felt (and very well might still do) when people threaten his life or try to kill him. Or how about those who kill those who mock Islam, as we saw with the Charlie Hebdo attack?
While Islam could theoretically undergo a Reformation much like Christianity began its Reformation when Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses on the door of Castle Church in 1517, there are no signs of Islam undergoing a Reformation or Enlightenment. That might have something to do with the fact that whatever faction of moderate Muslims exists is dealing with its own legitimate fear of being attacked or murdered by Islamists. What people in the Western world consider to be radical and authoritarian is normalized in the Muslim world.
I know these survey data are dated, but I went back to 2013 survey data from Pew Research. Pew asked Muslims across the world about sharia law and what they consider to be immoral. It is not simply that most Muslims want sharia law implemented. Most Muslims also take issue with homosexuality, sex outside of marriage, and drinking alcohol while a significant minority support honor killings. If you look at the Freedom House rankings for the fifty-plus Muslim-majority nations, you will see that none of them are considered "Free" in terms of political freedom or civil liberties. They do not fare much better under the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom.
Like with the Far Left's use of other "phobias," whether it is homophobia, xenophobia, or transphobia, Islamophobia is a linguistic shift to silent dissent by conflating race with belief. Media outlet Spiked Online explains that "Islamophobia" is used as a cudgel to stigmatize or criminalize any critique of Islam as racist. To show where things stand, the Islamic Human Rights Commission gave its "Islamophobe of the Year" to the editorial staff at Charlie Hebdo only a few weeks after terrorists massacred them for publishing cartoons of Islam's prophet Muhammad. And it is amazing how many in the West go along with the "Islamophobia" trope.
Yes, there is legitimate fear that gay people, women, apostates, and non-Muslims can have for being punished under Islamic society. There is legitimate fear that Islam is not here to coexist with people of religious persuasions, but rather to dominate and subjugate, as Muslim polities have done since Muhammad became a warlord in the seventh century.
Denmark banning Quran burning to shield Muslims from being offended is but one example of how they are shaping the Western world to be as oppressive and authoritarian as the Muslim-majority countries. But if you criticize how sharia law is implemented in Muslim-majority countries or what a significant faction of Muslims living in Europe and other parts of the Western world would like to implement, you are wrongfully branded an "Islamophobe." To quote Sam Harris again:
And while every religion has its fanatics, there is only one religion on Earth where even its mainstream members of the faith seek to impose their religious taboos on everyone else. There is only one religion that has made it unsafe for people to criticize it, or indeed, for its own members to leave it. Only Muslims routinely fear for their lives when they decide to leave their religion--and this is true, even in the West. If you doubt this, just read some books or listen to podcasts by ex-Muslims.
As I brought up ten years ago, criticizing Islam is not Islamophobic and practitioners of Islam are not entitled to a life free of offense, criticism, or downright mockery. Being in a free society means that we can criticize, and by extension, offend others with what we believe or say. Those who silence criticism of Islam are committing an egregious linguistic sleight of hand that is eroding democracy and pluralism. At the end of the day, mimicking the intolerance of Islamists with censorship is not the way to go if we want to ultimately avoid being subjugated under authoritarian rule.
Earlier this month, Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz was on MSNBC when he said something I found shocking: "There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy." As I covered in 2017, there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Even "hate speech" is constitutionally protected. Reason Magazine brings up how misinformation is more complicated. Libel, lying to a government official, or fraudulent charitable fundraising are punishable. Conversely, some lies are protected (e.g., New York Times v Sullivan, 1964; United States v. Alvarez, 2012).
Sadly enough, Tim Walz is hardly alone in this authoritarian view and using "misinformation" as a pretext to want to stifle First Amendment rights. According to a recent survey from the Foundation for Individual Expression (FIRE), 53 percent of Americans believe on some level that "The First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees." That partisan breakdown is over 60 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans. This is a perturbing trend given that the U.S. Left had been a major advocate for freedom of speech, especially during the birth of the Freedom of Speech movement in the 1960s. Although Republicans are less likely to take issue with the First Amendment, it is a more prevailing view that has taken over.
What a majority of American citizens are really saying is that they wish they had fewer civil liberties. Benjamin Franklin once said that "those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Security, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." The feeling of security not only applies to national security, but also the security blanket that one's beliefs or worldviews holds.
Not everyone believes, thinks, speaks, or acts the same way as you do. There is no constitutional right to not be offended. I cannot stand pro-Palestine protesters and their blatant lies. Nevertheless, I still believe in their First Amendment rights to [peaceful] protest and freedom of speech. Why would I take such a view? A few reasons:
As I brought up in 2017 with political correctness, the list of triggers and what is deemed as offensive is subjective and never-ending. If being offended were a right, there would be no upper limit on what could be banned or prohibited.
Freedom of speech is indivisible. For freedom of speech to work, that right has to apply to those with whom I emphatically disagree, as well as those as with whom I agree.
To support freedom of speech means understanding that diverging viewpoints exist. Allowing for those viewpoints and beliefs to be expressed means fostering tolerance towards those who are different from us.
Historically, the government has wielded its raw power to silent dissidents and those who speak truth to power. Freedom of speech, religion, and protest are almost always the freedoms that authoritarian governments stifle first. It is no coincidence that authoritarian governments commonly and often coerce and silence journalists. That is because those that are too insecure in their own beliefs or ideas feel the need to strong-arm those that disagree or reveal information that is unflattering to an authoritarian's worldview.
Freedom of speech is neither inherently "left-wing" or "right-wing." It is for everyone, regardless of one's political views, religion, race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Having an intellectual marketplace allows to advance new ideas and find like-minded individuals to inculcate social and political change.
The First Amendment gives us the ability to express ourselves openly. As long as people are not harming others vis-à-vis the non-aggression axiom, I want people to live their lives as freely and happily as possible. That includes their freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition. To quote Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, "the human spirit...demands self-expression. Such expression is an integral part of the development of ideas and a sense of identity. To suppress expression is to reject the basic human desire for recognition and affront the individuals's worth and dignity."
Many Americans seem to view freedom of speech with a "fine for me, but not for thee" mentality. When they can express themselves, it is acceptable. However, when it is someone with whom they disagree expresses their views and opinions, it is a whole different scenario. This attitude comes from a society that prefers to avoid or silent dissent instead of learning how to have difficult conversations on controversial issues. What is unnerving is that Americans have more tolerance for unprotected conduct than they do various forms of protected speech, much as we have seen with the recent pro-Palestine protests on college campuses.
When I criticized the Danish government last December for banning Quran burnings, I was dismayed at how the "free world" is putting the kibosh on free speech. However, I at least had a sigh of relief saying "at least the United States still has a First Amendment." One of the reasons that the United States has historically been a great country is because of the First Amendment rights that it offers. Yet the trend towards hating the First Amendment makes me wonder where my country has gone. If the government starts choosing which ideas or beliefs are "hate speech" or "misinformation," we will find ourselves in an Orwellian state in which 2+2 = 5. I do not want that.
As long as people want more power and/or money, freedom will always be on the defensive. I want to be free. So many revolutions across history were fought because of a desire to be free. With snowflakes on both sides of the political aisle, we need to fight against those who want to censor and make cancel culture woven into the fabric of U.S. society. More than ever, we need to reignite the part of society that values the freedoms that the First Amendment enshrines and have historically made the United States a shining city on a hill. Otherwise, the United States will become an authoritarian nightmare that is negatively depicted in so many dystopian movies and books.
Imagine living in a country where you can get fined or thrown in jail for mistreating a book. You do not have to imagine because it is going to happen in the nation of Denmark. This year, there have been 500 demonstrations in Denmark by anti-Islam activists that have included burning the Quran or flags. This has led to outrage from Muslim-majority nations. That outrage translated into political pressure.
Last week, the Danish Parliament (Folketinget) passed a law that makes it a crime to "inappropriately treat, publicly or with the intention of dissemination in a wider circle, a writing with significant religious significance for a religious community." While the law does not mention the Quran by name, it nevertheless was designed with Quran desecration in mind. The Danish Justice Peter Hummelgaard made that point clear the day the bill passed. The law de jure punishes burning the Quran either with fines or two years of jail time.
It should come as no surprise that I take issue with the Folketinget's decision. I know Denmark is not the United States. Thankfully, freedom of speech is so well-protected in the United States that burning a U.S. flag is constitutional. As I pointed out in 2016, burning a flag of the United States is not how I would personally go about expressing discontent. However, I did point out that the flag is their property and they should be allowed to burn it, especially since they are not physically harming anyone. I would extend this argument to burning a Quran. To quote British media outlet UnHerd:
"There can be no doubt that book burnings are crude, deliberately provocative, and a poor substitute for reasoned debate. But when conducted by private individuals, they serve as non-violent symbolic expressions intended to convey a message -- the essence of freedom of expression."
Only allowing for speech you agree with is not free speech. That freedom of expression has to be allowed to those whose opinion you cannot stand. I articulated that concept last month when it came to pro-Palestine protestors and activists. These protestors base their arguments on lies, half-truths, and taking things woefully out of context. They complain about ethnic cleansing while advocating for ethnic cleansing of Jews. They bemoan a fictitious genocide while ignoring the one that Hamas is diligently working towards. While I abhor what they have to say, I support their right to express their freedom of speech under the First Amendment.
What is obvious is that Denmark's bill is designed to shield Islam from blasphemy. In 2015, I wrote a piece on how criticizing Islam is not Islamophobic, as well as how we should be able to criticize everything, including Islam. The fact that Denmark is passing this bill out of safety concerns speaks volumes. It means that Islamists have a veto over liberty in the Western world.
It is ironic because, as one Muslim scholar from Cato Institute brings up, the Quran itself says the way to deal with those who mock Islam is not banning, throwing people in jail, or the death penalty. Rather, the Quran demands patience (3:186) and staying away from the mockers (4:140). Even if the Quran allowed for punishing the mockers, do proponents think that a blasphemy law will make people respect Islam? If anything, it will only seek to agitate dissidents further while making Islam or Muslims appear too thin-skinned to handle criticism. More freedom of speech eases such tension (Bjørnskov and Mchangama, 2023). What I can anticipate is that blasphemy laws in Denmark will more likely lead to greater savagery:
"For censorship tells certain groups that their beliefs are so perfect, so pristine, so beyond the scurrilous commentary of mere mortals, that those who dissent from them are deserving of punishment. Censorship begets intolerance. In force fielding certain ideologies from criticism, it incites the adherents to those ideologies to seek out and 'discipline' the filth that dare to dissent."
Although Denmark has a population of under six million, this trend in blasphemy laws is perturbing. Denmark abolished censorship in 1770, which we can see in §77 of the Danish Constitution. Look at the Index for Reporters sans frontières (RSF), or Reporters without Borders in English. Denmark has ranked in the Top Ten for greatest freedom on information. Denmark's enactment of blasphemy laws is worrisome indeed. Reason Magazine aptly summarizes my concerns:
"Denmark's surrender to violent extremists and states that imprison, lash, and execute 'blasphemers' is a disturbing sign of the free speech recession that is sweeping the globe in the 21st century. One can only hope that the First Amendment [in the U.S. Constitution] will continue to serve as inspiration to liberal reformers across the globe in a world where free speech is in fast retreat."
Having to serve jail time simply for insulting a religion is not progress. Mimicking the intolerance of Islamists is not going to make them disappear or feel placated. All that Denmark's legislative move will do is embolden the most radical elements in Danish society while further eroding freedom. Having some people offended is a small price to pay for freedom. I hope the rest of the world realizes the importance of freedom of speech before we are further enveloped by the iniquity of authoritarianism.
Another day, another battle in the culture wars. This time, the topic is Roald Dahl. Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter. He wrote such wonderful children's books as Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The publisher Puffin hired sensitivity readers from Inclusive Minds to bowdlerize Dahl's works. To bowdlerize is to remove or modify content thought to be vulgar or otherwise objectionable. The term bowdlerize comes from the Bowdler siblings who infamously expurgated (edited) William Shakespeare's works to make them more appropriate for women and children. You would think we have that reached a point in history where we did not have to cave into the most prudish and puritanical members of society, yet this is 2023. Why would I expect anything less?
So what exactly transpired? Per the Associated Press, "some passages relating to weight, mental health, gender, and race were altered." In defense of its edits, the publisher Puffin said "it's not unusual to review the language alongside updating other details...any changes have been small and carefully considered." An argument for "a sensitive consideration of whether the word-choice matches current sensitivities" was made in The Sydney Morning Herald by children's author Andy Griffiths. Griffiths opines that "children's books are not sacred texts; they are living breathing collaborations between the writer's words and the active imagination of the reader. Words that might reasonably be predicted to upset or offend sections of the audience are, in most cases, better off being replaced."
"Reasonably be predicted." Let's see what isso offensive that it would be considered reasonable to edit. Augustus Gloop from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is called enormously fat, and the editors changed it to enormous. His "great flabby folds of fat" were similarly bowdlerized. The famed Oompa Loompas went from being "small men" to "small people." This is one of the multiple linguistic shifts towards gender-neutral language to not offend transgender or non-binary individuals. Mrs. Twit from The Twits is no longer called "ugly." The words "mental" and "crazy" have been replaced to not insult those with mental health issues. In The Big Friendly Giant, the giant doesn't wear a black jacket, and the characters do not turn "white with fear." Let me get into why I, along with greats such as Salman Rushdie, take issue with these edits.
One of the issues of bowdlerizing the text is that it distorts works of literature and introducing ideas that were not in the original text. One such example is Augustus Gloop. Dahl was not making a statement about obesity in his text per se. Gloop was overweight because of his gluttony for food. It was his greed that got him stuck in a factory pipe and presumedly made into fudge. Dahl used Gloop's fatness as a metaphor for what happens when we have excess consume our lives.
Diluting the language means diluting the power of the story. Literature is a part of culture and history; it is meant to be a reflection of the times in which it was written. You can add a forward or introduction to contextualize Roald Dahl's writing style and word usage. If you want something more in alignment with your values, buy an author's book that is reflective of those values. If Dahl's work is truly that offensive, his work will fade in the background and will be forgotten. There is no need to bowdlerize.
I find the call to bowdlerize to be hypocritical given that the side of the political aisle that is for these revisions is also clamoring for critical race theory (CRT). Forget for a moment that CRT is a dangerous bait-and-switch that only serves to erode race relations and K-12 education. CRT proponents advocate for CRT because we should not whitewash history. That much they are right about: we need to teach the good, bad, and ugly of history. But here is where it goes awry. The woke Left want us to understand racial injustice in spite of alleged "white fragility," but describing the physical appearance a fictional character as "fat" or "ugly" is too triggering? The people on the woke Left cannot acknowledge their own fragility, but I will digress from the woke Left's intellectual inconsistency.
What exactly are we teaching children when we take out certain words because they are too offensive? Children are bound to meet people who think and act differently than they do. This sort of behavior encourages children to complain and strong-arm when they do not get their way, i.e., act like children instead of adults. Instead, we should be encouraging future generations to be more emotionally resilient. Similar to comedy, literature is meant to be surprising and provocative. If you remove the content that could be offensive, you remove its potency.
Plus, the idea that children cannot understand a book simply because it was written in the past is insulting. Especially as they get older, children learn to understand the difference between literal and figurative language. People are capable of reading a text from the past without judging it by modern standards. We should not talk down to or patronize children because they will not learn better.
Dahl's style includes dark humor and unexpected twists, which has been part of his appeal enough to sell over 250 million copies of his books. As Ben Shapiro astutely points out, Roald Dahl's books teach a lesson about the world: "Life is a rough place where people are mean to you and social expectations are set for you." Life is not sugar-coated, certainly not the way Augustus Gloop would have liked. The beauty of Dahl’s works is that the protagonists develop resilience and find creative ways to navigate brutal realities. To reiterate, trying to shield children from life's brutishness or unfairness does not do any favors to prepare them for living in the real world.
Forget that Roald Dahl did not want anyone to change his texts. It is not the job of publishers to remove discomfort from its readers because life is not one big safe space. Nor is it a practical endeavor to bowdlerize. A similar censorship debacle happened a couple of years ago with Dr. Seuss. As I asked then, "who determines what is too offensive?" Is it a worry about offending everyone or a select few? The CEO at PEN America, an organization dedicated to free expression, rightly stated that "the problem with taking license to re-edit classic works is that there is no limiting principle." I brought this up with political correctness: the list of potential triggers is subjective and never-ending. If we take this need to not offend to its logical conclusion, it would mean banning fiction all together. This leads to the crux of why I take issue with this latest attempt in censorship. To quote PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel:
Rewriting novels, like efforts to rewrite history, has origins in authoritarian playbooks. While editors and publishers might be tempted to try to excise ideas or words from he past that offend us today...we can't go about ridding regrettable ideas and words from the past without potentially diluting the original text and the story itself. We need to learn from the perspective of the past, not eliminate viewpoints we no longer accept. Much of literature could be construed as offensive to someone, based on race, gender, religion, age, economic or other status or myriad other factors...[If we bowdlerize], we risk distorting the work of great authors and clouding the essential lens that literature offers on society.
Fortunately, there was pushback as I was writing this piece. It was not only other publishers throughout Europe that decided they were not going ahead with this bowdlerizing nonsense. Even better, this pushback resulted in Puffin announcing a Roald Dahl Classic Collection to keep the author's original text in print. I am happy to see this take place, but it is also a partial victory. Why? Because they are still going to sell the bowdlerized version alongside the original version.
As a writer at Forbes pointed out, it very well could have been Puffin's plan all along to stir up controversy and create both versions to boost sales. On some level, I suppose it gives greater consumer choice, which helps maximize Puffin's bottom line. Maybe Puffin really was making a business decision to take advantage of the current culture war we are in.
As much as I would rather not be in the midst of a culture war, c'est la vie. Roald Dahl and his children's books ended up being another battleground. In George Orwell's Animal Farm, freedom was abolished not through violence, but by changing meaning of words and the record of the past. Sadly, Orwell's dystopian fiction is becoming more real by the day.
As I pointed out last month, the woke Left is on the warpath to control language. They will not stop at Roald Dahl. They will continue with the attempts to bowdlerize texts and cancel anything that does not agree with their worldview. The fight is for much more than a book.
As comedian John Cleese points out, this level of wokeness and political correctness sets the bar according to those who are the most touchy and most emotionally unstable. If we do not take a stand or draw a line, they will continue to let their unfounded sense of moral indignation continue to erode literature and indeed all forms of artistic expression.
What gives me hope from the latest Roald Dahl controversy is that there are plenty of people who do not care for the bowdlerizing and fought back. Yes, advocates of freedom of expression can claim a victory with Roald Dahl's work. But the fight is hardly over. If anything, it is only beginning. If we want to emerge victorious from the woke Left's relentless crusade to sanitize art and speech, we will need to push back and we will need to push back hard. Anything less will result in the loss our freedom of expression in a way that would turn the Orwell's fictitious 1984 to reality.
I don't know if you have noticed or not, but the English language has been undergoing a lot of changes in the past five or so years. These changes are due to the puritans of our time: the woke Left. Mothers have become "birthing people." Affirmative action is now "diversity." Disinformation has become wokespeak for "speech I disagree with," which has a similar vibe to the phrase "threat to democracy." Infrastructure went from "roads and buildings" to "anything the Left deems essential for the government to spend tax dollars on." There are more examples that I will provide below, but it begs the question of what is happening and why. To quote the American Institute for Economic Research:
Wokesters quickly grab the moral high ground and ruthlessly denounce any deviation from the neo-orthodoxy du jour. Social media provides a conduit for quickly detecting tough and lifestyle infractions, shaming deviants into compliance or having them 'cancelled.'
This shift to gain the moral high ground is seen in a number of instances. We went from a fight for equality (i.e., equal treatment under the law) to one of equity (i.e., attempting to correct past discrimination with present discrimination, often to the point of "equality of results"). While inclusion has meant "everyone is welcome," it has an additional woke meaning of "a space that restricts speech to cater to those who are offended." Then there is anti-racism. Forget that almost no one is pro-racist. We used to fight for a colorblind society, but that is now deemed racist. And if you disagree, that is considered racist. Don't pay any heed to the fact that the obsession over race in the anti-racist world is its own form of racism.
I want to point out a couple of notable examples from recent months to accentuate the woke Left's attempt to control language. Let's start with a list from Stanford University's Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) created this May. The Wall Street Journal discovered the list in December and had a field day with it. Here are a few good suggestions from the list:
Calling it a "blind review" insinuates that blindness is abnormal and negative, furthering an ableist culture. Similarly, calling it obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is insulting, which is why EHLI suggests calling it detail-oriented. Way to minimize OCD!
"Burying the hatchet" is considered cultural appropriation, as is the word guru.
Calling someone brave is an insult to the Indigenous people.
Using such words as freshman, congressman, gentlemen, or chairman perpetuates gender binary language.
Calling it a white paper denotes that "white = good," which is why you should call it a position paper.
"Beat a dead horse" perpetuates violence against animals.
Survivor is a good substitute for "victim" because it gives agency, but it's not good enough for Stanford.
It is bad enough that woke institutions try to thrust the usage of preferred gender pronouns onto the rest of us. In an attempt to out-woke everyone else, EHLI now says that calling the pronouns "preferred" is bad because it suggests that being gender nonbinary is a choice and a preference.
This list reads like a parody from the satirical site Babylon Bee. Yet these examples are coming from a well-known university being serious about linguistic shifts. A person with normal sensibilities would look at the list and dismiss most, if not all of it, as ridiculous. It is not only Stanford University making these sorts of modifications to the English language. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has put itself in charge of administering woke language in the health sector by releasing Preferred Terms for Select Population Groups and Communities.
Calling someone a smoker is considered offensive, so the CDC thinks you should use the term "person who smokes." Forget the fact that the CDC has trademarked the phrase "Tips From Former Smokers®." The CDC being incapable of taking its own advice is another reason I cannot take the CDC seriously. Calling someone an addict is deemed incorrect by the CDC. The CDC thinks "criminal" should be replaced by "person who is incarcerated or detained." Out of all the things a criminal in jail is going to worry about, do you think being called a criminal is at the top of that person's list?
Yes, there are some truly offensive words out there. There needs to be a balance between being a society of sociopaths and being a bunch of snowflakes who have not developed the basic emotional resilience to handle words that are not considered offensive by the vast majority of people. The woke Left is incapable of striking such a balance.
The woke Left's obsession over language is less about offensiveness because they do not care about offending anyone who disagrees with the woke in-group. Odds are that changing language is not going to address real issues because the legitimate problems facing us (and not micro-aggressions) entail solutions that go much deeper than making words less offensive for the least stoic and emotionally resilient in society, i.e., the woke. One of the main functions of language is to clearly communicate ideas, but all wokeness has done is muddy up and bastardize language for political purposes. Wokeness, or what was formerly referred to as political correctness, is thought and speech controlin the guise of brotherhood (sorry, I mean all humans getting along in a harmonious fashion). To quote the Right-leaning The Federalist:
The obsession with over-complicating language is not incidental and has in fact been a consistent and identifiable strategy to muddy theaters of political discourse and frame discussions in a way that benefits the Left from the outset of the conversation.
The woke Left's strategy is "control the language, control the conversation and how stories are told." Confucius once said that "when words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom." The ability to express oneself is an essential part of freedom. It is no accident that freedom of speech is in the First Amendment. It is also no accident that the woke Left is trying to control speech: because they want us to conform to their way of thinking. The only way to deal with the woke Left's Orwellian doublespeak is to speak up and fight back. As I brought up in October 2021, we should not be encouraging fragility or victimhood. We need emotional resilience and anti-fragility in our society. We also have to call out the woke B.S. and create institutions that counter the wokeness.
As British magazine Spiked pointed out, "Society tends to oscillate between periods of liberalism and puritanism or conservatism. We are currently living through a puritan age. Soon will come a reaction, a swing once more towards liberalism....The people of the future will probably damn the generation of 2023 for its suffocating, moralizing, Philistine culture of censorship and its desire to wipe out the past." That shift cannot come soon enough. Much like with the ridiculous barrage of ineffective and harmful COVID restrictions, I anticipate that future generations will look at the woke attempts to mess with language with the same disdain and ridicule that it rightly deserves.
Actress Whoopi Goldberg found herself in hot water last week when she made comments that got her suspended from The View for two weeks. What did she say that was so offensive? She said that the Holocaust was not about race. It was not a stutter or a woeful misstep. She repeated it three more times shortly afterwards. Goldberg said that the Holocaust was not about race, but rather about man's inhumanity to man. Someone should have told Hitler.
It is true that Jews are not strictly a race. Jewish identity is more complicated. I should know. I was not born Jewish. Judaism works a lot like U.S. citizenship. The U.S. Constitution states that you can either be a U.S. citizen by being born as a U.S. citizen (Fourteenth Amendment) or going through the naturalization process (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 4). It works similarly with Judaism. Either you are born Jewish because one of your parents (traditionally the mother) is Jewish. Alternatively, you can convert to Judaism. Plus, the idea that Jews can be of any ethnicity, whether it be white, black, Asian, or Latino, should dispel the notion of Judaism being a strictly ethnical concept.
While Judaism is not about race, the Holocaust was decidedly about race. Hitler's goal was to build a society of the Übermensch. Yes, the Nazi regime ultimately systematically murdered gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, and political dissidents along with the Jews. At the same time, the group of people that Hitler despised and targeted the most was the Jewish people. The Nazi regime started its racist policies by first and foremost targeting the Jews. It used a pseudoscientific argument to codify in German law the false idea that the Jews were biologically inferior. The Reich Citizenship Law, enacted in 1935, changed the definition of the Jewish people from a religious and cultural community to that of a race that was strictly defined by birth and blood. The Law for Protection of German Blood and German Honor banned marriage between Jewish Germans and non-Jewish Germans. These two laws became the basis of the Nuremberg Laws, which was the beginning of racial antisemitism of the Nazi regime that led to Hitler pursuing his dream of systematically exterminating the Jewish people. Furthermore, it is clear that Whoopi Goldberg did not read the book Maus, the topic being discussed on The View that day which led up to her inflammatory comments, because the epigraph of the book has a despicable quote from Hitler saying, "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human."
What compounded the historical illiteracy of Whoopi Goldberg was that by saying the Holocaust was "about man's inhumanity to man" is that she refused to give Jews any special identity. From her limited perspective, it was just an instance of "white-on-white violence." Goldberg could see nothing unique or different about Jewish identity, or could even perceive Jews as minorities. It is as if she were erasing the centuries of persecution and oppression the Jewish people have endured. As actress Debra Massing pointed out, Whoopi Goldberg has "All Lives Matter[-ed]" the Jewish people.
One could easily be mad at Whoopi Goldberg. She opened her mouth and stuck her foot right in there with her misunderstanding of the Holocaust and Jew-hatred. On the other hand, she is not alone in her ignorance of the Holocaust. Holocaust education is not what I would call great. Only 19 U.S. states require Holocaust education. In 2020, a 50-state survey of millennial Americans showed that 63 percent did not even know that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. More disturbingly, 11 percent of millennials and those of Generation Z thought that the Jews caused the Holocaust. A similar lack of Holocaust knowledge came from a U.K.-based survey in 2021.
We have to remember that she is viewing the concept of race from her experience as a 65-year-old African-American woman. From her point of view, racism only happens when black people and other people of color are being oppressed by white people, which sounds a lot like critical race theory (see my criticism of CRT here). She could not fathom that racism could also be one group of white people oppressing another group of predominantly white people that the first group of white people has deemed racially inferior. It is ironic considering that Goldberg essentially used the now-woke Anti-Defamation League's [ADL] previous definition of racism, which was defined as "the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed hierarchy that privileges white people." The ADL has since changed their definition of racism, but the irony of the ADL's wokeness does not escape me.
Leaving the politics of something as CRT aside, I can say that it is effortless to view an idea, concept, event, or occurrence strictly through the lens of your experience. However, that is limiting not simply because Goldberg's understanding of race is predated by centuries of Jews existing. It is because the world around us is so much more than what we experience. This is why having diversity, whether that of race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, philosophy, or political persuasion, is important. We learn from other experiences and improve our understanding of the world by conversing with those who are different from us.
With that being said, what should be the fate of Whoopi Goldberg? Should she be fired? It is tricky to know how I feel on this one. In 2013, I was okay if A&E, a private entity, decided to fire Phil Robertson for his offensive remarks about gay people. Part of being free is being accountable for what we say and do. Our actions have consequences, both good and bad. ABC would be in the right to fire Whoopi Goldberg from The View, particularly if Goldberg's remarks were a violation of her contract or if those comments did damage to ABC.
On the other hand, I highly value free speech. Freedom of speech is one of the redeeming features of American society. She should be free to express herself, much like comedian Dave Chappelle, author J.K. Rowling, podcaster Joe Rogan, or actress Gina Carano should have been before ABC's Disney decided to fire Carano. Plus, we as a society have gone off the rails in recent years regarding what is deemed offensive. The reaction of those who want Whoopi Goldberg fired is part of what makes cancel culture so infuriating. It is easier to go into mob mentality and throw stones at someone who said something offensive than it is to forgive. Yes, Whoopi said something daft. I do not think she said something out of malice because she at least acknowledged how horrible the Holocaust was. I think Goldberg's comments were straight-up ignorance.
More to the point, Whoopi Goldberg should be educated so she can have an opportunity to learn from her mistake and better understand the nature of anti-Semitism. Too much of our society has become too polarized, too quick to judge those who are not of the same political tribe, and too stuck in echo chambers to reach out to those who disagree. Until we can reverse the trends on political discourse in this nation, we will continue to go in this illiberal, un-American direction.
This time of the year is a time of reflection on what has transpired during the current calendar year. Last year, I was hoping for less craziness than there was in 2020. Between the pandemic, economic downturn, and social unrest, last year was unhinged. While 2021 was not as bad as 2020, 2021 still had more than its fair share of insanity.
As the pandemic continued into its second year, it remained a major topic in the media and among political pundits. On my blog, the pandemic was a topic that accounted for over a third of my blog entries for the 2021 calendar year. I was hoping that it would have been less considering that safe and effective vaccines were made available (see April 2021 analysis here). There was a brief moment in which the CDC said that the unvaccinated could go around doing normal activities unmasked. My response to that CDC recommendation in May was that the CDC has botched messaging throughout the pandemic and that going back to normal means ignoring what the CDC has to say by enjoying life regardless. Maybe now, we could stop people telling us to "follow the science" while ignoring the science. That was wishful thinking on my part.
We went from "two weeks to flatten the curve" to "wait a little longer to help hospitals" to "wait until we have a vaccine" to "get enough people vaccinated." But along came the Delta variant, and with that, the goalposts moved once more. To keep Delta in check, President Biden called for vaccine mandates. I covered the topic no less than four times this past year in which I pointed out the problems with vaccine mandates (see here, here, here, and here). 2021 was also a year in which we procured enough data to conclude that the lockdowns were both ineffective and harmful from a public health standpoint. And let's not even get into the unhelpful travel bans or mask mandates (see here and here). All of this lunacy made me realize that the pandemic will not come to an end when COVID-related hospitalizations or deaths get low enough, but when we as a society get used to accepting risk once more.
But don't you worry. There was enough craziness to go around that the pandemic did not need to hog all the spotlight.
Cancel culture was another major news item. Take the Dr. Seuss controversy in which the Dr. Seuss Foundation cancelled the publication of six of Seuss' less-known works. I came to multiple conclusions on that debacle, most notably that the woke Left are the moral prudes of our time and that a small group of emotionally fragile and intellectually weak individuals should not have their sense of being offended determine what is acceptable for the rest of us.
In a similar vein, there was cancel culture controversy surrounding comedian Dave Chapelle's Netflix special The Closer. He made jokes offending all sorts of people, but the jokes that got the most ire were those on the theme of transgender individuals. You can read my analysis here, but I was reminded of the value of comedy, the importance of free speech, and that the fragility of the woke Left is both at odds with learning to agree with those disagree with you and the essential pillars that make up a free, democratic society.
And let's not forget the debacle with the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. While the woke Left tried to make it about race (which is odd considering the case was about a white guy shooting four other white guys in self-defense), it showed how little many on the Left believe that there is a such thing as a "good guy with a gun." The spoiler here is that defensive gun usage (DGU) is way more prevalent than the Left would care to admit.
But if we do want to get into the topic of race, I tackled the topic of critical race theory (CRT). Contrary to what the Left would like to believe, CRT is not about simply about having a dialogue about race or making sure we are not ignoring the nastier parts of history. CRT is a simplistic, fatalistic worldview that believes that U.S. institutions are inherently racist and [one of] the only attributes of a human being that matters is the color of one's skin.
On the brighter side of race relations, Juneteenth became a federal holiday. I wrote a piece on why we should all celebrate Juneteenth in the United States.
I wish you all a Happy New Year! May it be less out of whack than 2020 and 2021 were.
It is no secret that comedian Dave Chappelle has a mix of observational humor, black humor, insult comedy, and satire that he enjoys using to get under people's skin. He gets off on offending people by being blunt and crass. In his latest Netflix special, The Closer, he takes it to a whole different level. He talks about discrimination against the African-American community relative to the LGBT community. He jokes about getting COVID-19. He explores the textbook definition of feminism and realizes that he is a feminist after he refers to women as "bitches." What got him the most flak was his comments about transgender individuals.
There was considerable anger from the trans activist community, ranging from angry Tweets to threats to boycott Netflix and pleas to pull the special from Netflix. How did Netflix respond? They did not cave into pressure. Instead, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings defended Chappelle in internal communications: "In his special, Chappelle makes harsh jokes about many groups, which is his style and a reason his fans love his comedy and commentary. Stand-up comedians often expose issues that are uncomfortable because the art by nature is highly provocative. As a leadership team, we do not believe that 'The Closer' is intended to incite hatred or violence against anyone."
My Criticisms of "The Closer"
There is a lot I would like to cover today, but I want to start off this analysis by saying there were parts of Chappelle's sketch that I found distasteful. I say this as someone who has a high threshold when it comes to humor. I appreciate black humor. When done correctly, it can be great because laughing at some of the darkest aspects of human existence can be therapeutic. If we don't laugh at those dark moments, they will bring us down...or at least that is how I view it. I find raunchy or crude humor funny. South Park's mix of the crude and political satire had me laughing out loud on multiple occasions. I also think a number of controversial comedians are funny, including George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Tracy Morgan, and Lenny Bruce. What I am about to say has nothing to do with a low tolerance for controversial or "inappropriate" material.
But within the first ten minutes of his stand-up, Chappelle does a bit that I thought went too far. Chappelle thought of an idea of a movie: There is a discovery of a group of aliens that are originally from Earth. They come from an ancient group of people that achieved interstellar travel and left Earth thousands of years ago. They go to another planet and things go bad. They decide they come back to Earth and reclaim it as their own." What does Chappelle call this movie idea? Space Jews.
Why should the Space Jews bit be offensive? After all, at the end of The History of the World, Part I, Mel Brooks does a bit called Jews in Space (see below). I agree that no group of people should be exempt from being the butt of a joke. As Mel Brooks shows, you can make Jew jokes while still being tasteful and spot-on. Dave Chappelle crosses that line from a good joke to a bad one. I don't say that simply as a Jew. I say that since part of Chappelle's style is based on observational humor. Content and delivery are the two main ingredients for good comedy. In the case of observational humor, part of that content is making sure that it at least remotely resembles reality.
Chappelle's joke takes on multiple anti-Semitic tropes that are categorically untrue, including that Jews are "other," Jews want to take over the world, and that Jews are oppressors. If Chappelle were to base the joke in historical fact, he would have known that the Romans came into Judea and Samaria, took over the land, oppressed the Jewish populace, and ultimately expelled the majority of the Jews. The Jews were subsequently exiled and oppressed by various governments for nearly the next two millennia. Jokes, especially ones that are based in observational humor, are funnier when they are at least somewhat based on historical accuracy. So to recap this part of the analysis: Jews in Space is funny, Space Jews is anti-Semitic.
There were some other parts of Chappelle's special I took issue with because of a lack of accuracy. One is that Chappelle treats oppression like a zero-sum game. This is especially pronounced when he jokes about discrimination against African-Americans in comparison to discrimination against LGBT individuals. He oversimplifies it by assuming that all gay people are white (i.e., Chappelle said that "gay people are minorities until they need to be white again"), and frames it in a way as if the African-American and LGBT communities were two separate entities without any overlap.
He also implies that the only discrimination that really matters is that against African-Americans. On the one hand, I am not here to say that African-Americans historically have had it easy. On the contrary! As recent as last June, I brought up how African-Americans have dealt with more than their fair share of discrimination in the United States. Plus, I understand that Chappelle is speaking from his personal experience. On the other hand, Chappelle asked the LGBT community to not "punch down" at him, after he spent a decent part of his show minimizing the discrimination of LGBT individuals. It is disingenuous to ask something of someone that you yourself cannot do, much like it is disingenuous for a millionaire with a large fan base trying to play the victim. Plus, there have been multiple minority groups that have been oppressed, including Jews, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, Muslims, gays, Gypsies, and the disabled. As the Left-leaning Slate brings up, Chappelle narrowly has focused on Black pain, but "fails again and again when his attention turns toward other marginalized groups."
The Funnier Parts of "The Closer"
For all that I found faulty with his special there were parts that I agreed with or at least found funny and/or to be good social commentary. Here are a few of those highlights from Chappelle's special:
"Is it possible that a gay person can be racist?" To Chappelle, I respond that it is possible. I think it is possible for anyone, whether they are gay or straight, black or white, religious or not, to be racist. Humans from all backgrounds have the potential and ability to discriminate against others.
"Of course it's possible [that a gay person can be racist]. Look at Mike Pence." Aside from the rumors that the former Vice President is gay, what makes this funny is that Chappelle calls Pence "a sad gay...one of those gays that prays about it." What makes this bit funny is that being gay is not a choice although there are people that still believe it is, conversion therapy is a bunch of bullocks, and it's sad that it's 2021 and people are still in the closet. Again, black humor!
"I'm jealous of gay people." After talking about "how well that movement is going," Chappelle proceeds to say that "I don't hate gay people at all. I respect the shit out of you." If Chappelle were an actual homophobe, he would not revere or laud gay people. I'm not here to say that every one of Chappelle's remarks on the gay community are accurate, but a bona fide homophobe would have a different take on gay people than one of respect.
Describing an altercation he had with a lesbian, Chappelle ended with the punch line of "I whooped the toxic masculinity out of that bitch." That punchline is a jab at the woke Left's take on how all masculinity is toxic, as opposed to distinguishing between toxic and healthy masculinity.
DaBaby is a rapper that made homophobic comments at a concert in Miami, implying that all gay people have HIV or AIDS. While that is wrong, a point that Chappelle brought up is that DaBaby also shot a fellow black man in a Wal-Mart in North Carolina. His self-defense argument was good enough to get him a misdemeanor, but that doesn't change the fact that DaBaby still shot a guy and that got less flak than his homophobic remarks. Chappelle is criticizing an assumption on the Far Left that incendiary words are just as bad as physical assault or murder. We'll talk about this topic more later.
Chappelle was perplexed as to why women think he's misogynisitic, asking "what could I possibly be saying that would make these bitches think that I hate women? I couldn't figure it out." Non-rhetorically, using a derogatory term to describe women might be why, but I digress. Chappelle then said he Googled the dictionary definition of feminist to make sure that he wasn't misogynist. Webster's defines feminism as "the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities." Chappelle then declared that by that definition, he was indeed a feminist.
When trans activists were criticizing him on Twitter, Chappelle's response was "I don't give a fuck because Twitter is not a real place." I found that to be interesting commentary on how we view social media in our society.
Chappelle and Transgenderism
He spent much of the second half of "The Closer" on transgender issues. He started that part of the sketch by asking "What is a woman?" He then said that as much as women, gay men, or lesbians have a problem with him, transgender individuals want him dead because "I went too far, I said too much." He jokingly (or possibly half-jokingly) called himself transphobic multiple times in the sketch. He relays a story in which he allegedly was tricked into calling a transgender woman beautiful. He also compared transgender women to white people wearing blackface. He also said that "I'm not saying that to say that trans women aren't women," followed by comparing the genitalia of transgender individuals to such plant-based "meats" as Impossible Burger. His take on it was "that it's close, but not quite there." Those were some of the cruder parts of his coverage on transgender issues.
Chappelle made a statement that was not crude, but nevertheless controversial when he stood up for J.K. Rowling when she said that biological sex was a thing. He made fun of how certain transgender activists called Rowling a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or TERF for short. Chappelle said that TERFs feel about transgender women how black people feel about blackface. Chappelle says he is "Team TERF," saying that gender is a fact. If you are looking for analysis on what Rowling said in 2020 and a nuanced take on transgenderism and biological sex, you can read what I wrote in 2020.
Then there were some of the more endearing moments he had when it came to transgender issues. Chappelle also said that "I am not indifferent to the suffering of someone else." He reflects on when was first called transphobic sixteen years ago and how he evolved since then. Chappelle made fun of transgender bathroom bans. At the end, he conveyed a story about a trans woman named Daphne Dorman. He asked Dorman to open up a sketch for him. During this opening, Chappelle and Dorman were having a conversation. Chappelle said, "I have no idea what you're talking about," to which Dorman responded, "I don't need you to understand me. I just need you to believe I'm having a human experience." For Chappelle, he believed it because "it takes one [a human] to know one." Sadly, Dorman committed suicide shortly thereafter. Chappelle set up a trust fund for Dorman's daughter. When Chappelle met the daughter, he said, "I knew your father, and he was a wonderful woman." What is noteworthy is that Dorman's family is standing up for Chappelle and calling him an ally to the LGBT community.
Does Chappelle make off-color jokes? Yes. Are his jokes offensive? That matters on personal taste, to be sure, but I can at least understand why some people would take offense. Do I think he is being transphobic? I do not. I watched the special twice to make sure I got a grasp of the content of the special. Yes, Chappelle made jokes about transgender individuals. However, the thing is that Chappelle is an equal-opportunity offender. In that special, not only did Chappelle make fun of trans individuals, but he made fun of Jews, white people, the Chinese by blaming China for COVID-19, gay men, lesbians, and women, not to mention his constant usage of the n-word. His content oscillates between the irreverent and the humane. That is what Chappelle does. With regards to trans individuals, what I think Chappelle is trying to say in his own way was "I respect you as human beings, but I disagree with this definition of gender."
The Value of Comedy and Free Speech
Going through Chappelle's comments in detail reminds me of the complexities of comedy. There were parts I liked about Chappelle's special and there were parts that I truly did not care for. Does that mean I am going to join the trans activists and ask that Chappelle's special be pulled? Of course not! I brought this up back in March when giving my take on the Dr. Seuss controversy in which some of his books got pulled from publication. Just because something is offensive does not mean we should discontinue it or censor it.
The last thing we need if we are to have a free society is to have a small minority of prudes decide what content is acceptable for the rest of us. Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist who was once a slave, said that "Liberty is meaningless when the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down." Or to quote comedian John Cleese, "Laughter is a force for democracy."
We do not have the right to not be offended. If anything, freedom of speech implicitly involves the right to offend. People are bound to hold different beliefs on a multitude of topics, whether that be religion, politics, or philosophy. This is especially true when talking about comedy. Comedy is an art form that is meant to be edgy and push boundaries. The good comedy often holds up a mirror to us and to society and asks us to look at who we are. Comedy is meant to provoke. There are times it will insult your sensibilities, especially if you have a thin skin.
The Art of Agreeing to Disagree Versus Woke Fragility
I have learned to get less offended as time passes. I have realized that not everyone is like me. Not everyone thinks like me, observes religion like me, or has the same tastes or preferences as me. I don't expect people to conform to my way of life. For the vast majority of people, I can agree to disagree, sometimes vehemently. I have found that those on the Far Left or those who identify as woke are incapable of doing that. Why am I pointing out the woke crowd specifically? Because it is most relevant to this discussion. I agree that there are closed-minded and authoritarian individuals on the Right. In U.S. history, much of the prudishness and censorship came from the Religious Right. However, the ones that are most gung-ho in our society to cancel comedic work because it offends their nature is coming from woke individuals on the Left. This is not a criticism of everyone on the Left because not everyone on the Left is woke. This criticism, much like previous criticisms I have made on this blog, are of a woke subset on the Left.
As I detailed in July 2020, the woke mindset is a fundamentalist mindset reminiscent of those on the Religious Right. For the woke or the social justice crowd (whatever you prefer to call them), the Dave Chappelle controversy (or any controversy) is more than mere disagreement; it is a moral deficiency to disagree and not see things exactly the way they do. It does not matter that Chappelle criticized transgender bathroom bans or recognized the human experience of being trans. If Chappelle (or anyone, for that matter) doesn't agree with the woke on everything, the proper punishment is labelling said individual a transphobe and attempting to strip them of a livelihood. This woke mindset, especially when it comes to comedy, manifests itself in a few problematic ways.
The first is that those who are different, those who are not part of the "in-group," are viewed on an adversarial level. At the very least, it leads to more divisiveness, much like we see with Critical Race Theory. How are we supposed to have comedy, never mind a pluralistic democracy built on tolerance and diversity, when differences are not acceptable by this vocal minority? Also, is it realistic to expect to change their minds if you treat them as an adversary? When was the last time you were convinced of something because someone yelled at you and berated you?
The woke like to argue that "words are violence." Forget that Webster's Dictionary defines violence as "the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy." While certain words can inflict emotional or psychological damage, harsh words are not bullets, knives, fists, or fires set to property. If the woke Left were concerned about the impact of words, they would be concerned about how it impacts everyone, and not just certain individuals that are part of the woke in-group. If it is not about legitimate harm caused by words, why use the argument? As I brought up in 2017 when discussing political correctness, political correctness is not a synonym for "politeness." It is thought and speech control under the guise of brotherhood and unity. When someone says "words are violence," what they are really doing is deflecting criticism while attempting to control language.
If you shield yourself from criticism, how do you grow intellectually or spiritually? When I talk with people I disagree with, not only do I learn about their arguments and perspective, but I learn about myself. By shutting down conversations, those on the woke Left are missing on a true growth opportunity not only for themselves, but for people that they might have otherwise persuaded.
I'm not saying nothing should offend us ever because that would make us a society of sociopaths. But I will say that U.S. society has taken the concepts of fragility and victimhood to a whole different level, and not in a good way. If Stoic philosopher Epictetus was right in saying "It's not what happens to you, but how you react," then that would mean people can exert greater control over their response to how something such as The Closer makes them feel. If that is the case, then people choose the story and narrative that they hear when listening to comedy, which means that in many instances, they choose to be offended by such comedians as Dave Chappelle. When talking with woke people over the years, I get the sense that they are on the lookout for things that are offensive. In this mindset, everything is a slight, regardless of intentions.
Those who complain about "white fragility" basically have no threshold for a comedian telling jokes that are outside their worldview. If they don't like something, they try to tear it down or censor it. There is no attempt to converse with, empathize with, or even understand someone who is different. If the tolerance for those who are different is so low in the woke crowd, how can you ever expect woke people to understand comedy? To channel comedian John Cleese: "A good sense of humor is a sign of a healthy perspective, which is why people who are uncomfortable around humor are either pompous (inflated) or neurotic (oversensitive)." Hear, hear!
Concluding Thoughts
Even with my gripes about some of Chappelle's content, I think that his special represents the importance of freedom of speech generally, but also about the value of comedy specifically. Chappelle's special reminds us that good comedy means that no topic or no group of people is off limits. We recall the fact that life is the opposite of a safe space, not to mention much more complex than a series of talking points. Chappelle has the right to offend, much like we can respond with our freedom of speech by calling him out on inaccuracies or problematic statements. I believe that Chappelle can improve both on his content and delivery while still keeping within the overall comedic style he has developed over time.
But trying to prohibit comedians from having a platform or censoring content because it does not agree with your sense of right and wrong? How un-American, how undemocratic, how authoritarian! If you don't like Chappelle's comedic style, don't watch Chappelle's specials. Netflix provides plenty of LGBT movies and TV series for you to watch. I'm glad that Chappelle was able to withstand the naysayers. To see a comedian with notoriety with content on a famous platform as Netflix is encouraging because it means the Thought Police are less likely to win the cultural battle, that "we, the people" will have enough of the politically correct overreach in our lives. We shouldn't be reenforcing values of fragility or victimhood. Rather than making people emotionally "safe," we should make people emotionally strong. I hope that this victory is the first step towards reinforcing the values of anti-fragility, emotional resilience, freedom of speech, and the art of agreeing to disagree.
Last week, the Dr. Seuss Foundation decided to withdraw six of Dr. Seuss' books from publication: And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street, McElligot's Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, If I Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat's Quizzer. The reason? Because these books contain "racist and insensitive imagery" (see more detail on the images here). A culture war debate managed to reverberate throughout the United States as a result. The Left claimed victory for decency, whereas the Right decried cancel culture like we have never seen before. There is so much I would like to cover but will probably not get to, but what I will ask today is the following: Is the Dr. Seuss controversy an example of making a mountain out of a molehill or is this incident indicative of something larger?
Like everyone else, Dr. Seuss was human. As such, he was bound to be imperfect. It is unsurprising that he was a product of his times because we all are. And just because Dr. Seuss was a flawed genius doesn't take away from the fact that he was still a genius when it came to children's literature. Dr. Seuss was a pro-FDR, New Deal Democrat that was all for the Japanese interment camps, so it wouldn't be shocking that anti-Japanese sentiment slipped into his earlier cartoons during World War II. At the same time, his stepdaughter recently said that Dr. Seuss did not have a racist bone in his body. That might be because he decried Jim Crow laws and criticized Nazi Germany. He was all for saving the environment, as is illustrated by The Lorax. The Butter Battle Book was a satirical take on the Cold War with an anti-Reagan subtext. Yertle the Turtle was Dr. Seuss ripping on the rise and fall of Hitler.
Before continuing, I want to acknowledge some valid points that those on the Left have made. For one, these are some of Dr. Seuss' more obscure works, so it's not like we're going after Seuss' more renowned works (or classics from other authors....at least not yet). Also, public libraries in Toronto and Chicago are currently assessing whether the Dr. Seuss books in reference should still be on their shelves. Two, I took a look at the images. Most were not particularly problematic, but I could see how some of them could be offensive, especially the negative depictions of Africans in If I Ran a Zoo. Third, it is not censorship from the government or a violation of the First Amendment. It is a decision by a private company to discontinue publishing its own legal property. At the same time, why is the book de facto being forced out of print? Because its sales figures are terrible? We don't know that since the Foundation refuses to release sales figures. They even refuse to point out which illustrations are problematic and provide a rationale. The most probable explanation is because it offends a small group of people.
Should we cancel something simply because there are parts that are offensive? Merchant of Venice depicts Jews in a negative light. Yet we don't cancel Shakespeare. We laud Shakespeare because he was an excellent writer who had great insight into the human condition. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses the n-word more than 200 times, but we consider it a depiction of race relations in the nineteenth century. Lord of the Flies could be construed as a colonialist narrative negatively depicting indigenous people, yet we read it because of its great use of symbolism and an exploration of the myriad of emotions that exist. To quote writer Janie Cheaney, "whatever an author's faults, classic fiction offers readers a chance to experience lives beyond their own narrow and limited perspective."
There are people out there that are so easily offended or get off on getting offended that they actively look for a reason to be offended. Instead of teaching people to learn from other perspectives and interact with those who are different from you (you know, that thing called "tolerance"), our society is encouraging fragility and intellectual weakness. As Left-leaning comedian John Cleese recently said, the problem with political correctness (more on that momentarily) is that we "have to set the bar according to what we are told by the most touchy, most emotionally unstable and fragile and least stoic people in the country." But I digress....
This all brings up an important cultural question: how much should offensiveness dictate whether something should be a part of culture? Let's forget that life is the exact opposite from being one, big safe space. What offends you might not offend someone else. On the contrary, they might get a kick out of it! While we are not dealing with a constitutional issue, there is a reason why the "right to not be offended" is not in the Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence.
Who determines what is offensive? If we were subject to the whims of an individual's preferences or that of a committee or a small sub-section of society, we could not live our lives freely, especially given the subjective nature of being offended. We could not say what we want, observe whatever religion we want, have sex with whomever we want (provided they are consenting adults), buy what we want, or eat what we want. It's not as if cultural prudes trying to force their views onto the rest of us is anything new. At least in U.S. culture, such a phenomenon dates back to the Puritans. We had the Moral Majority try to force fundamentalist Christian views down Americans' throats in the 1980s. In spite of our love for freedom in this country, there has always been a prudish, morally righteous countercurrent simultaneously existing in society. And guess who the Puritans of the 21st century are? The woke Left.
There are those on the woke Left who would have you believe that the discontinued publishing of these six Dr. Seuss books is an isolated incident or it's a way to bring us closer to polite society. In their minds, they think that political correctness is merely a modern-day application of politeness and decency. "Cultures evolve. Get with the times," goes the argument. There are times where that is the case because there are norms and mores that we outgrow as a society. A good example is tearing down Confederate statues. The South lost the Civil War. Forcing other human beings into slavery wrong, as is the racism that wrongly justified it. At best, these statues should go into museums and act as a reminder as to how morally inept the Confederacy's pro-slavery stance was.
If the forces behind the cultural shifts we are witnessing were more benevolent or less inclined to grasp for power, I would be more sympathetic to their cause. However, I fear that is not the case. As I explained four years ago, political correctness is thought and speech control under the guise of tolerance and brotherhood. There was a time where the Left was all about freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Berkeley gave birth to the Freedom of Speech movement in the 1964-65 academic year. If those liberals were here now, their attitude towards the cancel culture crowd would have been "If you don't like it, don't read it!" How the times have changed!
It has gotten bad to the point where I felt the need to write a piece last July on how the social justice movement greatly parallels that of religious fundamentalism. Being woke comes with so many features of religious fundamentalism, ranging from a doctrinal belief system and wanting to control moral codes to disdain for the non-believer and a holier-than-thou attitude.
The fundamentalism of the social justice crowd unsurprisingly resulted in cancel culture, a phenomenon that I criticized last year. What makes the cancel culture mentality even worse is that it assumes guilt, turns a specific action into a general indictment of character, and then proceeds to escalate the situation in which forgiveness is not the end-goal. It also results in a mob-like, black-and-white mentality in which "if I disagree with you, not only you are wrong, you are a racist, homophobic, bigot." There is no distinction between an anti-Trump libertarian, a moderate, or a hardcore Trump supporter. To paraphrase former President Bush, you are either with the cancel culture mob or against it. It has gotten so bad that Left-leaning comedian Bill Maher acknowledge it: "Cancel culture is real, it's insane, it's growing exponentially, and it's coming to a neighborhood near you." A poll from the Cato Institute from July 2020 shows how bad it is getting. 62 percent of Americans feel like they cannot express themselves. Unsurprisingly, 58 percent of staunch liberals (i.e., the woke Left) feels comfortable expressing themselves.
If you need another example of the black-and-white mentality (pun intended), look at the shift in how we express societal views. There was a time where being non-racist was the ideal, which it should be. Racism is stupid and not conducive for a democratic society. I personally don't associate with racists, anti-Semites, xenophobes, or homophobes. I am one for non-racism, much like in Dr. Seuss' The Sneetches. If you read The Sneetches, you will realize that it a series of allegories pointing out the stupidness of racism, much like Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles did. It was nice to have the goal of race not mattering. It was Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream! However, we have reached this point where race is a big deal and that The Sneetches is now considered problematic. This trend towards anti-racism is perturbing that it got me wondering how much the obsession of race from the anti-racists was starting to resemble bona fide racists.
Aside from the Dr. Seuss reference, the reason why I bring up the anti-racism trend is that it is another manifestation of how the woke Left would love to do nothing more than control the cultural narrative. It might seem tame in comparison to Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution or how the Third Reich had a Chamber of Culture to deem what is culturally appropriate. Conversely, as this woke mentality permeates schools, corporations, and other cultural institutions, it will gain more traction. Ultimately, what I want to point out is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As long as there is a human desire for more power and control over others' lives, freedom will always be on the defensive.
How do we deal with such moral prudishness affecting our freedoms? I sure do not trust the government to be objective in this endeavor. Creating a bureaucracy to deal with this, especially with a Democratic Congress and presidency, will hardly be objective. Such actions would only lead to greater authoritarianism and more cancelling things not considered palatable to the Left. The slippery slope need not be inevitable. We need to do what we have always done in history when "the man" has his boot on our collective throat: defy the establishment. How? Some thoughts. We get more involved in the political process to make sure the government doesn't strip us of our freedoms. We create alternate institutions to counter the wokeness. We call out the B.S. when we see it and we don't cave into the politically correct. We live freely and have our lives be a testament to the importance of freedom. Making sure that we fight against authoritarian trends, whether they come from the Far Left or the Far Right, is how we make sure that American culture is not actually cancelled.
