Conservatives Have Won A Major Battle in The Culture War
Comedians are refusing to apologize for extremely offensive jokes and in some instances companies are backing them up. The cast of Guardians of the Galaxy have even come to the defense of James Gunn asking for people to stop weaponizing moral outrage.It would seem that regardless of whether the right acted in bad faith they have neutralized the left's moral outrage tactic and now high profile individuals like Trevor Noah are even pushing back on left wing activists.Political correctness and social justice outrage can only go so far if celebrities have to defend against the same tactics from conservatives and liberals.Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The right has weaponized the moral outrage tactic typically used by the left against the left.
And I talked about this a few days ago, but it would seem like the tactic worked, and the right has just won a decisive victory in the culture war.
Now, this is just my opinion.
It's not something you can really quantify.
But after Mike Cernovich and many others highlighted James Gunn's tweet, getting him fired, people said this was a bad faith action, it was politically motivated, and now we're seeing a petition with over 350,000 signatures call for James Gunn to get his job back.
The cast of Guardians of the Galaxy are saying James Gunn should get his job back.
He was the director.
After this, we saw another controversy.
Trevor Noah was accused of being racist because he made jokes in 2013 about indigenous Australians.
But because of these actions and people being fired, Trevor Noah had only one real course of action, and that was to push back against the left.
Because of the actions of those on the right weaponizing this moral outrage, people could see through the tactic, and now comedians are actually rejecting the left.
So let's look at what actually happened in this story.
What did Trevor Noah say in response to the outrage?
And the question I have is, where's the line?
Why are some jokes acceptable and others aren't?
♪♪ But before we get started, please head over to patreon.com
forward slash timcast and become a patron to help support my work.
This is what I do for a living, so if you like these videos, you want to see more like it, and you want to see more on-the-ground reporting and interviews, please consider becoming a patron at whatever level you feel comfortable today.
This story came out yesterday.
Guardians of the Galaxy cast are backing James Gunn.
They want him to get his job back.
They issued this public statement, where in it, they say, there is little due process in the court of public opinion.
James is likely not the last good person to be put on trial.
Given the growing political divide in this country, it's safe to say instances like this
will continue, although we hope Americans from across the political spectrum can ease
up on the character assassinations and stop weaponizing mob mentality.
Roseanne lost her job for making a racist comment.
Back in the day, Paula Deen, I'm not too familiar with her work, she lost her job for apparently making racist comments.
Papa John's is in a controversy now for not even calling someone a racial slur, just saying it in a descriptive way.
And we also heard about the Netflix executive who lost his job for describing the n-word as well.
When we see high-profile actors like Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldana and the rest of the cast of Guardians of the Galaxy saying, we all need to stop weaponizing mob mentality, it would seem that the tactic of the right worked.
That the left was using this moral outrage, getting people to bend to their will, to their political ideology, and then the right used it, and all of a sudden it became taboo, and celebrities are saying, okay, everyone, you need to stop doing this.
But then there was the Trevor Noah controversy, Where he was accused of being racist and now he's pushing back as well.
This story from The Hollywood Reporter, Trevor Noah refuses to apologize for resurfaced joke about aboriginal women.
In an interview he said, What I understand about outrage though, what I mean is that people don't generally want to listen or understand from their side.
They go, no, we're angry.
And regardless how many times you speak about the thing, they still want to be angry.
And so all you can do is fall back and say, I've addressed this.
We live in a world where people want to unearth things that have already been unearthed.
The Daily Show host's refusal to apologize comes after resurfaced tweets from director James Gunn led him to being fired from Disney's upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy 3.
Controversial old jokes from Dan Harmon, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Ian Black have also been resurfaced and received scrutiny over the past week.
Dan Harmon, Sarah Silverman, Michael Ian Black, a lot of comedians had old tweets resurface.
In the case of Dan Harmon, someone pulled up a video he made, a parody of Dexter, where he did things to a baby doll.
He deleted his Twitter account, issued an apology, and then Adult Swim, where Rick and Morty, his show, airs, also issued a statement saying that, you know, we understand, people push the boundaries, and it was meant to be a joke.
So I'm trying to understand where the line is, what is acceptable, and what isn't.
And what I've realized is that the left gets really angry at racist jokes, like Trevor Noah being called out for making comments about aboriginal women.
Racism is a serious issue, and I think it's because the left, the far left, they tend to be identitarian.
And what that means is they use identity politics, their identity is the core of what is and is not acceptable.
This also means that rape jokes are out of the question.
Because you're targeting typically women.
You know, anybody can be a victim of abuse, but they tend to get angry at rape jokes targeting women.
Yes, sometimes targeting men, too, but typically targeting women.
And comedians have had to apologize for making rape jokes in the past.
But it's interesting, then, that when talking about the abuse of children, the assault of children, people say, yes, they're inappropriate, but there's no one who's offended, and they actually call for James Gunn to get his job back.
And obviously not every activist that I want to generalize, but a lot of them.
I mean, right now, at least 351,000 people have signed a petition saying, re-hire James Gunn, even though he joked time and time again about the abuse of children.
So my question then became, why is it okay to joke about abusing children?
We say, oh, well, it's not really okay, but you shouldn't be fired for it.
But then other people get fired for saying something racist.
Roseanne was fired because she said something racist, and by her explanation, she was on Ambien and didn't realize the person she was insulting was black.
But I digress.
People make racist comments or even use racist words, they get fired.
That's not okay.
But when someone talks about actually abusing children, You know, we should be protecting children more than most groups.
That's not a fireable offense.
They should get their job back.
I found that really interesting, and I think it has to do with the fact that babies and children aren't going to defend themselves.
You know, a child who is being abused might not know they're being abused, and they don't have a path to come out and speak up against this.
In many instances, it's not until they're adults that they can come up and say, hey, this is not okay.
So I think that's why.
You know, if someone makes a joke about a group of people, women or a certain race, that special interest group will speak out and say, you can't do this.
And it is a way to gain political points.
So when people say that what the right is doing in terms of James Gunn is in bad faith, I mean, I kind of feel like it's all in bad faith.
I don't think people are actually getting angry.
I think they just feel justified that you don't have a right to talk about them in some way.
But there's no one to defend children, so the right does it.
As I mentioned earlier, this does seem like a decisive victory for the right when you see Trevor Noah push back on these critics, these activists calling him racist.
But because of this, it also creates a preventative barrier over similar issues.
Because Dan Harmon has been accused of being racist too, but the left is not rallying to shut down Dan Harmon now.
In this story from the Gateway Pundit, Cassandra Fairbanks highlights blog posts and videos from Rick and Morty creator Surface in which he repeatedly uses the n-word Dan Harmon's old MySpace page surfaced in an archive on the internet, and I have verified this to a decent degree.
It's hard, near impossible to confirm, but I would say, based on my fact-checking, this is extremely likely, if not confirmed to be true.
There's maybe, in my opinion, a 0.1% chance it was fabricated, but I have checked the source, and I genuinely believe this to be the legitimate blog of Dan Harmon.
And because of the language he uses, I'm actually not going to dig into it.
Suffice it to say, you can find the Gateway Pundit's article.
But he uses the n-word around something like 20 times.
There are sketches he is in where they also use the n-word.
And even his own fans bring up how Dan Harmon won't lay off talking about race and allowing racists to speak on his show.
Simply doing a Google search of Dan Harmon and racism and you'll find a year ago someone complaining about how on his show he allows Andy Dick to make a bunch of racist statements.
Or how he can't help but bring up race when he's around people of different races or identities.
But this is interesting now, because the left is not attacking Dan Harmon for being racist.
And I know a lot of people are going to say, well, it's because Dan Harmon's on the left, because he supports them.
But he's been accused before of being right-wing, of being offensive, and it would seem like in response to that, he pushed further left.
So it could be an issue of tribalism.
But when even Trevor Noah pushes back, it seems like this tactic has been entirely destroyed.
The right weaponized it against the left, and I was told by many people it was to get everyone to be held to the same standards.
And because of that, it is no longer a viable tactic.
So once again, it seems like if it was a bad-faith political move by the right, it worked.
They've shown the hypocrisy of the left, backed them into a corner, and now the left is pushing back on their own side.
And what kind of proves my point about a special interest group making something taboo, we see this story from Fox News.
Stars rally around liberal James Gunn after offensive tweets, unlike reaction to Trump supporting Roseanne Barr.
The article says Gunn was recently fired from helming the third installment of the Disney franchise after offensive tweet he wrote several years ago resurfaced.
Meanwhile, the Disney-owned ABC canceled Roseanne after the pro-Trump comedian tweeted a racist remark about former President Obama's aide Valerie Jarrett.
While Gunn's colleagues have come to his defense, Barr's co-stars expressed disappointment in the comedian's tweet.
So there's absolutely a difference between what James Gunn did and what Roseanne did because Roseanne was talking about a specific person who can then get angry and then people can rally behind her and James Gunn was just making blanket offensive statements.
But it is interesting to see how all this is playing out with Massive celebrities saying we shouldn't weaponize mob mentality.
And even Sarah Silverman posts about how these are jokes from a time not that long ago when hard, absurd jokes by comedians were acknowledged for what they were jokes, not a disingenuous national threat to people fake-clutching their pearls.
So here's what I think happens.
The left is outraged, and they use moral outrage to their political advantage.
Comedians like Sarah Silverman and Patton Oswalt, Michael Ian Black, they're going to rally behind those people for tribalistic reasons.
So then we see conservatives say, okay, we can use the same tactic against you.
And when it actually puts these people in a threatened position, They then come out and say this tactic is BS and shouldn't be used and people shouldn't weaponize mob mentality, thus disavowing their own tactic, and in the process, pushing back on their own side.
Trevor Noah pushing back on left-wing activists, and in the instance of Dan Harmon, people are not even protesting the fact that he used to casually throw the n-word around all the time.
We just saw Papa John Ousted from his company because on a phone call he described the N-word.
He used it in a way to describe racism.
We heard the story about a Netflix executive who was fired for telling people the N-word was offensive and saying it.
And now, after it's surfaced that Dan Harmon has repeated it time and time again, we are not seeing collective outrage because the tactic seems to be totally destroyed.
Now, it may resurface, This is just one new cycle, and perhaps people will forget about Dan Harmon, they'll forget about James Gunn, and in the future try to weaponize this strategy again, but for the time being, it seems like the right has won.
They have destroyed this tactic, they have tried to hold everyone to the same standard, and in doing so, they have forced high-profile individuals to stop using the tactic, and to denounce it, and even push back on their own side.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
Is this just another step?
Is it really just about tribalism?
Do you think the left will revert to using the tactic at the next opportunity?
Or do you think the right, weaponizing it against them, has effectively destroyed it?
Let me know what you think.
We'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Twitter at TimCast.
Stay tuned.
New videos every day at 4 p.m.
And if you want to hear much more snarky opinion videos, they're on my second channel every day at 6 p.m.
