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United States News Title: Left & Right Unite Against Speech! I dont like being wrong. But every now and then, I find myself ashamed to be right. Last month I made a prediction. There was a movie being distributed by Universal called The Hunt, and right-wingers were up in arms because they thought the movie glorified the murder of rightists. Such a movie is dangerous! It could inspire real-life violence, they wailed as they hiked their skirts and jumped on chairs like women in an Edison Kinetoscope. The screaming meemies were, of course, wrong. The film was actually a pro-deplorables actioner featuring cartoonishly villainous leftists. But Universal bowed to the right-wing mob and pulled the film, and the red-state retards rejoiced in having killed one of the few movies in recent history with a plotline that actually favored them. Which brings us to my prognostication. I looked ahead to Sept. 20 and the release of the new Rambo film with its all-Latino cast of villains, and I predicted that not only would leftists slam the film for being racist, but the same rightist anencephalics who cheered the canceling of The Hunt because it had a dangerous message would mock leftists for claiming the new Rambo film has a dangerous message. Was I right? Does Ben Shapiro shit in a potty chair? RedState.com had decried The Hunt as a blatant provocation, a pathetic film that should be scraped (I think RedStates Elizabeth Vaughn meant scrapped, but heyI dont speak tard). But when leftists attacked Rambo: Last Blood for being a blatant provocation, RedState spun a 180 and painted the films critics as insecure snowflakes. Western Journal declared that The Hunt should be pulled in light of the growing discussions of whether dangerous rhetoric and imaging have the potential to inspire violence. But when leftists attacked Rambo for similar reasons, the Journal ridiculed the critics for being oversensitive. American Thinker ran two pieces condemning The Hunt. One claimed that the dangerous film promotes violence against conservatives. The other straight-out called for the film to be suppressed, because cinemization of violence leads to real-world violence. But when leftists called the new Rambo movie dangerous because it promotes violence against Mexicans, Patricia McCarthy, the same dingbat whod slammed The Hunt as dangerous, rushed to the Stallone films defense, attacking the critics for being politically correct while praising the Rambo series in general as welcome revenge porn and the new installment as educational and a vicious, brutal, grim story that all Americans should see. Did I call it or did I call it? Conservative comedian and FoxNews.com bobblehead Tim Young is the embodiment of the stammering young cadet in The Untouchables, a cretin incapable of original thought whose mindless recitation of textbook answers guarantees (as Connerys character observed in the film) upward mobility. Young helped lead the charge against The Hunt last month, because, he alleged, the films celluloid violence normalizes real-life violence. But this month, Young lambasted Saturday Night Live for cutting newly hired cast member Shane Gillis because of offensive podcast jokes about Asians. We cant allow the mob to kill speech, Young lectured while wearing his defend free speech hat (as his kill speech I find offensive hat sat idly on the chair). We must end cancel culture, he triumphantly bellowed. So I called him out on Twitter: Tim, didnt you actively participate in the canceling of the film The Hunt just a month ago? His reply: I absolutely did. It was glorifying violence based on current politics. Im not going to congratulate him on his honesty; I just think hes too stupid to grasp the hypocrisy. Everyone who participates in cancel culture has a reason, Tim, I responded. Why are your reasons (its a hateful violent film) more valid than the reasons of, say, an Asian person who went after Shane Gillis for his hateful racist comedy? An Asian person might say that the harm that comes from a racist joke is just as damaging as the harm you imagine comes from a violent action/satire film. Why cant you see this simple point? Everyone who does the cancel culture thing thinks THEIR beef is the most legit. Cretinous Untouchables cadet grew frustrated that I wasnt seeing the simple truth that when he cancels content, its to protect society, but when someone else cancels content, theyre attacking free speech: Making tasteless/awful jokes in the comedy profession is worlds apart from a film that promotes/glorifies violence based on our countrys current political divide. Which is exactly the problem leftists have with Rambo: Last Blood: It promotes/glorifies violence. I can hear my faithful readers now: Wow, Dave, youve proven that hyperpartisan ideologues can be hypocrites. Thanks for the scoop, brainiac. Hey, dont be a dick, imaginary heckling readers. I have a larger point to make, and it has to do with why conservatives (bless their hearts) have failed to effectively counter the lefts relentless cancel crusade. The right fears words just as the left does, though not necessarily to the same degree. Fearing words is to leftists what spraying stank is to skunks; its what defines them. But on the right, there are just enough stank-sprayers (like Tim Young and everyone else who helped sink The Hunt) to hobble the efforts of those who want to put an end to cancel culture. Indeed, rightists are every bit as vulnerable as leftists to that defining rationale of the word policeman: Bad speech makes people do bad things. So lets put that claim under a microscope. Can a brush with speech influence a person to do bad things? Is bad speech like a cold virus, something requiring only the briefest of contact to cause infection? Can a simple viewing of a film, or reading of a tweet, or hearing of a jokeabsent any physical force or other type of coercionmake a person do bad things? Thats why all those rightists went after The Huntthe fear that people would be influenced by the film, and real-world violence would ensue. Much like how Catcher in the Rye forced Mark David Chapman to murder John Lennon. Blame books and movies, not the perpetrator; thats a great position for law and order conservatives to take. Danny Lee Young, the black gentleman who mowed down 48 pedestrians with his car on an L.A. sidewalk during the 1984 Olympics, blamed Stevie Wonders music for the crime. Hmph
if Ronald Reagan was such a great conservative, why didnt he hold Wonder responsible? Wotta fraud! To claim that a movie like The Hunt has the power to turn people violent is to accept the theory that criminals are not wholly responsible for their actions. Thats literally the most un-conservative position imaginable. And if blame the entertainment biz for violence is un-conservative, its to an even greater extent unscientific. Most of the studies proving that exposure to violent content can turn people violent in real life fall apart upon cursory examination. In 1992, psychologist in need of a psychiatrist Leonard Eron published a study claiming that little girls who watched The Bionic Woman, which he labeled a violent and aggressive TV show, grew up to be violent and aggressive adults. I called Eron, with whom Id had a longstanding correspondence, and I asked him if he knew that Lindsay Wagner, a hippie vegan peacenik, had forced ABC to ensure that her character would never engage in violence. The Bionic Woman never punched anyone, never killed anyone. Eron sheepishly admitted that hed never actually seen the show; hed just assumed it was violent. I told him that Wagners character only used her bionics to do good, from cleaning the floor of a nunnery to making sandwiches for Boy Scouts. So if young girls who were regular viewers grew up to be violent and antisocial, that actually disproves the theory that TV shows influence behavior. Ill never forget the old farts sigh of resignation and defeat as we ended the call. A common refrain among believers in the medias ability to spur real-world violence is, If the media doesnt have the power to influence us, why do companies spend so much on advertising? In fact, as my Takis colleague Steve Sailer recently pointed out, the power of advertising, especially TV advertising, is highly overrated, if not a complete myth (theres even less evidence that online advertising has any measurable effect). If TV cant hypnotize people into buying a toaster, how the hell can it mesmerize them into committing mass murder? Thats a point made by Wilson Key in his seminal 1973 book Subliminal Seduction. The goal of, say, fast-food advertising isnt to make you hungry. Advertising cant make you get hungry; it cant alter who or what you are. The point of advertising is that when you get hungry, on your own, youll hopefully think of an ad you saw and choose McDonalds over Wendys. The media cant make a nonviolent person homicidally violent, and someone who already has homicidally violent tendencies might choose anything as his obsession. Theres no universal trigger for schizos. It could be The Hunt, it could be Catcher in the Rye, it could be Stevie Wonder. It could even be Schindlers List. The paranoia on the right that fueled the crusade against The Hunt is emblematic of our own form of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Many of us have been driven so insane by our hatred of the media, weve started to wildly overestimate its influence. As a veteran of Friends of Abe, Ive seen this pathology present itself in hundreds of still-vocal members of the now-defunct org. Since 2016, theres been a massive rise in posts from members claiming that Hollywood isnt just leftist and hateful (which it is), but also a deep-state CIA MK-Ultra mind-control factory. The 1999 book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters is a kind of bible for the Hollywood is CIA MK-Ultra crowd. It details the CIAs attempts in the 1950s and 60s to influence public opinion via hidden messages in Hollywood films. But heres the funny part: In the book, the spooks behind the scheme admit it didnt work! It didnt change anyones course of action or thought, historian, political insider, and former OSS operative Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. cedes. And that was back when the media was more centralized, and the average media consumer more naive and gullible. As I write this column, an anxious nation is bracing for all the violence the new Joker film is supposedly going to cause. The FBI and the U.S. Army have even gone so far as to issue official warnings about the movies likelihood to engender real-life violence. Thats the pervasiveness of the bad speech makes people do bad things pseudoscience; its literally government canon now. And why not? Its a bullshit notion embraced by left and right, yet another example of the principle that, in politics, the things that everyone agrees on are often the worst things of all.
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