Don’t Apologize’: Ricky Gervais Takes On Verbal Terrorism

[Geee]

National Review

The Left should listen to comedians more.

Ricky Gervais calls himself “a lefty liberal champagne socialist,” but when he says, “I don’t agree that feelings are more important than facts,” he echoes Ben Shapiro. The point of intersection: Both men support speaking freely. This quality makes them somewhat courageous, though it shouldn’t.

Another commonality is that both tend to elicit a lot of shock and dismay, or at least feigned shock and dismay. Gervais dismisses adverse comments on social media as the scribbles on “every public toilet wall in the world” in an important two-hour conversation that recently appeared on the podcast Making Sense with Sam Harris. Harris is a vigorous defender of the culture of free speech, and his interviews are always penetrating. This is one of his best.

Gervais giggles with disbelief when he says, “John Wayne was canceled recently, 40 years after he died, for not being woke enough.” He stresses that “political correctness, I’m all for it” — because he doesn’t want to hurt people’s feelings — but standards do change, so applying them backwards in time is a strange fixation. When Kevin Hart was chosen to host this year’s Oscars, his detractors resurfaced some nasty cracks about gays he’d made years ago on Twitter. He apologized and deleted the tweets but lost the gig anyway, because “it’s not enough to apologize anymore and move on. People want blood, people want you ruined, because it’s a point-scoring competition now.” Even if you’re finely attuned to evolving standards, as Gervais says he is, “You can make your jokes bulletproof at the time, but now you have to make them bulletproof for ten years.”

[Valin]

 

[Geee]

"Don't apologize, it's a sign of weakness" is also a favorite quote of Gibbs on NCIS