On Monday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles attacks the Left for applying political correctness selectively. Video and partial transcript below:
It drives me crazy because about once a year there’s a movie from Hollywood that I actually want to go see. In the last few years, we had “A Quiet Place,” we had “Hail Caesar,” “Get Out” was kind of interesting, but those are the exceptions. Most of the movies were horrendous. So you finally see a movie that looks pretty good, and then it gets canceled.
This is the problem with cancel culture. This is the problem — which is 99.9 percent a Leftist problem, but occasionally conservatives get involved too — which is, we don’t like you, we’re going to shut you down, we’re going to shut you up, or we think we don’t like you, so we’re gonna shut you down and shut you out. Bad idea. Just let it out. It’s ok. They’ll make a movie. If Hollywood wants to make a bad stupid liberal movie, people aren’t going to go see it. Hollywood wants to make what seems like a fairly conservative movie. I bet people would have gone to go see it, but you don’t have to go see it if you don’t want to.
Now it’s not just this movie, it’s not just “The Hunt.” Unfortunately, this is a tough day. I’m having almost as bad a day as Jeffrey Epstein too because not only do I have to defend Hollywood, I have to defend Sarah Silverman, one of my least favorite comedians — if you can even call her a comedian. But she apparently, she was relating this on a podcast — Sarah Silverman apparently just got fired from a movie because, on her own unfunny TV show, she wore blackface one time. I don’t watch her show. I didn’t watch the episode. I don’t know the context of the blackface, but I assume she wasn’t wearing it to just make fun of black people. I don’t think she was going out there — I don’t know that she was singing Al Jolson songs or something. I assume she was doing it for a comedic point, to make some kind of point. And yet she was fired from a movie for it.
So my question is: Has Jimmy Kimmel been fired yet from his show? Jimmy Kimmel wore blackface on “The Man Show.” Has Ted Danson been fired from his incredibly good and successful career in Hollywood yet? Ted Danson wore blackface one time to make a point. How about Robert Downey Jr? He wore blackface in that movie “Tropic Thunder.” How about Julianne Hough? I don’t even know who that is. But she is apparently a Hollywood person; she wore blackface. How about Fred Armisen from “Portlandia” and SNL? He wore blackface on “SNL.” How about Gigi Hadid? How about the Governor of Virginia Ralph Northam, who either wore blackface or a KKK hood? Probably the latter but he hasn’t copped to either of them — he was just on his medical school yearbook page.
Why are we firing one person for this when we’re not firing other people? Doesn’t make a lot of sense. Also are we really going to take away someone’s career because they wear blackface? I guess, if you’re gonna do that though, if that’s the new rule, then you’ve got to apply it to everyone. And are we going to take away the Wayans Brothers’ careers because they were white face in that movie “White Girls” or “White Chicks.” Remember that movie was two black guys who put on white face and blonde wigs and they pretended to be white girls. So you’re allowed to do that but you’re not allowed to wear blackface? Or I guess you’re allowed to wear blackface — for virtually every liberal elite in Hollywood — except for Sarah Silverman. I hate defending Sarah Silverman, but I have to do it because it’s just not applied fairly. There’s no logic to this cancel culture. There’s no logic to these new speech codes. There’s no logic to political correctness. It isn’t a logical ideology. Political correctness is a cudgel — that’s all it is. It’s just a tool. It’s just a hammer used to smack down your opponents. Which is why it only happens to some people and not others.
You know Meghan Kelly, for goodness sakes, she was on that show and on NBC, and she suggested that wearing blackface isn’t the worst possible crime, especially let’s say if you go out and go as Diana Ross — let’s say for Halloween you darken your skin a little bit to look more like Diana Ross. Maybe that’s not the end of the world. Maybe you shouldn’t get fired for that. And she lost her show for that, even though other people on the same network have worn blackface multiple times but nothing happens to them. Now, why did they go after Meghan? Did they go after Meghan because of her comments about blackface? Absolutely not. They went after Meghan because they don’t like her politics — because they’re not exceedingly left-wing — and they went after her because they didn’t like her show. So they were looking for an excuse to get rid of her show, and they used that politically correct excuse as a way to do it. But it wasn’t about principles, it wasn’t about values, it wasn’t about logic. Nothing. And that is always the way political correctness is applied.
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