This article has been updated since its original publication.
Comedian Ricky Gervais continued his crusade on politically correct cancel culture by defending free speech.
Speaking with talkRadio, Gervais called this cancel culture a “weird sort of fascism.”
“There’s this new weird sort of fascism of people thinking they know what you can say and what you can’t and it’s a really weird thing… that there’s this new trendy myth that people who want free speech want to say awful things all the time. It’s just isn’t true, it protects everyone,” Gervais said.
“If you’re mildly left-wing on Twitter, you’re suddenly Trotsky, right? If your mildly conservative, if you’re Hitler and if your centrist and you look at both arguments, you’re a coward,” he continued.
Ricky Gervais is an avid freedom of speech supporter, and though he supports some curtailments of it in the form of libel and slander laws, he ultimately cautioned against the criminalization of speech that some people might find offensive.
“Just because you’re offended it doesn’t mean you’re right,” he said.
Speaking with Times Radio last week, Gervais said the “The Office,” the original BBC show that he created, would be destroyed in today’s environment because woke mobs take everything out of context.
“Now [The Office] would suffer because people would take things literally. There are these outrage mobs who take things out of context,” he said. “This was a show about everything — it was about difference, it was about sex, race, all the things that people fear to even be discussed or talked about now, in case they say the wrong thing and they are canceled.”
“The BBC have got more and more careful, people want to keep their jobs, so would worry about some of the subjects and jokes, even though they were clearly ironic and we were laughing at this buffoon being uncomfortable around difference,” he continued. “I think if this was put out now, some people have lost their sense of irony and context.”
Regarding the state of comedy, Gervais said that it has been reduced to “two tribes of people screaming.”
“I genuinely think I don’t do anything that deserves to be canceled,” he said. “Some people now don’t care about the argument or the issue, they just want to own someone, they want to win the argument.”
Earlier this year, Ricky Gervais delivered a seismic opening monologue at the Golden Globes in which he roasted liberal Hollywood for posturing woke while allegedly being total degenerates in their private lives, from friendships with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to shady business deals with communist China. Speaking with Yahoo Entertainment, Gervais said that the moment became so “zeitgeisty” because people were sick of seeing the hypocrisy.
“It was quite zeitgeisty,” he said, as reported by Fox News. “I suppose because people were tired of being lectured by multimillionaires telling them to recycle when they’re flying around in private jets. So I think people were tired of the hypocrisy.”