Comedian Sarah Silverman blasted cancel culture as “righteousness porn” and warned that such tactics could push people into hate groups.
Speaking on her podcast last week about her friend Christian Picciolini, who used to be a neo-Nazi, Silverman explained why he fell in with such people from an early age.
“Christian Picciolini, my friend, who was a neo-Nazi for years, since he was 14 to, you know, into his 20s, late 20s maybe, was the head of a neo-Nazi, whatever, KKK chapter where he lived,” Silverman said. “He has spent the last 30 years getting people out of hate groups. That’s what he does. But he went towards love. He was 14, he was smoking a joint, and an older kid took the joint out of his hand and threw it out and said, ‘You don’t need that stuff, man.'”
Silverman went on to explain how the person who discouraged Picciolini against drugs also drew him into a hate group, which offered him the sense of belonging he was looking for. The group “gave him him a place where he was accepted and cared for and loved,” Silverman continued. “And that was a hate group, a neo-Nazi group, where he found family, camaraderie, and a place to be when both of his parents worked all day.”
Silverman went on to claim that even young people who are drawn toward hate groups are looking for love. “Going towards love can be a hate group, it could be the drama club. But that’s all it is at its root,” she said. “It’s just going towards where the love is. And you’re going to find yourself doing it a lot, all through your life, and maybe wonder about it.”
Silverman then turned to “cancel culture,” and how it emboldens hate groups, saying, “In this cancel culture, and we all know what I’m talking about—whether you think there is one or there isn’t one or where you stand on it, and there’s a lot of gray matter there—but without a path to redemption, when you take someone, you found a tweet they wrote seven years ago or a thing that they said and you expose it and you say, ‘This person should be no more. Banish them forever.’ They’re going to find some place where they are accepted. And it’s not going to be with progressives, which ironically means ‘to be changed; progress.'”
“If we don’t give these people a path to redemption, then they’re going to go where they are accepted, which is the motherf***ing dark side,” Silverman concluded. “I think there should be some kind of path—do we want people to be changed? Or do we want them to stay the same, to freeze in a moment we found on the internet from 12 years ago? And so we can point to ourselves as right and them as wrong.”
“It’s righteousness porn,” Silverman added.
Silverman was herself the subject of cancel culture last year when footage re-emerged from 2007 in which she wore blackface.
WATCH:
Dipping my toe into a take on cancel culture in episode 2.#SarahSilvermanPodcast eps 1-5
Here: https://t.co/qNnHEngHbF… pic.twitter.com/9v65pd9nIV— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) October 24, 2020