Someone needs to alert the late-comedian, Henny – “Take my wife … please” – Youngman, that he has just been declared a retroactive racist by the International Business Times (IBT). How else to interpret this absurd Fake News headline over an innocuous #ADayWithoutaWoman joke from Colin Moriarty, co-founder of Kinda Funny, a joke that had absolutely nothing to do with race.
Here’s the IBT headline (screenshot below):
Kinda Funny’s Colin Moriarty Resigns After Targeting Women In Racist Joke; Insists It’s His Personal Decision
The headline is no mistake. The hysterical story itself declares the joke racist:
Last week, in the wake of the Internal Women’s Day celebration, Moriarty caused a huge stir online for a racist joke he shared on Twitter. Kinda Funny fans and other people condemned Moriarty. Even his peers and former colleagues at Kinda Funny and IGN also called him out on social media, as per Polygon.
Are you ready to see Moriarty’s joke?
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Over this innocuous joke, Moriarty was immediately savaged and bullied online by that insufferable pack of virtue-signallers who call themselves Social Justice Warriors – you know, those anti-free speech fascists who believe your life should be destroyed over a joke. According to IBT, even Moriarty’s own colleagues publicly attacked him.
Nevertheless, in the wake of all this nonsense, and in his “effective immediately” resignation published Monday, just days after the incident, Moriarty doesn’t mention the tweet, only that he is moving on for different opportunities that have nothing to do with video games.
Believe it or not, the fallout was so great over Moriarty’s tweet, his company immediately released a mewling statement of apology.
Unfortunately for all of us, leftists like IBT declaring this joke “racist” is not at all unexpected.
Those familiar with “1984” will remember that one of the key goals of the totalitarian fascists in George Orwell’s fictional dystopia, was to shrink the dictionary to something like 1/10th its original size. This was a way to declare most words off-limits. But overall it was a way to control the population using language. And since being a racist is one of the worst things you can be in America, why not just go ahead and declare Moriarty a racist, even though he said nothing about race.
Although it is an objective lie to do so, the act of branding Moriarty a racist, of ensuring that their headline lives forever through a simple Google search, IBT is effectively and intentionally attempting to “un-person” Moriarty, to toxify him forever as a racist within his chosen field.
Listen, you can be as literal as you want about the First Amendment only protecting Americans from government censorship. That doesn’t change the fact that if the price of free speech is losing your livelihood at the hands of dishonest, online mobs of witch hunters, then we really don’t have free speech.
Even in defense of the worst leftists, time and again I have argued that it is fine to criticize speech you find offensive, as long as you do it with more speech. Once you try to personally destroy someone, though, and take away their ability to make a living, you are nothing more than a bullying fascist crossing the line into outright un-Americanism.
I am a free speech extremist. Unless the language involves the justifying, inspiring or calling for violence (a daily CNN staple), within the confines of our own personal online space, we should be able to fire off some satire, or even a tasteless joke, and do so without being penalized by our government, our employer, or anyone.
For the record, until now I had never even heard of Colin Moriarty. That is not meant to be a slam on him. Video games just aren’t my thing. So who knows, he may very well be the most insufferable SOB on the planet, someone who hates everything I stand and care for.
Doesn’t matter.
He’s an American and what is happening to him is un-American.
And what is happening to him is happening in this country way too often.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.