On Thursday evening, comedian Kevin Hart backed down to pressure from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and withdrew his name from hosting the 2019 Oscars, thanks to the discovery of old tweets that angered members of the woke Left.<\/b>
\nOn Thursday evening, comedian Kevin Hart backed down to pressure from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and withdrew his name from hosting the 2019 Oscars, thanks to the discovery of old tweets that angered members of the woke Left. The whole rigmarole began Thursday afternoon when Hart was mobbed on social media by intrepid reporters digging up his prior joke tweets, some of which referred to not wanting his then 3-year-old son not to be gay and others of which used the word \u201cf*g.\u201d This drove the outrage mob to call for his head.
At the outset, Hart rightly refused to apologize, pointing out that he had addressed those comments years ago. \u201cGuys, I’m almost 40 years old,\u00a0\u00bb he said. \u00ab\u00a0If you don’t believe that people change, grow, evolve as they get older, I don’t know what to tell you.\u00a0\u00bb He added this, in writing:
Then, presumably at the behest of his business managers, he not only apologized, he withdrew:
So, a few lessons.
1. Success Brings The Outrage Mob To Your Door. Hart has been a comedy star and a movie star for years. He had already addressed this controversy years ago. But he made the mistake of becoming even more successful \u2013 and that prompted a re-examination of all of his old tweets. The more successful you become, the more past controversies shall be dredged up anew. As Bridget Phetasy rightly stated:
2. The Penitent Man Shall Not Pass. Hart may not have made these jokes today. He says he wouldn\u2019t have. We all have said things in the past we regret. Hell, I have an ongoing and updated list of them. Twitter and Facebook just mean that there\u2019s a record of that stuff. But instead of us asking each other whether we still believe those bad things, it\u2019s more fun and edifying to tear people down by taking them out of context and assuming the impossibility of penitence. This whole episode wasn\u2019t meant to make the world more tolerant or to allow Hart to change his tune. It was meant to destroy Hart for the pleasure of the crowd.
3. The Outrage Mob Will Never Stop. Social media is a mob without a purpose. That means that the shiniest object will draw the most scrutiny, the biggest crowd, and thus the highest chance of a mobbing. Think you\u2019re not at the center of the mob, so you\u2019re safe? Wait about five minutes. Whether you\u2019re me, Mark Duplass, James Gunn, Kevin Hart, or anyone else in the public eye, there will be an excuse to attack you so long as you do something that violates the norms of oppositional political discourse. Soon enough, everyone will be wished into the cornfield. And that will only get worse as retaliatory strikes become the order of the day, exacerbated by a feckless and virtue signaling social media apparatus designed to expunge \u201csin,\u201d in the words of Apple\u2019s Tim Cook. Never mind that social media mobs represent a tiny fraction of human beings, and don\u2019t even chart when it comes to impact on market share. They scare people. That\u2019s enough.
4. You Are Only Punished If You Are Attacked By The Left. Joy Reid has said stuff far worse than Kevin Hart ever said. But the revelations of her statements came from the political right, so she still has a job. Hart was attacked by people who stand above him on the intersectional pyramid, and so he lost his Oscar gig. If only he\u2019d had the foresight to get Mike Cernovich to dig up his old tweets rather than GLAAD allies, he\u2019d be riffing jokes about Trump come February without a second thought. (What about James Gunn? He only lost his job because Disney is uber-fearful of blowback from family audiences, so the attackers matters less than the blowback.)
5. Hollywood Is Full Of Virtue Signaling Hypocrites. Today, Hollywood pats itself on the back for its foresight in stopping a successful black man from making jokes at a ritzy event based on decade-old non-PC jokes. A columnist at Variety says that Hollywood has preserved its record of \u201cempathy.\u201d This is hilarious. Hollywood is the least empathetic place in America. Disagree with the prevailing worldview? You\u2019re toast. Want to maintain personal virtue at the expense of an A-list name\u2019s libido? You\u2019re toast. Make a joke the radicals don\u2019t like? See you later. Get cast as a transgender woman while maintaining your status as a non-transgender woman? Prepare the outrage machine. Hollywood is cruel and nasty. Hart just found that out the hard way again.
Eric Weinstein says that in the future, everyone will be Oscar host for 15 minutes. That\u2019s about right, but only if it takes that long to use Twitter\u2019s search function. In truth, Hollywood should just get it over with and insist that the only people who work be current or former employees of Planned Parenthood, GLAAD, and the Obama administration. The only true representative of Hollywood is Hannah Gadsby, the insanely unfunny \u00ab\u00a0comedian\u00a0\u00bb hailed by the Left as a comic genius precisely because she is both woke and dramatically unfunny. Hollywood should just crown her Empress and be done with it. It\u2019s the only way to ensure Hollywood\u2019s purity and decency, dontcha know.<\/p>\n