Canceling Comedians While the World Burns
Canceling Comedians While the World Burns
My conversation with philosophy professor, podcaster and author Ben Burgis
Appears in this episode
If you’re a regular listener of the Lean Out podcast, you know I’m pretty concerned about the state of the left. Here’s a clip of the kind of thing that drives me crazy, from a 2019 conference of the Democratic Socialists of America. In it, the forum is derailed by interruptions from delegates who recite their pronouns and then demand that audience members stop whispering (it upsets those who are prone to sensory overload and triggers those with anxiety), stop clapping, stop waving banners, and stop using gendered language like “guys.”
My guest on today’s episode touches on this incident in his hilarious book, and notes that the DSA was live streaming the conference. “Everyone knew this,” Ben Burgis writes, “and everyone seemed to think ‘we’re building the kind of movement where no one is allowed to make a loud noise’ was a good face to present to the world.”
Ben Burgis is a philosophy professor, a columnist for Jacobin magazine, and the host of Give Them An Argument podcast. He’s also the author of Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left. He joins me on the podcast today to make the case for a smarter, funnier, and more strategic left.
If you’re in Toronto on April 22, Ben will be giving a talk at Ryerson University, followed by a Q&A with Matt McManus and Victor Bruzzone.
Canceling Comedians While the World Burns
The left’s intolerance for people who hold different views than theirs, and their marginalization of such people expresses their total embrace of segregation. But even further, their frenzied attacks on people expressing different views, with the clear intent to cause them as much suffering as possible is the very heart of the lynch mobs of 70+ years ago.
It was only a few years ago where my friends and I would have laughed and ignored those people as being on the wrong side of normal, but having no animus against them. Now we see that we made a big mistake... they were always dangerous in their commitment to normalize their crazy.
It makes me sad because of the lesson of tolerance needs to be rewritten. I think culture always matters and it should have at least some gray area boundaries of acceptability. Go ahead and be weird and celebrate it! I will celebrate it with you! But get aggressive to force the weird as normal... going so far to persecute what is normal... and I will fight you to prevent it.