Topic: Media Research Center
Christian Toto has been trying to portray hateful right-wing comedy as somehow brilliant and cutting-edge. He continued to do that in his Oct. 7 Media Research Center column, whcih began with this amazingly stupid claim:
“Lenny Bruce would be impossible today.”
So says Svetlana Mintcheva, the director of programs at the National Coalition Against Censorship. Mintcheva shares that observation in a compelling new docu-short called “Crossing the Line in Comedy.”
The video hails from the Free to Choose Network, a group established “to build popular support for personal, economic and political freedom.”
But there is not need for a Lenny Bruce today because there already has been one. And Toto, had he been around in the 1960s, would be among those reactionaries who relentlessly hounded Bruce for his profane anti-establishment humor.
The video Toto is promoting is from the Free to Choose Network, which complains that people are offended by certain comedians, which the implication that they are right-wing comedians who want to make fun of liberals. Toto himself emphasized that narrative:
The video arrives at a chilling time in western culture. The woke revolution has scared many people into silence, fearing the “wrong” opinion could cost them their jobs or make them social pariahs.
Just ask J.K. Rowling. Or Dave Chappelle.
Comedians are routinely censored by Big Tech platforms under dubious circumstances. Others face professional blowback for uttering the “wrong” jokes targeting the “wrong” demographics. Sometimes fellow comedians are the ones trying to shut them down.
But Rowling isn't a comedian -- she is a rich author who spews hate at transgender people. Chappelle's anti-transgender "humor" simply wasn't funny enough to overcome its offensive nature, and Toto offered no evidence otherwise. (Note that Toto's two poster people for violating "woke" standards involve people who intensely hate transgender people; he offered no explanation for why transgender people are acceptable targets.) Interestingly, we haven't seen Toto defend Chappelle when, a couple weeks later, when he made comments critical of Israel during one standup appearance that caused at least one member of the audience to leave.
Toto went on to huff that "Groups like PEN America railed against so-called 'book bans,' ignoring the obvious issues with sharing pornographic books in schools nationwide." His evidence here is a link to the right-wing Independent Women's Forum, which disonestly potrays all allegedly offensive content as "pornography" and evern denies that books are being "banned" -- thus furher showing that he would have been among the moral prude who censored and hounded Lenny Bruce. Meanwhile, Florida schools are removing dictionaries and encyclopedias from schools ("for further review," they claim) out of fear of purportedluy offensive content. Toto is probably not going to demand that comedians make fun of that. And despite all that, Toto made another conterfatual claim:
Free speech is now a partisan issue.
Conservatives, by and large, support more expression and less guard rails on speech. Progressives, many beholden to militant Leftists, demand censorship to suppress “hate speech” or “misinformation.” And, since the Left controls the U.S. government, the media, academia and Hollywood, it has a unique ability to suppress speech as it sees fit.
That's not really true. Conservatives don't want to be called out on the hate and lies they like to peddle, so they frame any criticism of them as "censorship" -- that's the entire premise behind the MRC's attacks on social media moderation. Further, inadvertently showing how far-right he has moved, Toto illustrated this point by embedding a tweet by Lara Logan, the disgraced former "60 Minutes" correspondent who has moved even farther right than him.
Toto closed by quoting Mintcheva saying, "'I'm offended' has become an argument for 'shut up.'" He won't mention that his fellow right-wingers are doing exactly that in an attempt to shut up anything they don't like.
