BIPOC Booted from Prom? Not!
Even In Fascist Amerikka, the demand for racist outrages exceeds the supply
What with pornstar politicians, two-timing governors, congressional vulgarians, senatorial slobs, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, there’s plenty of competition just now for Worst Person of the Year (So Far!) And now I am adding alleged comedian Hasan Minhaj to the list of nominees.
The ideological narrative of postmodern progressivism incorporates the claim that America is “irredeemably racist.” If that were the case, a BIPOC like Minhaj—he’s a twofer, being a Muslim of Indian origin—would have plenty of authentic horror stories to supercharge his standup routine. There’d be no need to make stuff up, right?
Minhaj has told the story of how he missed prom because Mom and Dad didn’t want their white-bread daughter being seen with a brown boy. He’s told the story of his meeting with the FBI informant who was spying on his mosque. He’s told the story of the envelope containing suspicious white powder that sent him to the hospital with his daughter in his arms. He’s told the story of his confrontation with Jared Kushner at a Time 100 Gala when the latter took the seat reserved for a Saudi dissident.
All these stories are false. And what is perhaps worse, none of them are funny. Come to that, Minhaj himself isn’t particularly funny. He doesn’t even look funny, in the way that Jack Benny or the Three Stooges looked funny. But of course, he doesn’t need to be or look funny because (1) he’s a comedian of color and (2) comedy itself has long since ceased to be funny.
It’s not that today’s comedians lack material. At a time when John Fetterman is slouching around the United States Senate in a hoodie and gym shorts while President Mumbles deteriorates before our eyes, there’s plenty to work with. But playing for real laughs just gets a comedian cancelled, while confirming the comrades’ priors and virtue signaling his BIPOC posterior off attracts kudos.
Ha! Ha! Ha! White people are such racists! Ha! Ha! Ha! Donald Trump is a big fat fascist! Ha! Ha! Ha!
That’s progressive comedy for you. That’s Woke humor.
The point of this story is not, however, that Hasan Minhaj is shameless jerk who when called out for his lies defended himself with the hilarious claim that they represented “emotional truth.” No, it’s the fact that he felt the need to make them up at all.
In America today, victimization opens the door to secular sainthood, generating a demand for racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/fascist/MAGA outrages that far exceeds the supply. Think about it: If the comrades are right and Fascist Amerikka is indeed a snake pit of racist & etc. evil, Hasan Minhaj and Jussie Smollett and the countless other jerks who’ve fabricated their tales of racism and victimization wouldn’t need to do so. But they do, and they get plenty of help from the X (formerly Twitter) mob and our despicable media. Recall their treatment of a pregnant white woman, a nurse who got into an altercation with a bunch of black teens who were trying to steal her rental bike. She was branded as the villain of the piece: a white supremacist Karen, bullying saintly kids of color.
Many false accusations of racism originate on college campuses—and that’s no coincidence. As a group, young people are conformist, dogmatic and intolerant—and the higher education they receive nowadays seems calculated to magnify those characteristics. Young people are also devotees of Hasan Minhaj’s “emotional truth” doctrine, this being the excuse offered when some fake racist incident is exposed.
University staffs and faculties are no help. While treating false allegations of racism in a Yes, but… manner, they ignore, even facilitate, the one example of racist hate on campus about which there can be no doubt: antisemitism. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, is currently hosting the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, featuring speakers notorious for their vile Jew bashing. Writing for National Review, Zach Kessel describes the views of the most famous of the bunch, Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters.
Waters…is so outspoken in his hatred for Jews—which he couches as support for the Palestinian cause—that one of his former bandmates, David Gilmour, has publicly agreed with the notion that Waters is an antisemite. His rhetoric goes so far that the U.S. State Department condemned him after a concert in Berlin in which he donned a Nazi SS uniform in an apparent attempt to compare Israel to Hitler’s Germany and insulted Anne Frank’s memory. Waters has repeatedly flown a pig balloon emblazoned with the Star of David at his concerts, intimated that Israelis are not human, accused Jews of controlling American media, and referred to a “Zionist cabal,” an antisemitic canard dating back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
One may well ask why the former Pink Floyd frontman was invited to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival; he’s not exactly what you’d call the literary type. Ah, but he has the right opinions—when it comes to the Jews, he’s a doubleplusgoodthinker.
As for the other invited guest speakers, in their various ways they’re just as disgusting as Waters. But to a formal protest from some 2,000 Jewish alumni and supporters of the University of Pennsylvania, President Liz Magill responded with the usual blather about Penn’s “responsibility to foster open dialogue and cultural diversity on campus.” I call it blather because that responsibility does not extend to speakers and events deemed unacceptable to campus radicals. An antisemitic hate fest, though? No problem! And no doubt it’s a coincidence that yesterday morning, a Penn student yelling “F**k the Jews!” trashed the campus Hillel.
Hasan Minhaj’s comeuppance is good for a laugh, sure. Finally, he’s done something that’s really funny. But there’s nothing funny about fake racism, wherever it manifests itself. As with a related plague, false allegations of rape and sexual assault, such lies trivialize actual racist incidents, such that they’re met with skepticism if not cynical dismissal. For instance, the narrative of the racist pregnant nurse, which the media seized upon and broadcast far and wide, did its little bit to confirm people in the opinion that the media are not to be trusted. Lies of this kind cannot be excused as representing “emotional truth,” or because they “point to a real problem,” or because they “facilitate necessary conversations.” These are lies of the worst kind: lies that drive out the truth.
So yes, despite the element of farce in Hasan Minhaj’s phony pose of BIPOC oppression, it represents an evil that puts him in the running for The Worst Person of the Year (So Far!)