Grace, Period?

"She's got the time to talk

She travels outside of karma"

U2 - Grace

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"Nor could any social-minded patriot sneeze at her recent somewhat unappreciated effort to maintain the purity of the American Home by barring from the motion-picture industry all persons, actors or directors or cameramen, who had: (a) ever been divorced; (b) been born in any foreign country -- except Great Britain, since Mrs. Gimmitch thought very highly of Queen Mary, or (c) declined to take an oath to revere the Flag, the Constitution, the Bible, and all other peculiarly American institutions."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here (1935)

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"Bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else you, in potentia, you're making a rod for your own back [...] About this censorious instinct, we basically know all that we need to know and we've known it for a long time. It comes from an old story about another great Englishman, sorry to sound so particular about that this evening, Dr. Samuel Johnson the great lexicographer, the author of the first - compiler, I should say - of the first great dictionary of the English language. When it was complete, Dr. Johnson was waited upon by both delegations of people to congratulate him of the nobility, of the quality, of the commons, of the Lords; and also by delegations of respectable ladies of London, who tended on him in his Fleet Street lodgings and congratulated him: "Dr. Johnson," they said, "We are delighted to find that you have not included any indecent or obscene words in your dictionary." "Ladies," said Dr. Johnson, "I congratulate you on being able to look them up". Anyone that can understand that joke, and I'm pleased to see that 10% of you can, gets the point about censorship, especially prior restraint as it's known in the United States where it's banned by the first amendment to the constitution. It may not be determined in advance what words are apt or inapt, no one has the knowledge that would be required to make that call and - more to the point - one has to suspect the motives of those who do so, in particular: the motives of those who are determined to be offended; of those who will go through a treasure house of English, like Dr. Johnson's first lexicon, in search of filthy words to satisfy themselves and some instinct about which I dare not speculate."

 

Christopher Hitchens debating free speech in 2006

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"No pixels were harmed in the making of this game." - quipped a much older incarnation of Blizzard Entertainment in the end credits of the first Starcraft in 1998. At the time, it could be interpreted both as thumbing their noses in challenge to the movie industry as computer graphics began catching up in quality, and more importantly at the wave of moral panic over video game violence which the '90s had seen from hordes of knuckledragging soccer-moms and god-botherers. Doom and Mortal Kombat were frequent targets at the time, fueling the censorial climate which directly inspired both The Simpsons' Bonestorm video game parody and the more famous "won't somebody please think of the children" reference to many, many quite literal inspirations. The popularity of many late-'90s splatterfests like Blood or Redneck Rampage owed less to those games' inherent quality (I'd tried the latter in demo form; after the initial novelty wore off you quickly realized it was crap) than to a public desire to snub the self-appointed thought police, much like waving a copy of Playboy until the busybodies throw salt over their shoulders.

Where's that public now?

 

Here in the States (and watched by much of the world) the big story last week was the attempted government ban of Jimmy Kimmel Live and his eventual reinstatement by his corporate overlords, though they did make him debase himself in a choked repudiation of a verbal transgression he did not in fact even commit.* His comedian colleagues and many others in the media, feeling more than a touch of the noose tightening around their own necks, came out strongly in defense of free speech (for once) but I do have to correct them whenever they warn about the danger of bans spreading from this example onward. That already happened. Where were you five years ago, when it was career suicide for media figures on the supposedly freedom-loving "left" to dare criticize the twenty million deadheads rioting in the name a murdered brainless thug? 'Cause much as I despise religious lunacy, I would still have been safer boarding a bus next to Charlie Kirk than next to George Floyd. Yes, it was for fear of the censor's lash that no public figure in polite society dared point out the rioters had picked a piss-poor martyr to champion as pretext for their looting and vandalism. Otherwise anyone could have questioned why the rabble did not thus rise up against the innumerable worthier cases of police brutality, and called mass insanity for what it was.

 

It wasn't just one dictator forcing you then. A thousand news editors and publishers censored their staff, a thousand university professors egged their students on toward violence instead of tempering their "defund the police" mass hysteria, ten thousand greenwashing, diversity-hiring, rainbow-flag-waving corporate middle managers equated any criticism with "creating a hostile work environment" as an actionable offense. Trump didn't make you do that. Hell, not even Biden did. That was all you. Each and every one of you, in your own sphere of influence, decided to play grand inquisitor.

 

Kimmel specifically calls out Trump and FCC chairman Carr for their hypocrisy in trampling their own past statements on the importance of free speech when it suddenly became convenient. Where were all these worthies of the jester's alarm bells, where was Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, John Stewart, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Conan O'Brien and the whole rest of the sympathetic litany Kimmel cites in his own support, through the entire previous decade(s) of policing free speech in the name of social "justice"?

 

For that matter where were you twenty million Kimmel YouTube subscribers earlier this year?

 

Credit card companies decided to strongarm game distribution sites into banning games with sexual content considered violent toward women based on the assessment of a little-known Australian feminist lobby called Collective Shout. Given it was founded by an anti-abortion feminist, I'd guess that under the hood her outfit's at least 40% Jesus-freak by volume, but because the demand was framed as protecting women from men, suddenly censorship A-OK! - and journalists pointing out the seemingly uninformed or outright random nature of some of the bans and the slippery slope issue were themselves censored. One wonders, by-the-by, if rape fantasies are the enemy, why PayPal, Visa and Mastercard bothered banning a hundred video games and not the thousands-strong swathes of dime romance novels in which the audience surrogate damsel is dragged off to the basement of some corporate CEO or imperious sheikh or thousand-year-old vampire but-it's-OK-he's-rich-and-handsome... except that "romance" novels are favored by women and video games by men, and it is always acceptable to attack men. (Even though the conflation of sex with power and violence is more obviously a female obsession.)

 

Note we are talking about pure fantasies here. Quite literally, no pixels were harmed. Thought crime by nickel and dime, money-changers legislating who is or is not permitted to fantasize, based on demographic. Well, good luck keeping revenge fantasies like Inglorious Basterds from the chopping block. You can bet all the same audience which suddenly discovered a love of free speech when Kimmel got suspended had cheered automatically at abusive rhetoric like "All these porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists" being spat out to justify censorship a couple months before when it flattered their misandrist ideals. Or at least they cheer every time Bill Maher spits out "incels" as a catch-all for society's ills.

 

How do you think the censors get their foot in the door? You wanted to ban the word "nigger" from Huckleberry Finn? Then don't act surprised when "trans" gets the white-out treatment. This is nothing new. Back around 2010 I remember some Cosmopolitan-like article celebrating the rising trend in fetish porn and gay porn, etc. then a sentence later pivoting to hey, but don't think for a second that your straight male fetish for nurses and asian schoolgirls or whatever is permissible, you sick pervert freaks you should be in prison!

How many years did you think it would take for the worm to turn?

And if sexual violence mandates censorship, why not admit that the female sexual ideal of a provider/protector mandates far more violence to prove Prince Charming's worth. Not in paywalled content but in every mass-market thriller where a sex scene must be preceded by at least half an hour of the alpha male ripping other men apart limb from limb until XY blood overflows the screen before he is permitted to copulate as a superior specimen the heroine might deign to consider deserving of her touch. Do those movies not advertise during Kimmel's ad breaks? And did not these same demands for the prenuptial mortification of male flesh permeate every story, through all the decades and centuries when blue movies and skin mags and erotic doodles were banned as immoral? How is it that by eight years old, before I could even masturbate, I was already fantasizing about getting mauled by a mountain lion to prove my devotion to some imaginary girl I couldn't even picture in my head? Will you censor Jules Verne because of that?

 

You are aware that banning pr0n is also part of the Project 2025 playbook, aren't you?

What use is an anti-censorship movement so utterly blind to its own bias, and especially to its own gargantuan blind spot when it comes to swallowing anything sold as female empowerment or protection? When Don's increasingly blatant senility overtakes him as it did Joe last year, when Princess Ivanka inherits the Red Cap throne she will have no trouble making a Kimmel ban stick. She need but squeak girlishly in front of the cameras, squeeze out a few crocodile tears and claim she Feels Threatened by the big mean man, and everyone, from the backwoods hicks with cross-shaped assault rifles to the grungiest Seattle quinoa addicts, will rush to defend her with no questions asked about constitutions. As none of you "on the right side of history" (in the U.S., Canada, France, Sweden or wherever) have ever bothered asking whether it fit your national ideals of freedom to have individuals fired and blacklisted at a word throughout the nearly decade-long #MeToo witch hunt.

 

 

 

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* Kimmel was suspended, it must be noted, on the false grounds that he had attacked a murder victim when he had in fact only mocked (in all of three sentences) those weaponizing the murder for political gain, which, irony of ironies, the Jesus freaks immediately continued to do by weaponizing it to ban him as well.

 

** Interestingly, Disney shareholders have hinted at legal action over the corporation acting against their interests in cancelling Kimmel's profitable show but I'm not hearing about Paypal getting sued over gratuitously refusing profits from products by and for the imagination on the command of a gaggle of Aussie harridans... even as our great temple moneylenders rake in far less defensible profits from sweatshops all across the globe, from laundered arms sales and drug traffickers. Ask yourself rather: once Mastercard buys the FCC, who'll stop them?

 

*** I waited twenty years to link this cartoon, only to find the author pulled it off the web along with all her old work. Hm. Guess we'll have to mention Jen Bateman and personal revisionism some other time. Suffice to say things got a bit meta at this point and would've dragged this post out too much.