As we say here at The BFD, We Will Let You Comment on Articles When They Won’t. We will also tell you the news that they won’t.
When Stuff reported on comedian Josh Thomas’s social media, cancel culture crusade against Coon cheese, they neglected to report some important information. Such as that Thomas almost immediately got skewered on his own Sword of Wokeness.
No sooner had this cancel culture inquisitor issued his whiny auto-da-fé than the mob strung him him up by his own “problematic” past.
George Bernard Shaw famously advised: “Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
On Tuesday, two more Australian comics lived to regret climbing into the ring. Please Like Me star Josh Thomas[…] waded into the Black Lives Matter movement by posting an image of Coon cheese on social media, calling for it to be renamed as the term was often used as “hate speech” towards indigenous Australians.
Here’s the thing about mud: sometimes it sticks when you fling it; sometimes it comes back and covers you in ignominy.
As Stuff at least admitted, the cheese is named for its inventor, Edward William Coon. If we’re to cancel Coon Cheese, then do we ban the artworks of Jeff Koons or Willem de Kooning? (That last one is especially problematic, with its obvious mockery of ebonics.)
But young Josh soon had bigger problems than being an unfunny, limp-wristed, ginger soy-boy. It turns out that he has been less than sufficiently woke, in the past.
A 2016 clip had resurfaced which showed him complaining about the difficulty of casting non-white actors. In the clip, widely shared on social media, he is joined on a panel discussion by three white writer-actors: Dan Harmon, the American creator of Community and Rick and Morty, and Australians Celia Pacquola and Luke McGregor. Warning the audience “this is going to sound racist”, Thomas said it was hard to find actors from diverse backgrounds with experience.
On choosing an actor to portray a 7-Eleven worker, he mused: “Do you make them Indian? Or, is that offensive? Or, then if you make them white, is that a bit like you’re lying, really?”
Naturally, Thomas immediately issued a grovelling self-criticism even more obviously contrived than a Stalinist show-trial confession.
On the other hand, Meshel Laurie, who wallows somewhere between Josh Thomas and Hannah Gadsby at the bottom of the leftist barrel of unfunniness, tried the “my dog hacked my Facebook post” gambit.
Meshel Laurie[…]was called out for posting a comment to her Facebook page saying that “blackface has no cultural relevance in Australia”.
Which is true, as it happens. It’s just never been a “thing” here. But never let facts get in the way of a good offence-taking.
Instead Laurie, who has appeared on The Project and Have You Been Paying Attention?, said she’d been hacked and accused one of her accusers of being “a psychopath”.
Laurie[…]took to Facebook to deny the comment was hers, despite its appearance on her account.
That’s the thing with totalitarians – they live in perpetual terror of falling foul of their own. As Orwell wrote, “the peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it does not fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it alters them from day to day”.
This only increases the totalitarians’ power. When their subjects are forever trying to keep their footing on constantly shifting sands of dogma, they live in constant fear. And to live in constant fear is to live in submission.
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