On Friday, we reported that British comedian Ricky Gervais had launched an attack on cancel culture and outrage mobs. Now, he is doubling down by going after the “fascists” who want to shut down free speech, saying that “if you’re mildly conservative on Twitter people call you Hitler.”
“There’s this new weird sort of fascism of people thinking they know what you can say and what you can’t and it’s a really weird thing…that there’s this new trendy myth that people who want free speech want to say awful things all the time. It just isn’t true, it protects everyone,” Gervais said in a new interview.
Not stopping there, Gervais said that the people who are trying to shut down free speech in the name of combatting “hate speech” are “fascists” who from “behind this bit the shield of goodness,” say “we’re good, we’re social just warriors, we’re doing this for good and what we say goes…and they don’t realize how corrupt and wrong that is.”
“If you’re mildly left-wing on Twitter, you’re suddenly Trotsky, right? If your mildly conservative, if you’re Hitler and if your centrist and you look at both arguments, you’re a coward,” he added.
The legendary “The Office” star went on to say that nations should never criminalize speech that “someone, somewhere, might find offensive…because someone, somewhere might find everything offensive.”
“Just because you’re offended it doesn’t mean you’re right,” Gervais said, adding that in today’s culture, the phrase “I’m offended” has replaced the need to come up with any kind of argument.
Gervais concluded by saying that it is impossible to police “hate speech” because there’s “no consensus on what hate speech is,” which is why it becomes dangerous for one side to determine the rules around it, as “the people who think they want to close down free speech, because it’s bad, are the fascists.”
This came days after Gervais said that his beloved show “The Office” could never be made today because “outrage mobs” would take things out of context and cause the show to be cancelled. He also lamented how difficult comedy has become thanks to political correctness.
This piece was written by PopZette Staff on July 12, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
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