I don't care that it's offensive

I watched some right-wing humor. Here's what I learned.

Comedians, though usually extremely intelligent, somehow often lack critical pieces of information. As explained by Jerry Seinfeld: “The comedy brain. It picks up so much, except a lot of basic stuff that you need.” In the case of many right-wing comedians, this critical information seems to include the fundamental ways in which racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-trans, and anti-immigrant humor differs from other forms of vulgarity.

I’m not the PC police. In fact, PC police do not exist. What does exist is the real police. I have been harassed many times by them for no reason except a cop’s idea of JDLR (just doesn’t look right) in white spaces. Humiliatingly, I was once even arrested right in front of the MIT lab where I worked.

If you tell sexual jokes that I find obscene, I can easily avoid them. Have fun. That’s between you and your audience. If you tell racist jokes, I can avoid those too, but, whether I ignore them or not, they contribute to a permission structure that I can’t safely ignore.

When you reinforce people’s racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, and anti-immigrant attitudes, the problem isn’t that people get offended. We’ve all been offended. Grown-ups can handle being offended. The problem is safety. For example, the othering of marginalized groups limits people’s ability to empathize with those groups. This affects lawmakers’ and law enforcers’ perception of the community around them.

If you haven’t, spend some time in a place where you are in the minority. I don’t mean a place where lots of different types of people coexists and you are not the majority. I mean a place where almost everyone looks the same except for you. Any anxiety you’ve ever had about living in a surveillance state will feel like a low-wattage hairdryer compared to the furnace you’ve stepped into.

The fact that many of us feel this way all of the time would be bad enough. It seems, however, that 49.97% of the American electorate is also giddy at the prospect of making our lives even worse. Watch the October 27, 2024 hate rally at Madison Square Garden. Every single Trump voter either watched it one week before going out to vote for him or willfully ignored it. Go watch him spend the months and years and decades before that saying and doing these very same things.

I’m not going to cancel anybody because cancelling doesn’t exit. It never did. When public figures are credibly accused, it’s important for us to make each other aware. It’s also important to consider those accusations when we make decisions about what to consume. If this is cancel culture — never mind if it went too far — how could it go too far? While we’re at it, explain how you tell the difference between virtue signaling and plain-old virtue? When Trump threatens that The U.S. will be woke no longer, am I the only one picturing a forced sleeping-pill overdose?

I suppose I do care a little bit that it’s offensive. Sticks and stones — and militarized police and assault rifles and overcrowded detention centers — will break my bones. Words support a permission structure for their use. You’re free to say whatever you want to, but only a dullard would conflate threats to the safety of marginalized communities with bad-boy potty humor.