Comedian Cracks Wise with the ADL

2,159 words

My initial reaction to comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s keynote address to the Anti-Defamation League ^[3] and his follow-up editorial ^[4] for the Washington Post was to laugh it off. He’s a comedian. Not only that, he’s what I would call a practical joke comedian: someone who makes ordinary people the butt of his humor. Sort of like Andy Kaufman, but nastier and more cynical. As a result, part of his living is embarrassing and humiliating innocent folks. He has also poked ruthless fun at things that are traditional and time-honored in the West; well, the white West at least. He rarely aims his razor-sharp wit at the far more dysfunctional (not to mention violent) black or Muslim communities in the West (or outside of it, for that matter). No. White people are his favorite targets. And now that he feels that some white people are hitting back a little too close to home online, he’s calling for social media and Internet censorship – not censorship when he is intruding on people under false pretenses ^[5] and goading them into saying life-altering, career-destroying things ^[6], but censorship for people who support President Trump or are skeptical of the Russiagate conspiracy.

So much in Cohen’s speech and editorial screams hypocrisy that the man is begging to be satirized. I was planning on a satirical take on this entire affair, complete with “translations” of Cohen’s “Jew-speak” into “truth-speak.” For example:

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Or my favorite:

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Cohen just makes it all so freaking easy. And there I was, sharpening my zingers and getting ready to scribble them all down, when I took a gander at Counter-Currents and saw that my esteemed colleague Nicholas R. Jeelvy had beaten me to the punchline ^[9]. (Dammit.) And he probably did it better than I could have. (Double dammit.)

Anyway, it’s just as well that all the funny business is out of the way. This will allow me to offer Cohen the rebuttal and smackdown he so richly deserves. Hopefully, folks without an axe to grind will find my arguments persuasive as well.

The problem with the ADL and their dimwitted cheerleaders such as Sacha Baron Cohen is that they claim to oppose “racism, hate, and bigotry” while supporting these very same things when it comes to whites and whites only. They lack the self-awareness to realize that they themselves stand for what they purport to oppose. For these people, whites don’t and should not have freedom of expression, freedom of association, or freedom of ethnocentrism, while non-whites should certainly retain these rights (unless, of course, these non-whites target Jews). In its follow-up ^[10] to Cohen’s speech, the ADL called for the censorship of fifteen social media accounts. Of these fifteen, at least four are held by non-whites (Louis Farrakhan, Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir, and Brother Nathanael). In all four cases, the ADL finds these individuals odious because of their anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial. In fact, the ADL wishes to ban all of these accounts because of anti-Semitism except for Richard Spencer’s, whom they ding for racism first and anti-Semitism a distant second.

Note how the ADL is not in the least interested in censoring people for hatred of white people, which is, as we all know, quite rampant ^[11] on social media. Such two-faced agitation becomes glaringly obvious when its proponents spend their weaponized money in order to silence you and shut you out of the social mainstream.

Cohen’s talk churns with irony because it’s an appeal to the major social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and others) to employ Orwellian forms of censorship – as if they were not doing that already. Cohen makes it seem as if these corporate giants are paragons of free speech rather than fully complicit culture warriors for the Left.

Unfortunately, the executives of these platforms don’t appear interested in a close look at how they’re spreading hate, conspiracies, and lies. Look at the speech Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg delivered last month that warned against new laws and regulations on companies like his.

Zuckerberg tried to portray the issue as one involving “choices” around “free expression.” But freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Facebook alone already counts about a third of the world’s population among its users. Social media platforms should not give bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target victims.

What a gas. Does this comedian not realize how hilarious he is?

Since the summer of 2017, pretty much all the social media giants have been on a deplatforming rampage against Right-wing individuals and organizations. In December of that year, Twitter deleted the accounts ^[12] of Jared Taylor and American Renaissance. It also removed Jayda Fransen of Britain First, the Traditionalist Worker’s Party, Generation Identity, and Hunter Wallace of Occidental Dissent. I reported on this shameful event here ^[13]. Here are links describing how PayPal removed VDARE ^[14] without warning, and how YouTube continues to censor ^[15] American Renaissance. And lately, it seems, Counter-Currents has been their favorite whipping boy. In the past year, this publication has been deplatformed ^[16] from PayPal, Stripe, iTunes, Facebook, Amazon, and YouTube. And this says nothing about how credit card processors continually drop Counter-Currents ^[17] in an effort to starve it of donations.

And there is a lot more to it than the five minutes of research it took for me to compile this brief list.

So the crux of the matter is not that Cohen wants the “Silicon Six” to stand up for justice and protect democracy. Rather, he’s egging the corporate giants on to kick the Right when it’s down. Their massive spate of deplatformings was not enough. No, people on the Right need to have even more rights taken away from them – all in the name of “protecting democracy,” as Cohen puts it. It’s only “protecting democracy” in the sense that it is protecting Sacha Baron Cohen’s side of democracy (i.e., the neo-Bolshevik, anti-white, totalitarian side) by trying to demoralize, disorganize, and impoverish its legitimate and most potent adversaries. Given the applause and the leadership award that the ADL lavished on Cohen, no one should ever mistake the ADL for anything other than the anti-white hate group that it is.

And I love how Cohen lumps race-realists and white identitarians in with pedophiles. I wonder if he’s going to next call for censorship against ABC because they sat on an interview ^[18] which fingers Jeffrey Epstein as a pedophile for three years. The interview also purportedly links Epstein to high-level figures on the Left like Bill Clinton. They still haven’t aired it. I wonder how many children were raped during those three years, when Epstein was still a free man. I wonder if ABC is in small part criminally culpable for those rapes, given that they could have gone to the authorities with their interview and presumably didn’t. Are the executives at ABC the kind of pedophile enablers that Cohen would like to see demonetized and deplatformed? If Cohen and the ADL really cared about curbing pedophilia, the answer would be yes. But it’s not. They care more about rigging the game against the Right than they do protecting children.

Then Cohen drags out this classic, libertarian line of reasoning:

Zuckerberg claimed that new limits on social media would “pull back on free expression.” This is utter nonsense. The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law” abridging freedom of speech, but this does not apply to private businesses. If a neo-Nazi comes goose-stepping into a restaurant and starts threatening other customers and saying he wants to kill Jews, would the restaurant owner be required to serve him an elegant eight-course meal? Of course not. The restaurant owner has every legal right, and indeed a moral obligation, to kick the Nazi out. So do Internet companies.

This is absurd for three main reasons. First, yes, if someone were to use social media to talk about how he is going to murder anyone (not just Jews), then he should be deplatformed and at the very least investigated by the police. But this is a yawning chasm apart from what’s really happening. Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, Greg Johnson, and so many other victims of online censorship are not calling for violence of any kind. At its worst, the Right is no more obnoxious than what’s coming out of the social media-sanctified Left ^[19] these days. And at best, it’s more reasonable and more informed. So Cohen’s trite example pratfalls on its face.

Second, Cohen and the so-called Anti-Defamation League do not call for mass deplatformings or censorship when social media explodes ^[11] with anti-white hatred. Here is an interesting paragraph from the Gregory Hood article I just linked to that I think a non-hypocritical version of the ADL would address:

Some of the tweets are implicit calls to disfranchise whites. For example, Pete Forester, who has contributed to Esquire, wrote “I HATE WHITE PEOPLE” in response to an April 2018 poll showing majority support among whites for President Donald Trump. Ashley Feinberg of the Huffington Post declared “White people are f***ing monsters” on the morning the nation learned President Trump had been elected. Whites are obviously an obstacle to political progress.

Here’s another:

The double standards are painfully obvious. Candace Owens, a black conservative with a massive social media presence, recently exposed Twitter’s double standards by replacing the race in hateful tweets from New York Times Editorial Board member Sarah Jeong. She substituted “Jewish” for “white” in an insult about white people’s propensity to sunburn; something presumably both whites and Jews share. Twitter locked her account until conservatives protested. Miss Owens’s conclusion: “Racism in this country has been sanctioned against white people.”

How can anyone trust an organization with the words “anti-defamation” in its name when it consistently does nothing when a certain race of people get defamed?

Third, Cohen may not realize how inconsistent his own position is. The First Amendment “does not apply to private businesses,” you say? Well, a similar species of argument was used back in the 1960s to oppose the Civil Rights Movement. A cafeteria is a private business, too. If its owners wished to refuse service to a class of people that has a greater proclivity towards crime, then shouldn’t they be allowed to do so? After all, it’s not like black people can’t open their own cafeterias or make their own sandwiches. This is the land of the free, isn’t it? Actually, according to people like Cohen and the ADL, it isn’t. They would gladly force that cafeteria to cater to blacks while simultaneously forcing Internet and social media companies to deny service to self-identifying whites. How can anybody claim that people like Cohen and the ADL adhere to only one standard?

And there’s no end to the oppression they wish to dish out. Today, white identitarians can’t have Twitter or Facebook accounts. Tomorrow, they will not be allowed to own credit cards or cell phones or have bank accounts. After that, firearms. And after that? Well, after that you have either war or the gulag. And I am quite sure that some of the Jews applauding Cohen that night would fall all over themselves to work in such a gulag – just like they did in the Soviet Union ^[20].

Beneath all the moral posturing, what you basically have here is wealthy, influential Jews who wish to wage demographic warfare against what they perceive as their greatest enemy: white people. That whites died by the hundreds of thousands fighting on their behalf during the Second World War means nothing to these people. When viewed through such a tribalistic lens, everything the ADL does and does not do makes sense. All that matters is victory for them and their kind. And to achieve this, they intend to strip white people of their majorities, and ultimately, their rights.

In the middle of his speech, however, Cohen did crack what was perhaps the funniest joke of his career:

And it’s no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history: the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous.

Yeah. I laughed, too.

Spencer J. Quinn is a frequent contributor to Counter-Currents and the author of the novel White Like You ^[21].