Age of the Geek

 
Here We Go Again
  
      I’m starting to think I should just rename this column, “This Week In The Perpetually Outraged.”
     Is there something in the water? Just in the last few months it seems like you can’t go a week without another ridiculous controversy about some hyper-sensitive group getting offended about nothing.
     In this week’s highest profile case, and I say that because there were at least two other equally dumb outrages at the same time, we have Trevor Noah, the heir to Jon Stewart’s throne at “The Daily Show.”
     By all accounts, Noah’s selection as the next host of “The Daily Show” should have been a slam dunk for the progressive crowd. After all, every time a late night talk show seat gets filled by another white guy there are endless cries about the need for more minorities on television. Trevor Noah should make them weep with joy.
     Noah is a biracial comedian from South Africa. He grew up half-white in South Africa and is now half-black in America. He’s a two-for-one for minority representation.
     Granted, he’s not a woman, but try as they might, the “progressive” Internet couldn’t pressure Jessica Williams into taking a job she didn’t want and knew she wasn’t qualified for. And they did try, but that’s a whole other debacle.
     Still, Noah did get a hero’s welcome… for about 12 hours. That was how long it took the perpetually offended crowd to sift through six years of Twitter posts and decide that Noah was a sexist, fat-shaming, anti-Semite. (Which I’m sure came as a shock to his half-Jewish mother.)
     They came to this conclusion after finding about a dozen or so tweets, out of 8,844, that were mildly low brow. Because when you’re looking for an accurate assessment of somebody’s feeling’s towards Israel, a 140-character joke from years ago is definitely where you should start.
     I’ve read the offending tweets myself. Some of them were funny, some of them missed the mark, none of them gave me the impression that Noah was anything other than a comedian tuning his craft.
     And yet, based on less than 0.2 percent of his Twitter history, Trevor Noah’s comedy was deemed “problematic,” a word I’ve recently come to define as “something not really a problem, but treated like one anyway.”
     Thankfully, Noah has stood up to the torch and pitchfork mob with the one thing they cannot abide. Reason. “To reduce my views to a handful of jokes that didn’t land is not a true reflection of my character, nor my evolution as a comedian,” he tweeted. Because apparently people needed to be reminded of that basic truth.
     Also thankfully, it seems people are finally starting to reject this kind of behavior from the “progressive” crowd.
     Is it just me, or has this nonsense been getting progressively worse lately? Pun only partially intended.
     I’m seriously asking. Is this a recent phenomenon, or did some switch flip in my head when I turned 30 that made me more aware of the absurdity of the far left?
     And yeah, I’m going there. This is all on the political left. Crazy progressives constantly on the search for some new “problematic” issue to get upset about.
     I’m still a Democrat. I still think Obamacare didn’t go far enough. I still generally approve of the job the president has done in office. And it is almost a certainty that I will vote Democrat across the board in the next election.
     I’m pro-gay rights, pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-immigration, so on and so forth. I am, without a doubt, a card carrying liberal.
     There is a Winston Churchill quote that has always kind of worried me. “Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart. Any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.”
     I’ve always wondered if this was actually the case, but I think there is something else going on here.
     For years I’ve wondered what the leftist version of the Tea Party would look like. It seems I’ve finally found it. It’s political correctness taken to authoritarian levels. If they don’t like it, it must change.
     Recently I’ve discovered a political science term known as “Horseshoe Theory.” It states that rather than political ideologies being on opposite ends of a straight line, they instead form a shape similar to a horseshoe, until the extreme left and the extreme right end up closer to each other than they do the middle.
     This theory makes a lot of sense to me now. Instead of far right extremists demanding a Bible and a gun in every classroom, we have far left extremists demanding that every comic book cover, video game, and lame Twitter joke be sanitized to be un-offensive to anybody that might ever come across it.
     I thought we’d managed to placate this crowd back in the 90s, but, like everything else from the 90s, I guess it’s making a comeback.
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and knows that if you go too far to left, it's eventually the same as going too far to the right.