Comedian Patton Oswalt committed the great sin of taking a picture with a longtime friend. Now, he is begging people on the internet whom he doesn’t know to forgive him for not letting social media run his personal life.
The terrible monster that Oswalt took a picture with was Dave Chappelle, a comedian who has run afoul of the social justice Twitter mob for daring to make jokes about transgenderism. “Thirty four YEARS we’ve been friends,” Oswalt wrote in his groveling apology, complete with a photo of him sullenly writing in a legal pad. Apparently, 34 years of friendship is nothing when it comes to satisfying cry-bullies on social media, as Oswalt implies that Chappelle is ignorant, resentful, and spiteful but that he is not done “evolving” and “learning.”
Oswalt’s gutless, pathetic apology is a perfect example of what happens when you allow political and cultural battles and social media mobs to dictate how you live your life. Selling out a man that you claim has been your friend for 34 years because some whiny nobodies demand you denounce him is not something normal people do. That’s because normal people don’t let the internet run their lives.
But Oswalt, much like several major corporations, cowers in fear of the political obsessives and whiny liberals that make up his audience (especially when it comes to the perpetual outrage of transgender activists). Netflix may have recognized that the activists and Twitter users who complain about Chappelle make up a negligible portion of the population, but Oswalt apparently doesn’t see it.
Just as you shouldn’t let politics divide your family, you should not let the politics of no-life nobodies take priority over your friends, even if the online zealots are your “fans.” These people do not know you, do not care about you in any real way, and are not actually part of your life. Oswalt would lose nothing by standing by his friend. Instead, from cowardice, he chose to give up his dignity to please people he doesn’t know, who will happily dogpile on him again the next time he commits an inadvertent offense against the social justice orthodoxy.
