Gervais on 'outrage mobs': A new 'weird sort of fascism'

FPI / July 15, 2020

Comedian and free speech champion Ricky Gervais blasted "outrage mobs" which are attempting to shut down opposing points of view.

“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,” Gervais said in a talkRadio interview this week to discuss the 19th anniversary of his hit television series “The Office”.

“If you’re mildly left-wing on Twitter, you’re suddenly Trotsky, right?” Gervais said. “If you’re mildly conservative, you’re Hitler; and if you’re centrist and you look at both arguments, you’re a coward.”

Gervais added that it was “corrupt and wrong” for leftists to essentially deputize themselves the social media “hate speech” police.

“These people hide behind a shield of goodness. ‘We’re good. We’re social justice warriors. We’re doing this for good and what we say goes.’ And they don’t realize how corrupt and wrong that is. It’s just nonsense. It is mob rule.”

Gervais said cancel culture would make it impossible to create “The Office” today.

“I think now [‘The Office’] would suffer because people take things literally,” Gervais said. “There’s these outrage mobs who take things out of context. This was a show about everything. It was about difference, it was about sex, race, all the things that people fear to even be discussed or talked about now in case they say the wrong thing and they’re ‘canceled.’ ”

Gervais said he believes there would be outrage against the series if it was released in 2020 instead of more than a decade ago.

“I think if [‘The Office’] was put out now, I think that some people have lost that sense of irony and context. It isn’t a case of what’s right or what’s wrong, it’s a case of how many letters do we have to write? I’ve talked people down off the ledge before. Throughout my career I’ve said, ‘Listen, I’ll write the letter.’ I’ve explained it to people and gone, ‘No, no, it’s OK, ’cause this…’ and they go, ‘Oh, OK.’ Sometimes they’re just scared, and they’re even more scared now because people don’t take an explanation for an answer, they just say, ‘Well, I don’t want to see it, so let’s ban it.’ ”

<strong>Oliver Stone: Today's Hollywood 'too fragile', 'too sensitive'</strong>

Oliver Stone said has had enough of Hollywood’s “sensitivity.”

The Academy Award-winning director of “Platoon” and “JFK” told The New York Times that the film industry has become too politically correct, “too sensitive,” and “too fragile.”

PC and cancel culture has pushed Stone into making documentaries instead of narrative-based films, the most recent of which being “Snowden,” about NSA whistleblower Eric Snowden.

“The problem is in Hollywood. It’s just so expensive — the marketing. Everything has become too fragile, too sensitive,” he said. “Hollywood now — you can’t make a film without a Covid adviser. You can’t make a film without a sensitivity counselor. It’s ridiculous.”

When pressed to explain why a “sensitivity counselor” is ridiculous, Stone said, “The Academy changes its mind every five, 10, two months about what it’s trying to keep up with. It’s politically correct [expletive], and it’s not a world I’m anxious to run out into. I’ve never seen it quite mad like this. It’s like an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ tea party.”

Stone said he has been “offered stuff, but I’m not inspired to make a movie. I don’t feel anything inside me, fire for going through that pain and misery. The last film I did was ‘Snowden.’ It was so difficult to make. We struggled to get financing — I believe — because of the subject matter.”

Free Press International