I used to like George Takei. I really did. Still to this day, his performance along with the rest of the Roasters when William Shatner was in the hot seat was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen:
George Takei was the most important ambassador the gay community had ever seen. He normalised his sexuality by way of self-deprecation, achieving more in a few appearances with gags about having trouble as a gay Asian man saying ‘glory hole’ than the usual brand of intimidating, humourless rainbow coalition activism.
But then something happened. The same thing that has happened with Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, and others. We always knew these people’s politics. When you’re insulated in Hollywood far afield from the hopes and fears of ‘flyover country,’ they only tend to go one way. But it’s a little like the Wall Street stockbroker you suspect of doing a little blow on the side. As long as it doesn’t interfere with his work, your share portfolio is OK. But when everything becomes about coke, your previously highly functioning stockbroker can’t do his job properly any more. In much the same way, George Takei and a number of previously funny members of the entertainment community are finding that the opiate of social justice is affecting their comedic mojo.
Takei is a very vocal advocate of what he perceives to be a vast conspiracy of rampant racism and homophobia in Western society. But he never seems to address the awkward anomalies that disprove his case. Namely how someone who is literally an identity politics trifecta (Asian, gay, and Democrat) of all the things that the mythical ‘racist, homophobic, fascists’ who allegedly run the show wish to exterminate, somehow managed to escape a (Democrat-run) internment camp, avoid manual labour for his entire adult life, star in the most popular syndicated sci-fi television programme of all time, amass a fortune of $12 million, and marry the man of his dreams. Quite a feat given that he lives in one of the Meccas of White Western Society.
Like Schumer, Silverman, and others, George Takei has gone straight down the rabbit hole to such an extent that his popularity with a healthy chunk of his fans may never recover. We saw a good natured and funny entertainer become a bitter and twisted, humourless, creepy old guy before our very eyes.
Funny people turned humourless political activists, like this annoying trio, could do well to learn from the mistakes of their ideological other Dennis Miller. Miller destroyed his career by going all in for the Iraq invasion following 9/11 when a more measured political stance may have been called for in retrospect, particularly at a time when the left dictated the prevailing culture.
Even conservatives realised they’d been taken for a ride on Iraq after a year or two, but by that stage Miller had committed a failed ideology to such an extent that his only option was to double down on something he was clearly wrong about. Sound familiar? Like a certain Hollywood community and a mainstream media who also completely misread the public zeitgeist?
Big things were planned for Miller. Had he applied a bit more critical thinking, the world would be his oyster in the current climate. But like Glenn Beck (and Takei, Schumer, Silverman, and others on the progressive side), Miller overplayed his hand and went full retard. His career now mainly consists of being thrown scraps of appearances over at Fox News.
George Takei and his angry comic peers look set to suffer a similar fate of irrelevance in 2017 by going all in and over the top of the trenches for debunked and discredited ideologies of obsolete social justice and problematic identity politics that are very much on the nose for anyone capable of even a modicum of critical thinking. Schumer and Silverman are already being booed. Takei is being unfollowed and unfriended at a rate of knots. Expect all of their profiles to decrease dramatically unless they realise the error of their ways.
It’s your XYZ.
