Bill Maher And Elon Musk Terribly Oppressed By No One/Nothing In Particular

If you can't get specific, you're probably full of shit.

Last night, two of the most obnoxious men in America sat down for a chat about how upset they are about vague groups of people having non-specific opinions about them and about other things — or as one of them calls it "the woke mind virus."

That one would be Elon Musk. The other would be Bill Maher. Elon Musk owns one of the three big social media companies. Bill Maher has his own weekly television show during which he gets to say anything he wants. Both of them have been very oppressed by nameless, faceless groups of people who who say nonspecific things that are critical of them and worry that those nameless, faceless, nonspecific people could perhaps destroy them with their nonspecific criticisms.

Elon Musk on the "Woke Mind Virus" | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)    www.youtube.com 

“You have talked about this ‘woke mind virus’ in really apocalyptic terms." Maher said, because what is the apocalypse if not "people disagreeing with Bill Maher, publicly?" "You should explain why you don’t think it’s hyperbole to say things like it’s ‘pushing civilization towards suicide.’ First of all, what is the woke mind virus? And if we don’t deal with this, nothing else can get done."

The "woke mind virus," of course, is something that an egomaniac had to invent just to explain why people disagree with him, why his own kid won't talk to him and why his wife left him for Chelsea Manning. It's "you'd have to be crazy not to love me" writ large.

“I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic and anything that results in the suppression of free speech,” Musk said, ignoring the fact that he spent the last week replacing "people who were verified because they had actually done something that made it necessary for people to be sure they were who they said they were" with "acolytes and grifters willing to pay him $8." This would be the opposite of "meritocracy" — though that term has always been a joke to begin with.

“So, you know, those are two other aspects of the woke mind virus that I think are very dangerous is that it’s anti-meritocratic. You can’t question things. Even the questioning is bad. So, you know, another way, almost synonymous would be cancel culture. And people have tried to cancel you many times."

To be clear, there are rules with this questioning thing. If someone questions someone that Maher or Musk would conside "woke," they are doing free speech. If someone disagrees with the non-woke person or questions them, they are "canceling" that person. This is just how things work.

One would think, given how traumatic "woke mind virus" this is for the both of them, that one of them would have been able to point to many specific instances they found particularly upsetting or a specific person saying a specific thing that they felt was bad.

In 20 minutes, the two of them managed to come up with one single specific instance of the havoc this horrible "woke mind virus" had wreaked upon society.

Musk told a harrowing story about a time his friend asked his daughters what they knew about the first few American presidents — and, by golly, not only was George Washington the only one they could name, but only thing they knew about him was that "he owned slaves."

This is a trope, okay? Since I have been alive, at least, there have been absolutely endless polls showing how little people know about American history or other subjects. Someone does the poll and the everyone clutches their pearls about how stupid we all are and then everyone goes on about their day.

In 2007, a particularly non-woke time when hipster racism was flourishing, when female celebrities were publicly humiliated for gaining an ounce, when most trans people were in the closet, when gay people couldn't get married, when George Bush was still president — a survey commissioned by the United States Mint found that only 7 percent of Americans could name the nation's first four presidents in order.

I'm gonna take a moment and point out that there were decades during which the main things anyone could tell you about George Washington was that he had wooden teeth and that he chopped down a cherry tree and then told his father he chopped down a cherry tree, because he could not tell a lie.

 Neither of these things were true . All of the wood-based George Washington stories were pure nonsense, as far as I can tell — but it is, at the very least, factually true that he owned slaves. I would actually consider that a step up. It's also something (like wooden teeth or a cherry tree) that is just naturally more likely to stick in a person's mind than the specific details of the Whiskey Rebellion.

I sincerely doubt that the reason this girl, like so many before her, did not know all that much about George Washington, was because her school was infected with the "woke mind virus." After all, if she were too woke, she would have at least seen Hamilton . If you ask me, she was probably just busting her father's balls, as teenagers tend to do.

That's it. That's all they had. They couldn't even come up with a specific example from a specific person from Twitter. Maher just referred to them as "the mean girls" and talked about how he couldn't tweet anything without the "mean girls" coming from him.

He described the upsetting experience of tweeting something he felt was innocuous (about George Washington, naturally) and having people come at him to criticize him — which is something that happens to everyone on Twitter regardless of where they stand politically. Try tweeting something critical about Joe Rogan and enjoy your mentions for the next three days. Or hell, try tweeting about chili. Or whether or not you should wash chicken before you cook it. Or whether or not it is necessary to wash one's legs in the shower. This is what happens on social media. People are bored and contentious and that is what happens sometimes. And then other times there's a Pizza Rat or a The Dress and peace throughout the land.

I was actually somewhat disappointed that Musk did not inform Maher of the new developments at Twitter and let him know that he can now be sure that if he tweets something that someone might want to criticize, that he would actually have to scroll down through 45 responses from newly blue checkmarked people telling him how wonderful he is, promoting their own brands, selling crypto and posting entirely unrelated memes before he would see it.

While talking about how bad it is that Holocaust denial is illegal in France, the two agreed that the most important part about free speech is defending speech that one disagrees with and thinks is terrible — with absolutely zero awareness of the fact that this is literally the exact opposite of what they are doing. It would only follow that if you're gonna defend the free speech of the person denying the Holocaust, you also have to defend the free speech of the person calling that guy an asshole. You know, if you're going to be a big free speech warrior about things.

There really is something deeply sinister about a guy with his own weekly television show and the ability to give a major platform to anyone he chooses and a guy who owns one of the largest social media companies on the internet talking about how terribly oppressed they are by people with nowhere near the kind of power and influence they have.

There is a reason they don't get specific.

It's the same reason why one of the more effective ways to deal with general anxiety is to write up a list of the things that are giving you anxiety. Once you narrow down what they actually are, it often doesn't seem like as much of a big deal. I'll wake up in the middle of the night terrified because I have "so much to do" and it turns out that those things are "pick up some packages, do laundry, respond to a wedding invitation" and other things that are entirely manageable.

If they were to say exactly what happened, people can say "Well, the thing you said was actually pretty shitty and that person had a point," which forces them off the high ground. Or they say "Why should that person not have been able to say that?" which ruins your "I heart free speech" lewk. You name a person specifically and they can say "That is one person out of 100 and they have 12 followers. That's who is oppressing you?" Or they can just say, to any of that "So?"

There's a reason it's always these ominous, nameless, faceless, pitchfork-carrying mobs. Because what are they going to say, really? I said this and then someone said this back to me and it was wrong of them to do that? Someone said something was racist and I didn't think that thing was racist, so they shouldn't have been allowed to say that? I said this and then someone said they wouldn't watch my show? I said this and someone said they wouldn't use my social media platform? I don't like any of this because I believe in free speech?

It's not a very good look.

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