“Cancel Culture” has become an obnoxious part of American culture in the last couple of years. It’s the Me Too Movement era that really was the spark that lit the fire for cancel culture and the ultra-aggressive politically correctness pervading the country right now.
Nobody is safe. Not even liberal celebrities.
And cancel culture is about to take hold on SNL’s newest cast member for a racial slur he said only hours after the news made the trades.
Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr blasted this culture of many Americans’ addiction to being offended in their respective Netflix specials “Sticks and Stones” and “Paper Tiger.”
It almost seemed like there may be a start of a sudden change; about pushing back against this nonsense with Chappelle and Burr’s specials, but all of that came crumbling down yet again when it was announced Shane Gillis would be one of the three new “Saturday Night Live” cast members.
It was a little ironic because one of the newest members is Bowen Yang, who is the first Asian American cast member in the show’s history. That’s ironic because about a year ago, there was video of Gillis using racial anti-Asian slurs during a podcast.
In a clip (embedded below) from “Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast”, dated September 2018 and brought to light on Twitter by freelance writer Seth Simons, Gillis refers to “the f–king ch-nks” while riffing with co-host Matt McCusker on Chinatown’s architecture and restaurants. Gillis and McCusker also use racist pronunciations such as “dericious” and “nooders,” and go on about the “f–king hassle” of communicating their menu orders to Chinese waiters.
To be fair, while Chappelle also made fun of the idea of transgenders being race-related instead of sex; he said what if he was a Chinese guy trapped inside his “big black body.” Although he said that, Chappelle never used offensive slurs to tell his joke.
Here’s the video if you dare to watch it:
this, again, is from September 2018 pic.twitter.com/inYFT22zjl
— Seth Simons (@sasimons) September 12, 2019
It looks as though Gillis attempted to scrub the video from the internet before anybody got a hold of it, but it was too late obviously. Now, everybody knows about it.
Gillis also says their conversation about the racist comments is, “nice racism, good racism.”
Is there such a thing as nice, good racism?
And although NBC has yet to respond to the new reports, it looks like Gillis’ career is over before it even started. Is what he said as bad or worse than Kevin Hart’s homophobic jokes about his children turning out to be gay?
Or is it possible that there is a “grandfathered-in” rule to Hollywood show business?
For instance, both Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman were accused of sexual harassment by at least two people after the Me Too Movement scandal broke. But where are their careers now? Still alive and well, no?
On the other hand, what Kevin Spacey was accused of – outside of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein – was one of the worst exposed in the movement.
Maybe it’s just the degree of severity.
And what Gillis did is probably unforgivable, especially because nobody had heard of him before this morning.