Reprisal is not hypocrisy

One of the nice things about being an ex-libertarian is that one no longer finds oneself lumped in with the professional cucks at Reason.

The Walt Disney Company has fired filmmaker James Gunn, director of the Marvel franchise Guardians of the Galaxy films, due to revelations that he—gasp—said some very offensive things on Twitter many years ago.

It’s no accident these tweets were suddenly discovered; right-wing bloggers including Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec (with an assist from Breitbart and The Daily Caller) went digging after Gunn made negative remarks about conservative writer Ben Shapiro on Twitter. Ironically, Gunn was actually offering a very qualified defense of liberal actor and director Mark Duplass for saying Ben Shapiro was someone the left should engage.

Gunn’s tweets reference violence and sexual assault against children. They are gross. But he says they were intended as jokes, and there’s really no reason to suspect otherwise. While many have implied that the tweets include a link to child pornography, this is false—the link in question is harmless.

Gunn said he was a very different person when he wrote those tweets, and had previously apologized.

“I viewed myself as a provocateur, making movies and telling jokes that were outrageous and taboo,” he said in a statement. “In the past, I have apologized for humor of mine that hurt people. I truly felt sorry and meant every word of my apologies.”

This really ought to have been enough. But we live in an era where both the left and the right are eager to collect the scalps of people who offend them. Conservatives who participated in the lynch mob against Gunn are hypocrites, since they have often scolded the left for doing this exact same thing.

Cuckservatives are very unhappy when anyone does anything more effective than protest in a feeble and futile manner. To the Left, an apology is nothing more than an admission of guilt and justification for prosecution, and their apologies should be treated accordingly. Cerno and Jack are doing exactly what everyone on the Right should be doing to the Left, and that is holding them accountable to their own rules.

If you want to win the cultural war, you have to fight. Feckless posturing about how “we should be better than that” is not fighting, it is surrendering.