People say left-wingers are touchy. But it only took a 30-second teaser for Netflix’s new show “Dear White People” to get alt-right viewers to cancel their subscriptions.
And judging from some misreadings of the clip, many didn’t even give it the full 30 seconds.
We’re not just talking about easily-swayed Twitter sheep. The knee-jerking extended to the more cultured spokesmen of the movement with 100k+ followers.
Considering the alt-right are winning the culture wars at the moment – their man is in the White House and liberal America is licking its wounds – why are they so thin-skinned?
One-time Buzzfeed writer Tim Treadstone, aka @BakedAlaska claimed that the “anti-white” show “promotes white genocide”, and created the #NoNetflix boycott hashtag, which has been trending for two days.
But he has since claimed that it is “Dear White People” director Justin Simien who is shutting down debate:
The director of Dear White People was too afraid to address my critique of his anti-white propaganda show so he blocked me lol. #NoNetflix pic.twitter.com/NguRdMyCb0
— Baked Alaska™ (@bakedalaska) February 10, 2017
Really? There’s a difference in loudness between simply not watching a show, even blocking one person on Twitter, and ditching a whole network.
As well as throwing the baby out with the bathwater, this is the definition of shutting down debate.
Which is odd, considering alt-right criticisms of liberals center on their oversensitivity and propensity to take things out of context. You’ve got your eager-for-a-fight SJWs; fragile snowflakes who can’t stand the heat, people who can’t take a joke. More often than not, just sore losers.
But what’s worse than a sore loser? A sore winner.
If people on the alt-right had stayed for the full 30 seconds of the “Dear White People” teaser, they might have seen that it presents a critique.
Going even further back, you might discover that the 2014 movie on which the show is based critiques people of all leanings. It lampoons privileged racism, and those who think it no longer exists – but also takes on overzealous activists and people who are lukewarm about standing up for what they believe.
At the very start, one character calls in to the main character Samantha White’s radio show and asks whether it would be okay if he had one called Dear Black People. The question is debated. Everyone gets it from all sides, and this changes their outlook.
It is a film about the act of debate, self-criticism and re-evaluation. But it seems in our era of anti-intellectualism, any attempt to educate oneself or someone else is frowned upon.
The alt-right position themselves as provocateurs, but don’t know how to respond to criticism.
Their political representative, President Trump, doesn’t believe in climate change and so has cut funding to research into establishing whether it is a thing or not. His press secretary Sean Spicer told a room full of journalists to stop criticising his administration the day after the inauguration.
The truth is, the alt-right attracts the thin-skinned.
I mean, you have to be quick to take offence in order to wilfully misread “black lives matter” as “black lives matter more”; to think that voicing how it’s not okay to shoot a black person on sight is itself a racially motivated attack, or, in the case of Tomi Lahren – who hates “whiners” – as bad as systematic lynchings by the KKK.
In the case of “Dear White People”, the argument is this:that outlining the ways in which people have been racist in the past and in the present is itself racist against racists.
Do you follow? No? That’s because it’s bollocks.
The alt-right have always been thin-skinned but we just hadn’t seen it. Not too long ago they were outliers with nothing to lose. They didn’t have to justify themselves because nobody paid them enough heed to challenge them. Now they are a dominant political voice, but haven’t developed the diplomacy that comes with having to satisfy everyone’s gripes.
Dear White People director Justin Simien responded to the backlash in a Facebook post (which he later deleted): “I feel strangely encouraged. To see the sheer threat that people feel over a date announcement video featuring a woman of color (politely) asking not to be mocked makes it so clear why I made this show.”
Now there has been a backlash to the backlash. Some outlets have begun endorsing the show. The heat has lead to people who might not have seen the original film looking it up on Netflix.
It even inspired someone to coin the phrase “broflake” to needle alt-right guys who are nonetheless hypersensitive. In the end, the joke’s on them.
