Some good advice for celebrities...

Samantha Bee. Montclair Film.

This week has been all about celebrities putting their feet in the mouths. First Roseanne compared Valerie Jarrett to an ape. That cost her highly rated and hugely influential show. Not wanting to be outdone, late night TBS tv show host Samantha Bee went even further and called Ivanka Trump the "c" word. She still has her job as of this writing but sponsors are starting to pull out.

Of course, the spirit of free speech says that neither woman should be fired for their statements. Indeed, in each case there were a lot of people that weren't offended. And we, in general, should be more tolerant for other peoples ideas, even when those ideas are horrifically offensive.

But that is not the world we live in. We live in a world where the 1st amendment only applies to government action, and does not prevent private companies from firing you if you say something offensive. I think there is a real debate to be had about that subject, but the current status quo is that if you say something offensive, you risk getting fired.

Both Roseanne and Bee got in to trouble because they either forgot that was the status quo or thought they were immune from it. That may still be true with Bee as she hasn't been fired yet, since she is liberal, but she still could have avoided a lot of trouble if she hadn't said something horribly offensive.

Why would they forget such a thing? Because they thought their audience was a monolith. Roseanne probably thought that her post wouldn't have gone viral and would have only been noticed by her followers, most of which probably didn't care and may have agreed with her. The same thing happened with Samantha Bee. She never thought for a second that people who would be offended would even hear what she said, and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

In both cases they were rather obviously wrong. The people that disagreed with them politically pounced on the opportunity they were given and punished them, not so much because of what they said, but because it was an opportunity to hurt the other said. And those people knew that it wasn't just their side that was going to be angry about what they said, it would be politically neutral people as well. Normal people aren't going to care too much about the politics in each case but they are going to be offended by perceived racism and sexism.

So my advice is this. If you are someone that is at all politically active and you are vulnerable to losing your job, don't give your enemies any unnecessary ammunition. Yes, it is terrible that we can't say what we want in this country in the current political environment you are a fool if you say whatever you want in public. Yes, this means some things aren't going to be able to said, but that's what anonymous posting is for.

This is of course a bad state of affairs. If what happened to Roseanne and Bee could happen to them, it could happen to you. I don't see much of a solution for this other than perhaps making it illegal for people to get fired for their political statements. That doesn't seem likely to happen, and a cease fire in the culture war doesn't seem like it will happen anytime soon either... For now, caution must rule the day and you have to make sure that if you want to say something others may consider horribly offensive, you may end up paying for it with your job... as sad as it is to say.