George Takei Says No One Batted an Eye if Celebs Voted for Bush, Instantly Eaten Alive
Few individuals have gotten so much publicity thanks to the advent of social media as George Takei.
Ever since Twitter and Facebook gained societal traction, Takei has transformed himself from a minor gay rights figure and the third or fourth-most popular member of the original “Star Trek” cast (depending on how much of a jerk you think William Shatner is) to a liberal hashtag activist extraordinaire.
There’s no issue too big or too small for Takei to vulgarize and oversimplify in 280 characters or less (usually less), and his followers generally take what he says as gospel in spite of the fact that whatever evidence he uses to back his statements up — when he uses evidence at all — is a master-class in cherry picking.
Either social media has caught on or there are times when even Sulu can go too far, however, because Takei now finds himself at the center of a Twitter whirlwind after making one of the most risible statements of his fundamentally unserious career in internet punditry.
The backlash began after Takei decided to liberalsplain to America why celebrities who supported Donald Trump either stayed quiet or were being ostracized. And how did he do so? By talking about all of the celebrities who supported George W. Bush without any repercussions. You remember all of them, right?
“No one would bat an eye if an entertainer said they’d have voted for George Bush,” Takei wrote Monday.
“Vocal support for Trump, by contrast, stirs backlash because he has attacked our communities, our institutions, and our values. We are not in ordinary times. They demand we all take a clearer stand.”
This is funny, because these are exactly the arguments I remember liberals making about George W. Bush back during the Iraq War. Remember the Dixie Chicks telling British fans how they were “ashamed” of their president? Remember Green Day writing a song called “American Idiot” on an album called “American Idiot,” both of which tacitly referenced the intellectual and moral vacancy of the average Republican voter and the cravenness of the Bush administration? Remember how Michael Moore became a cause celebré among liberals for a film which implied the Bush family was in bed with the bin Ladens?
Or maybe you remember this magazine cover, like National Review’s Jonah Goldberg did:
And there were other Twitter users who recalled that period much the same way.
In fact, the left treated George W. Bush the same way they treat Donald Trump: as if he were a fascist and a rube whose ultimate goal was to take away every single one of their constitutional rights and roll back the cultural clock to sometime in the vicinity of Brown v. Board of Education. That was a febrile overreaction then, and it still is now. And George Takei has been at the forefront of both pitchfork-wielding mobs.
I’m not entirely convinced that Takei isn’t a secret Republican, because few other “liberals” have been so good for conservatives. However, the alarming thing is that this is too consistent to be spun as a massive troll. He actually believes this stuff.
Perhaps that’s even better. George Takei is like a museum exhibit demonstrating the amnesia and absurdity of the left. Keep on tweeting, George. It takes so little time and thought, yet it means so much to us on the other side.
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