Ralph Fiennes is one of the most versatile actors around. The Harry Potter star — he played the villain Voldemort — recently came out not to defend any particular idea except one: free speech.
Some people have a problem with this.
Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling is a woman of the left. She’s a billionaire thanks to the characters and books she created, also making her a capitalist in practice. Most if not all of the wokes are capitalists too, including the firms that push wokism for profit on government agencies and corporate America. They’re Marxists in rhetoric and in their level of tolerance for opinions that oppose theirs, meaning, they have no tolerance for opposing opinions whatsoever. But they like the American dollar. The same woke teachers’ unions that push critical race theory and are fighting to keeps kids out of schools are also trying to use COVID stimulus money to pay themselves bonuses.
The recent case in Loudon, Va., exposed woke intolerance for the umpteenth time. They’re hypocrites and moral monsters.
Rowling has come under fire and threat of cancelation from the woke-a-trons for merely noting that transgender people do not have the right to have a monopoly on opinions. It’s tough to cancel a billionaire, but they’re trying.
Fiennes recently questioned why Rowling has faced not just criticism, but threats of violence and death, for offering her opinion.
“I can’t understand the vitriol directed at her,” Fiennes said in an interview with the Telegraph. “I can understand the heat of an argument, but I find this age of accusation and the need to condemn irrational. I find the level of hatred that people express about views that differ from theirs, and the violence of language towards others, disturbing.”
Fiennes has a choice now: Stick with what he said, or apologize and grovel. The former will mean the woke critics will remain angry, but others will respect him. The latter pleases no one, as wokes don’t accept apologies.
He’s hitting the road doing a one-man show on T.S. Eliot, a literary giant known for his Christian faith. We’ll see what Fiennes does. I wouldn’t rule out seeing him stick to his guns. He’s an accomplished and versatile actor who is still starring in quality movies and by now probably isn’t overly concerned with what a bunch of tweeters think of him. He has five productions slated for release this year and next already, according to IMDB. Like Rowling, he’s probably financially set if he never works again.
This thread reacting to him indicates the level of thinking some of the woke-a-tron bigots tend to deploy when adults are attempting to have a conversation. But there’s also pushback.
“Literally” Voldemort isn’t literally alive. He’s a fictional character. If Fiennes can be held responsible for Voldemort’s evil, then James Earl Jones — the voice of Darth Vader (and once the voice of CNN, which exists and is arguably literally evil) — has some explaining to do.
It’s encouraging to see tweeters engaging the cancel wannabes on a story like this. Maybe it’s a sign that people are getting fed up with canceling people over opinions.
Cancelers should be forced to deal with their narrow-minded bigotry, their obvious hypocrisy, their childish ignorance, and for the fact that they stand opposed to the likes of Frederick Douglass, the former slave who called passionately for free speech on the eve of the Civil War. He said:
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason… Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
How can anyone argue with that, especially given the source and the context? Wokes claim to want to dismantle “systemic racism,” yet they leave the party that defended slavery and imposed systemic racism in the form of Jim Crow alone — that would be the Democratic Party — and openly oppose the principles of a giant such as Douglass now.
