SOUTH PARK’S MATT STONE ON CANCEL CULTURE:

“It’s new,” Stone says of cancel culture, the term used to refer to boycotts started (usually via social media) when a person or group is offended by a star or brand. “I don’t want to say it’s the same as it’s always been. The kids are fucking different than us. There’s a generational thing going on.” Currently, Dave Chappelle is in the crosshairs for his latest Netflix stand-up special, Sticks and Stones. “I know some people have been canceled for genuinely, like, personal behavior, but Dave is not getting canceled anytime soon,” Stone says, joking that South Park and Chappelle are “grandfathered” out of the culture.

Stone also shared his theory as to why critics were so hard on the latest Chappelle special, while viewers seemed to enjoy it far more. “I feel bad for television critics and cultural critics,” he explains. “They may have laughed like hell at that, and then they went home and they know what they have to write to keep their job. So when I read TV reviews or cultural reviews, I think of someone in prison, writing. I think about somebody writing a hostage note. This is not what they think. This is what they have to do to keep their job in a social media world. So I don’t hold it against them.”

Which dovetails well with this item from Sunday, which I dubbed “An Army of Fredrick Werthams:” How Twitter Transforms Regular People Into Woke Crusaders. Watch a comic book writer transform her opinion of The Joker, once her favorite character, to being (wait for it) “problematic,” because that’s how she’s expected to respond to the new film starring Joaquin Phoenix.

It’s like social media is a virus of the mind or something, to coin an Insta-phrase.

(Via Stephen Miller.)