Kevin Hart Oscars furore shows public shaming, virtue-signalling at its finest

Comedian Kevin Hart was forced to step down as host of next year’s Academy Awards amid furore over comments made almost 10 years ago. Picture: Getty

Position Vacant: Tedious and drawn-out gabfest requires host for immediate start. Must be able to pander to grossly overpaid, insufferable and hypocritical celebrities who pride themselves on being the epitome of virtue. Note, shortlisted applicants must undergo an intensive vetting process that will scrutinise their every single public utterance to ensure Hollywood’s impeccable reputation is not compromised. Previous applicant need not reapply.

So long Kevin Hart, actor, comedian, and until recently, would-be Oscars host. Last Friday he stepped down after revelations the day before he had, nearly a decade ago, made disparaging jokes about gay men. They included a tweet from 2009 in which he had called someone a “fat-faced fag” and stating on his 2010 ‘Seriously Funny’ tour “One of my biggest fears is my son growing up and being gay.” Initially refusing the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ demand he apologise, he said he had already “addressed this several times”. An hour later he tweeted he had withdrawn as host on the ostensible grounds he did not wish to be a “distraction”, apologising profusely to the LGBT community.

Granted, his remarks were stupid and offensive, but as Hart said “I’m almost 40 years old. If you don’t believe that people change, grow, evolve [then] I don’t know what to tell you.” George Harrison of Spiked Online wrote of this disturbing trend: “No matter how squeaky clean you think you are, there’s always the danger that a self-appointed member of the thoughtpolice will scroll back through reams of your online history to find one compromising comment to use against you,” he said. “Some people seem to take delight in shaming others in this way.”

Should Hart have immediately apologised for distasteful remarks he made years ago? Perhaps, but you could well understand his frustration given he already admitted at length in 2015 that the basis for these jokes was his insecurity. Also, forced apologies do not amount to contrition. In this age of confected outrage and social media shaming they merely signify the affronted party has won a moral victory in compelling the transgressor to confess and repent. “Forgiveness”, to use the term loosely, is conditional upon the offender repeatedly showing subservience to the minority he has upset, a form of moral indenture if you will. It is a fact unwittingly demonstrated by Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post.

“Hart should have apologised again immediately and profusely,” wrote Capehart, a member of the gay community. “He should have used the moment as a teachable one by aligning with an LGBTQ rights organisation such as the Human Rights Campaign or GLAAD to demonstrate that he understands the hurt he caused and that he continues to make amends.”

In other words, Hart should have embraced the Maoist method of seeking redemption through repeated and public self-abasement.

If we are serious about punishing people for historical so-called hate speech, let us begin with the Hollywood stars of 2009, the year of Hart’s first offending tweet. That year the institution’s beloved film director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland at the request of US authorities on an outstanding charge of statutory rape in 1977. Hollywood fulminated at the injustice of it all. Actress Debra Winger condemned the arrest, saying it was a “three-decades-old case that is dead but for minor technicalities,” the minor technicalities being Polanski’s absconding while on bail before he could be sentenced and fleeing the country. “We stand by him and await his release and his next masterpiece,” said a dewy-eyed Debra.

“I know it wasn’t rape-rape,” said actress Whoopi Goldberg, who has herself hosted the Oscars four times. “I think it was something else, but I don’t believe it was rape-rape.” One thing is for sure: we do know Goldberg is dumb-dumb. Polanski’s victim was a 13-year-old girl whom he had plied with alcohol and drugs before anally raping her. A movie mogul declared Polanski was a “humanist” who was the victim of a “miscarriage of justice”.

“We will have to speak to our leaders, particularly in California,” he said. “I’m not too shy to go and talk to the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and to ask him once and for all to look at this.”

That mogul was Harvey Weinstein, the unwilling catalyst for the #MeToo movement. He himself is on bail for rape, and at last count stands accused by around 80 women of predatory sexual behaviour. Since being outed, Weinstein has been too shy to make public utterances. As for Winger and Goldberg, did you ever hear of the film industry demanding the two publicly repent for being a child rape apologist? No, me neither. So please, spare us the stench of Hollywood high dudgeon in shaming Hart.

Hart’s case is yet another example of the disconcerting phenomenon of mass public shaming, particularly with the advent of social media. Part of the motivation is egotistical. By doing so we signal loudly to all and sundry our abhorrence of anything racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic. We crave affirmation in the form of retweets and ‘likes’. But there is a darker motivation, and that is the satisfaction so many progressive ideologues find in publicly hating and despising others who do not share their views.

What we say online contributes to an informal social credit rating. Unlike financial credit ratings, there are no lapses that disappear from the sheet after a few years of good behaviour. Your historical ill-tempered comments are not just potential indictments that can be retrospectively applied: they are the mark of Cain.

Keenly aware of this, we contrive a public persona built on conformance with the good, and we go to great lengths to manufacture this legend. Our prejudices remain; the veneer only hides them. All that is achieved is the reinforcement of groupthink. We lie not only to others about our true feelings, but also to ourselves. The louder we condemn others, the less likely it is we will fall foul of the mob ourselves. We could not be more wrong. The Brahmins of today’s offence-takers become the untouchables of tomorrow. This is an ideology that constantly reinvents itself in order to maintain a permanent state of unease. It cannot be appeased.

Should these online neo-Puritans scrutinise my own remarks, I hope for my sake they begin with this next sentence. Even as a young child, I became acutely aware of both my wokeness and my white male privilege, which I would renounce daily at show-and-tell. When my first-grade teacher played a Charlie Drake record featuring his novelty song My Boomerang Won’t Come Back, I protested this crude racist caricature and chastised my classmates for their ignorant laughter. In second grade I successfully lobbied the school librarian to remove from the shelves Helen Bannerman’s nineteenth century classic The Story of Little Black Sambo.

My defining moment came during an event most would have considered innocuous. As a young man in 1990 I went to a screening of Kindergarten Cop, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was enjoying the movie right up until the time a child actor recited the line “Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina.” At that moment I sprung to my feet, shaking with fury. “This is transphobia!”

“How could you so cruelly marginalise the most vulnerable,” I asked the bemused projectionist as I stood between his machine and the screen. “Not only do you perpetuate the fictional narrative of binary sexes in showing this hurtful film, but you ignore the fact that gender is a social construct.”

I turned to the audience. “Surely you would know it is folly to pretend that gender corresponds with one’s genitals,” I asked, scrutinising the women for any signs of dissent (Even then I was aware of hateful Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists or TERFS as they are now known). Come to think of it, I wonder what became of that child actor. By my reckoning he would have to be in his mid-thirties or so now, and it is time we held him to account for his remarks.

As for the rest of you, I encourage you to be similarly attuned to wrongdoing. It could be as simple as hearing a friend casually remark that her most prized possession as a child was a golliwog. Or you may read of a colleague carelessly disclosing on his Facebook page that he so loved that racist ‘70s British sitcom Love Thy Neighbour. And do not for a moment think the conversations of family are sacrosanct. Our beloved and noble Gillian Triggs, former president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, famously lamented last year “Sadly, you can say what you like around the kitchen table at home,” but fortunately those days are coming to an end.

Are there any questions? What are we hoping to achieve by these punitive measures, you ask? Why, we are ensuring tolerance for all. I thought that was obvious.