YOU CAN DO IT!

A conservative-leaning comedian and Saturday Night Live alum thunders about the loss of free speech in “woke” America.

“I am a traditional Liberal, which, apparently, makes me a right-wing fascist now!” Schneider writes. When, for example, he spoke out against the Covid-19 vaccine mandates in 2021, he says, liberal media outlets made him out to be “dangerous,” but “no one in media dared call those Democrat vaccine skeptics antivaxxers like soon-to-be vice president and antivaxxer-while-Trump-is-president, Kamala Harris.” (Harris in fact said while campaigning that she wouldn’t necessarily trust Trump’s assurances about the rapidly developed vaccine but would trust a “credible” source that vouched it was safe.) Schneider also found himself targeted for holding controversial opinions on transgender surgeries for children, which he likens to a radical form of gay conversion therapy except “at least ten thousand times worse.” He praises conservative Blacks such as SCOTUS member Clarence Thomas and economist Thomas Sowell, shaking his head because asking “inconvenient questions of the 2020s government” gets them branded as “race traitors.” The comedian suggests that for these and similar views on the “scamdemic” and the unnecessary alarmism about global warming, he has become much like his stand-up idol, Lenny Bruce: a performer blackballed by mainstream late-night shows because “they don’t want an opposing point of view.” Schneider buttresses his views by citing historical events as examples of the government’s “sociopathic behavior,” such as the “Tuskegee Experiment,” in which the U.S. Public Health Service infected unsuspecting black men with syphilis for 40 years, and a CIA program that administered LSD “to unwitting subjects in social situations”—though it’s not clear what these cases have to do with the current federal government urging people to get vaccinated. “Dissent is democracy. Not allowing dissent is tyranny,” Schneider concludes. Readers need not care for his confrontational style to agree with that statement.

Provocative reading that will no doubt appeal to Schneider’s fans.