Topics: Jerry Seinfeld, Comedy, TV, Reddit, Jonathan Chait, Twitter, shaming, political correctness, Entertainment News

Jerry Seinfeld is the latest brave middle-aged white man to weigh in on the “creepy” ascendance of humorless p.c. SJW anti-free-speech scolds. We know the drill now–we’ve heard it from comedians like Seinfeld and Patton Oswalt and, to a lesser degree, Louis C.K. and Chris Rock. We’ve heard it packaged in a different format from Very Serious media commentators like Jonathan Chait, Laura Kipnis and, most recently, an anonymous white male adjunct professor whose left-wing students “terrify” him.

It’s a familiar, tired drill. Point to instances of creeping overreaction by angry left-wing young people in the classroom, at protests and especially on Tumblr or Twitter. Portray these forces as a terrifying, swelling horde of enforcers with the power to totally destroy the lives of good old hardworking members of the chattering class like yourself. Talk about how this army of Social Justice Stormtroopers has successfully create a stifling Orwellian monoculture, especially on the Internet, where all of us live in constant fear of saying anything the least bit “offensive” lest our lives be ruined and as a result all online discourse has been stripped down to the level of catchphrase-spewing party apparatchiks seeking to avoid Stalinist purges.

This is clearly an extremely compelling narrative when it comes to a lot of people’s personal fears, because it’s a narrative they spin out of comparatively little evidence. It’s not that there’s no such thing as a left-wing witch hunt or that people haven’t been harmed by them — it’s that, for something that’s so scary that it warrants trend piece after trend piece on a biweekly basis, it seems pretty hard for these pundits to come up with actual examples of harm to themselves.

Daniel Tosh, whose nasty rape joke at an audience member spurred the comedy world to rally around him waving flags with apocryphal Voltaire quotes – yeah, he got a lot of mean tweets, and got analyzed in a bunch of think pieces, and got a really unkind (but hilarious) Onion article written about him.

And … that was it. His stand-up career is still going fine. He’s still on Twitter. He still has a damn top-rated show on Comedy Central, which makes him better off than 99.9 percent of all stand-up comedians in the country. (A show, by the way, which derives a lot of its humor from mocking people who are already being mercilessly made fun of or criticized on the Internet, which adds a little bit of irony to this whole “lynch mob” thing.)

Jonathan Chait combs through years of outraged viral right-wing posts on Facebook about left-wing atrocities but only comes up with one story of significant material harm, a kid being fired from a college newspaper, after Chait himself has gotten embroiled in controversy for trying to get journalists fired from newspapers for doing their job wrong. (As always, it’s actually about ethics in journalism.)

Laura Kipnis has a stronger argument for having been mistreated, even though the Title IX system she criticizes did, in fact, end up letting her completely off the hook — and even though the actual reason for the complaint against her wasn’t her “wrong opinion” but her spreading untruths about a student embroiled in a sexual harassment claim against a professor, which pretty much every “political correctness gone mad” pundit talking about the Kipnis case has ignored.

The professor who hides behind the pseudonym “Edward Schlosser” has, by his own account, never actually been targeted by left-wing students at all. He has only ever received one formal complaint against his teaching, from a right-wing student who accused him of being a communist — but his whole thesis is his left-wing students are scarier because his personal intuition is that they might come after him worse than that right-wing student did and it might be worse for him if and when they do.

He claims the troubling “The customer is always right” attitude universities increasingly adopt toward their students unilaterally empowers the angry p.c. left-wing radicals, and gets gently schooled by a black female professor who points out how she gets challenged by students for being too radical all the time, how progressive academics like Steven Salaita get silenced by institutions regularly.

And, with the most staggering lack of self-awareness I’ve yet seen in a hand-wringing think piece, “Edward Schlosser,” who has taken as many steps as possible to shield himself from any possible negative social consequences for an unpopular opinion, takes time out of his article to name-and-shame an online activist for having an unpopular opinion. As a result, conservative media made her the Hippie-Punching Target of the Week, she got the usual tidal wave of harassment and death threats women online get for unpopular opinions, and Vox was forced to edit Schlosser’s piece and put in an apology. Whether Schlosser’s take on who the real victims of “outrage culture” are was affected at all by this remains unknown.