What does that make Quentin Tarantino’s movies? 9/11 times eight? “This is another January 6 moment,” wrote John Blake about Joe Rogan’s foolish use of the N-word several years ago. This essay would be more likely to have been chalked up as a foolish blogospheric hyperbole moment, if CNN hadn’t decided to publish it on their platform.

If nothing else, Blake should win an award for this level of self-unawareness:

Rogan breached a civic norm that has held America together since World War II. It’s an unspoken agreement that we would never return to the kind of country we used to be.

That agreement revolved around this simple rule: A White person would never be able to publicly use the n-word again and not pay a price. …

But once we allow a White public figure to repeatedly use the foulest racial epithet in the English language without experiencing any form of punishment, we become a different country.

We accept the mainstreaming of a form of political violence that’s as dangerous as the January 6 attack.

Well, perhaps not entirely self-unaware:

Some might say that comparing a podcaster’s moronic musings about race to January 6 is hyperbole.

Hyperbole is too easy a word for it. This isn’t just hyperbolic, it’s performative outrage for outrage’s sake. It’s almost parodic in its idiocy, something that the Babylon Bee might construct to poke fun at nutcase speech policing.

Furthermore, it’s as if Blake woke up from an eighty-year nap. White public figures have been using this word in public for decades without any punishment, and not just in politics, although Senate Democratic icon Robert Byrd’s deeeeeeeep thoughts from 2001 on “white n*****s” — on live TV no less — certainly leaps to mind. (As does the excuse-making from the Left over it afterward.) It’s rife in entertainment and especially so in hip-hop, used by rappers and singers of all hues, including whites.

That’s not to say that it’s not controversial, and it should be, given the nature of this epithet and the meaning of its historical use by whites. Its use by entertainers, and especially white entertainers, has been the subject of debate for at least a decade. There’s even a debate as to whether white fans should sing rap lyrics as written by black entertainers. And of course, we have practically every Quentin Tarantino movie ever made, in which white actors repeatedly and frequently use the word, regardless of context, which Hollywood has occasionally debated but largely tried to ignore due to Tarantino’s popularity.

Did John Blake miss all of this in his assessment of the “simple rule” since World War II? Or is he just ten years old?

This isn’t to excuse Rogan’s use of the word in his podcasts, even to the extent it requires an excuse. It’s possible to discuss this word without actually using it, since everyone instantly understands what “n-word” means. Using it is a bad choice on its own merits, and it’s a bad strategic choice because (as this controversy proves) it’s easy to take out of context and hyperbolize it into an example of racist intent. It’s clear, though, that Rogan was discussing the word rather than using it as an epithet against anyone (unlike, say, Tarantino’s dialogues), a context that certainly should mitigate the criticism somewhat in a rational world. Instead, CNN turns Rogan’s use from a few years ago into The Insurrection That No One Noticed.

These absurd hysterics demonstrate that this isn’t really about the n-word. Charles C.W. Cooke hits the nail on the head:

Elsewhere in the piece, Rogan is compared to the white supremacist senator Theodore G. Bilbo; accused of undermining the progress that was made as a result of “the war against Nazism and revelations about the Holocaust”; and of “unleashing lethal forces that he may not understand.”

The attempt to remove Rogan began with the accusation that he was guilty of “platforming” deadly “misinformation.” When that failed, he was somewhat predictably labeled a “racist.” Now that that, too, has failed, his critics have moved on to insurrection and genocide.

There’s a problem here, but it sure as hell isn’t Joe Rogan.

This is CNN’s attempt to cancel Rogan by any means necessary.