During a recent appearance on popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Tucker Carlson vocalized a longstanding sentiment held by much of the American right: “I do feel like creativity—art—has been completely destroyed and eliminated in the United States.” Carlson bemoaned the notable decline of the visual arts, literature, architecture, and other realms of the artistic world. “You can’t be creative if you’re not honest,” he said. “It’s that simple. And we can’t be honest, so there’s no creativity.”
Although opposition to the left’s politicization of the arts has served as a rallying cry on the right for many years, in recent months, a growing coalition of mainstream artists, comedians, and other public figures have begun to publicly acknowledge the left-wing war on American culture – and push back against it.
This trend was most notably seen when renowned comedian Jerry Seinfeld, a Hollywood mainstay who once described meeting Barack Obama as the “greatest moment” of his life, spoke out against the effects of political correctness in comedy.
“Nothing really affects comedy. People always need it. They need it so badly and they don’t get it,” Seinfeld said in an April appearance on a radio show. “It used to be that you’d go home at the end of the day, most people would go, ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, M.A.S.H. is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on, All in the Family is on.’ You just expected [there will] be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight.”
He continued: “Well, guess what? Where is it? Where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap and people worrying so much about offending other people.”
For a comedian with the platform and widespread popularity of Jerry Seinfeld, these comments are significant—and signal that there could be a fierce backlash brewing among some of America’s most successful comedians and storied entertainers.
But opposition to wokeism in the arts is not limited to the realm of comedy.
In a recent episode of Glenn Loury’s “The Glenn Show,” Columbia University professor John McWhorter and actor Clifton Duncan discussed the jarring extent to which so-called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” edicts have influenced American theatre—particularly in the years following the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots.
“I have been told for a good couple years now by conservatives and liberals that the theatre is immolating itself because it’s been taken over by a hard leftist—let’s face it, woke—sensibility that is driving theatre companies around the country to program hectoring, hard-left, woke, sermonizing plays that audiences don’t like,” McWhorter said on the podcast. “And that basically audiences are not coming back to the theatre… because of this.”
Duncan, a self-described liberal, echoed this sentiment, observing that “there’s so much mismanagement and so much ideological capture” that has taken over the theatre industry—even to the point where acting in original plays feels no different than being a paid progressive activist.
Meanwhile, the film and television industries have been bombarded by racial quotas, gender ideology, and a misguided commitment to promoting socially progressive views—in effect elevating leftist ideological purity over the original, high-quality, and nonpartisan content Americans are looking for when they go out to see a movie or spend a night in watching Netflix. As a result, box offices continue to suffer and viewership of streaming services continues to decline.
At a commencement address at Duke University this month, Seinfeld doubled down on his calls for Americans to lighten up—and to be wary of losing themselves, their intellect, and their sense of humor to the oppressive whims of wokeism and political correctness.
“What I need to tell you as a comedian: Do not lose your sense of humor. You can have no idea at this point in your life how much you are going to need it to get through. Not enough of life makes sense for you to be able to survive it without humor,” he told Duke’s graduating class.
Whether the graduates in the audience realized it or not, Seinfeld’s advice is likely far more valuable than they now know.
The growing litany of mainstream actors, comedians, artists, and other public figures firmly standing against the woke takeover of the arts is just the latest in a long series of reminders that, politics aside, the American people just want to laugh, to be moved, and to once again enjoy their entertainment without feeling like they are sitting through a corporate H.R. seminar or DEI tutorial.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
