Last Friday, comedian Sarah Silverman posted a portion of one of her podcasts on Twitter in which she offered an opinion about cancel culture. Her take is that the problem with cancel culture is that it lacks a path to redemption for the accused:

“In this cancel culture, and we all know what I’m talking about, whether you think there is one or there isn’t one or where you stand on it, and there’s a lot of gray matter there, but without a path to redemption, when you take someone, you found a tweet they wrote seven years ago or a thing that they said, and you expose it and you say, this person should be no more, banish them forever,” Silverman said. “They’re going to find someplace where they are accepted and it’s not going to be with progressives, which ironically means to be changed, progress.”…

“If we don’t give these people a path to redemption, then they’re going to go where they are accepted, which is the mother—–g dark side,” she said. “I think there should be some kind of path. Do we want people to be changed? Or do we want them to stay the same to freeze in a moment we found on internet from 12 years ago?”

One reason Silverman isn’t eager to join the woke on their crusade to silence everyone that offends them is that she’s been on the receiving end of this before. Last year she was fired from a film role after a 2008 skit in which she wore blackface circulated. At the time she called it “righteousness porn.”

“I think it’s really scary and it’s a very odd thing that it’s invaded the left primarily and the right will mimic it,” adding that she dubs it “righteousness porn”.

“It’s like, if you’re not on board, if you say the wrong thing, if you had a tweet once, everyone is, like, throwing the first stone,” she continued. “It’s so odd. It’s a perversion. It’s really, ‘Look how righteous I am and now I’m going to press refresh all day long to see how many likes I get in my righteousness.’”

One reason Silverman’s comments are circulating widely today is that they became fodder for a segment on the view featuring Bari Weiss. Weiss pointed out that it’s not just celebrities who get “cancelled” and mostly recover. There are other victims of this mindset who don’t have the ability to fight back. She offered the example of Emmanuel Cafferty, who is Mexican-American, was fired from his job at San Diego Gas and Electric after a protester took a photo and alleged he was making a white supremacist hand sign. “I just think that is wrong and it is deeply un-American,” Weiss said.

Co-host Sunny Hostin completely ignored the story about Emmanual Cafferty and claimed cancel culture was really just holding people accountable for bad behavior. “Rather than call it cancel culture, why not call it consequence culture,” she said. Wow, I am so tired of this stupid talking point from people who fully expect to always be on the side of the accusers not the accused.

Sara Haines responded by pointing out that consequences are usually supposed to fit the crime at hand but with cancel culture every statement or failure from a decade or more ago is treated as if it were a capital crime. “I think there’s this unforgiving culture right now that’s become acceptable to mob mentality. And I think sadly if it were to affect you or someone you love you would expect more grace and nuance but we don’t extend that to other people,” Haines said.

Whoopi Goldberg closed out the segment saying that she knows something about cancel culture because she had been cancelled. She said it was only because Barbara Walters gave her a shot on the View that she ever had a job again. “I’m real particular about going after people and cancelling them because sometimes they’re not guilty,” she said.

The fact that only one person on a show known for leaning left defended this behavior is a hopeful sign. Maybe the real solution to cancel culture is to have it go after a few more celebrities. Eventually, after enough of them get hit with this, they’ll start defending classical liberalism from the woke extremists hounding everyone online.

Here’s the View segment. Below that is the podcast segment Sarah Silverman posted on Twitter.

Dipping my toe into a take on cancel culture in episode 2.#SarahSilvermanPodcast eps 1-5
Here: https://t.co/qNnHEngHbF… pic.twitter.com/9v65pd9nIV

— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) October 24, 2020