The Year in Woke Censorship

Gather round, women and minorities, and warm your hearts with the tale of all the lives we’ve ruined.

He knows what he did. Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

If you read this column on a regular basis, then I assume that you, like myself, are a woke censor — one of the countless identity-politics-maddened Maenads who cavort across the media landscape, ripping powerful celebrities to shreds for the slightest offense. If someone says something racist in your presence? Censored. Misogynistic? Censored. Transphobic? Definitely censored, so hard that you’ll literally never have to hear from them ever again.

Yes, it’s great to ruin lives in the pursuit of woke censorship. Yet I find we often have trouble celebrating the wins in this business. We can become so consumed with thoughts of all the people we will censor that we don’t pause to check in with all the people we have censored, and witness the powerless, tormented wasteland of poverty and silence their lives have invariably become.

Nothing instills a healthy sense of pride like taking stock of one’s own accomplishments. Here, then, is a timeline of some of the most famously censored people of 2022.

Dave Chappelle

The Crime: The Closer, a 2021 comedy special in which Chappelle declared himself “Team TERF.”