In light of the grievance du jour, conservatives would be well-served to remember why the cultural tides turned against progressives in recent years. It wasn’t just over public policy — it was that many of their cultural gatekeepers became insufferable.
A trip down Memory Lane might help: In 2018, as Amy Schumer’s I Feel Pretty faced outrage for supposedly tying confidence to appearance, Bill Maher declared the country had reached “peak snowflake” levels. Americans agreed with the HBO host. Two years later, a Pew study found that 57 percent believed people were too easily offended. Four years after that, a Marist poll showed the same share thought the country had become too politically correct. The backlash to progressive hypersensitivity didn’t just help elect Donald Trump — it fueled a broader cultural realignment.
Enter this weekend’s Saturday Night Live 50th-anniversary special.
On social media, a 30-second clip was all it took to confirm every conservative suspicion about liberal Hollywood. There was Tom Hanks in a bright red MAGA cap, seemingly recoiling at the prospect of shaking Kenan Thompson’s hand. The outrage industrial complex roared to life, with influencers tripping over themselves to decry it as yet another smug, coastal sneer at Middle America. The tweets wrote themselves: SNL was at it again, mocking Trump supporters as ignorant, racist hicks. Click. Send.
Libs of TikTok led the pile-on: “This propaganda is dumb and isn’t funny. When will they learn??”
A fair question — but the real lesson here is for conservatives (not to be mistaken for the radicals, noisemakers, and pyrotechnicians Buckley warned about) to recognize that outrage merchants profit by making them angry. Don’t let them, at least not over this.
Yes, SNL famously treated Barack Obama with kid gloves throughout his presidency, but this weekend’s faux controversy wasn’t an example of partisan bias. It was simply a nod to the 2016 Black Jeopardy skit, a masterclass in playing with racial and cultural stereotypes.
For those not among the 83 million who have watched it on YouTube, the joke was not that Hanks’s character, Doug — and by extension, half the voting public — was some backwoods bigot for flinching when Kenan Thompson’s Darnell Hayes approached him. It was that black Americans and rural voters might be surprised by how much they have in common — a fact confirmed by Trump’s growing support among minority communities in last year’s election.
Sunday’s tribute followed a similar formula. Doug hesitated, then warmly embraced Darnell — and like all good comedy, the writers didn’t pull the trope out of thin air. Funny or not, this wasn’t a hit job on MAGA. If anything, it was a throwback to the politically incorrect humor conservatives crave — the kind you’d expect in a Mel Brooks movie.
SNL didn’t humiliate conservatives — social media influencers did, whipping their audiences into a frenzy and making them seem like humorless scolds over a joke that, if anything, reaffirmed a truth worth embracing: Americans’ differences are often more superficial than substantive.