Actor Rainn Wilson, best known for playing Dwight Schrute on The Office, points to Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo as Exhibit A in America’s hypocrisy problem.
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In a recent interview with Fox News Digital, Wilson used the Democrat Maine Senate nominee’s growing list of scandals to illustrate a point that cuts both ways. The left, Wilson noted, has been remarkably willing to look past Platner’s tattoo, which has been linked to Nazism. “They’re willing to overlook the Platner Nazi tattoo,” Wilson said, “but if it was someone from the other side that had a tattoo that was questionable, they would be all over MSNBC about it.”
Wilson is right. The same tattoo would have ended a Republican’s career, and rightly so. The mainstream press would have run wall-to-wall coverage, and late-night hosts would have had a field day. But Democrats and many in the media treated the story as a distraction.
Wilson noted that Republicans are just as quick to howl about the other side’s scandals while granting their own a pass. “It’s the hypocrisy that gets me the most,” he said. “Both sides need to have, kind of, equal standards of behavior.”
Wilson was in Washington, appearing on Capitol Hill to promote a Baha’i-backed initiative aimed at bridging political polarization:
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The partisan divide and toxic partisanship, and corruption in partisanship, is something the American people are very passionate about. The people want this fixed.
How can we give fresh expression to the ideals in the declaration? How can we leave behind tendencies that divide us and replace them with a widening circle of concern? We need to be able to speak and think in terms of spiritual and moral dimensions of individual and collective life. We need to do that in ways that are meaningful across different perspectives, both religious and secular.
He didn’t use the term, but Wilson added that wokeness has killed the ability to make The Office today. “Even with the fact that painting that character as just an idiot,” Wilson said, “I don’t think you could get away with it today.”
That’s sad. Because when you can’t make fun of stupidity, you’re stuck with the reality of it.
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