Gervais at the Golden Globes

It seems to me Ricky Gervais’s monologue at the Golden Globe Awards marks an important new stage in the ongoing popular revolution against entrenched “elites.”

The protest has now moved from the streets into the halls of the palace.

We saw perhaps the same thing too when JK Rowlings recently fell afoul of the far left. And then did not apologize. We have seen it in the recent politically incorrect grumblings of ex-Pythons John Cleese and Terry Gilliam.

And all have been, perhaps, emboldened by the prior example of Jordan Peterson, an academic who bucked the academic speech codes, and prospered instead of being ruined.

It is a critical point; as when, during the French Revolution, members of the First and Second Estate began defecting to the National Assembly. For these are members of the elite defecting.

Gervais is himself a card-carrying member of the glitterati. Nor is he any right-winger. He aggressively advocated for the Corbyn Labour Party as recently as the 2017 UK election; this year, he was neutral.

It is important that Gervais was mocking them. That is extreme: he is saying they do not deserve to be taken seriously. This means that, very suddenly, it may be UNCOOL to be leftist. The peer pressure to conform to leftist ideology may be flipped.

His criticisms through humour were not political, either. They were on moral grounds.

That is the crucial point. The current elite no longer holds the moral high ground, as they must to justify their status and their privilege. They are beginning, belatedly, to see this themselves, just as the nobles and clergy did in the French Revolution.

Gervais almost said this in so many words: “You have no standing to preach to anyone. Just take your award, thank your agent and your God, and --.”

Tellingly, I see news sources transcribing that would “God” as “guard.” Which makes no sense, but to acknowledge a God might be, to them, too traumatic. They fear judgement now too much.

This is not the point at which the house of cards, or the Bastille, comes down; that is when the order is given to fire on the crowd, and the ordinary soldiers will not muster, or will not obey. But this is the point at which the collapse is inevitable.

The mandate of heaven, as the Chinese would put it, has moved on.