Things are tough out there for the honest, good-natured, conservative-leaning men of America. Just because they voted for Donald Trump, continue to support his bigoted and deadly policies, and feel comfortable waving away the darker implications of things like his Muslim ban or border wall doesn’t mean that they’re bad people. It just means that their political opinions happen to line up with neo-Nazis and so-called Christians who would rather kill the poor than actually spend a dime to help another living soul. There’s nothing wrong with that, and if you have the nerve to suggest that there is, then you’re the one who is the real intolerant piece of shit.
Just ask Tim Allen, the famous sitcom star who thinks that being a conservative in Hollywood is like living in Germany in the 1930s. He said that as a joke on a recent episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, but a Washington Post story explains that it’s not much of a joke to Allen or to a “clandestine support group” of other Hollywood conservatives who are frightened of being “excommunicated from the church of tolerance.” The piece also quotes older interviews with Allen where he said people should “forget the stupid shit [Trump] says about immigrants,” because it’s “just ignorant” and should apparently be ignored if Trump can “do the stuff that really needs fixing.”
He has also knocked Trump as an amateur with “very bad comic timing” in the past, but that’s the same sort of half-hearted, disingenuous bullshit that a lot of Hollywood conservatives like Allen (and Arnold Schwarzenegger) love to say when it comes to Trump. It lets them pretend like they’re enlightened while still avoiding the actual concrete issues that people have with Trump and his racist cronies, but when they catch a whiff that someone might think less of them for supporting Trump, they get to act all high and mighty for exposing someone else’s “intolerance.”
Allen’s line about 1930s Germany may have been tongue-in-cheek, but comments like that normalize the behavior of Trump’s more extreme supporters because it makes it seem like criticizing their beliefs is somehow worse than the dangerous and hateful things they believe. Attitudes like that helped get Trump elected in the first place, and now it’s more important than ever to call people on their shit when they deserve it. Maybe Tim Allen and his conservative snowflake buddies don’t like feeling judged for being a conservative in Hollywood, but that’s just too bad.