Hollywood treated woke ideology like scripture to brainwash Americans into accepting their cultural takeover.
Almost nobody inside the entertainment industry dared to question it out loud.
And Chris Rock just told the New York Times something about wokeness that liberals never wanted to hear from one of their own.
Chris Rock brought up Salem on a New York Times podcast
Chris Rock is no conservative. He told an interviewer recently that he is no “fan” of President Donald Trump.
That detail makes what came next harder for the Left to wave away.
Rock sat down with host David Marchese for The Interview, a New York Times podcast, to promote his upcoming film Misty Green. Marchese asked the director about forgiveness, which runs through the movie.
Rock started with a story about a friend he described as “nameless” and “canceled.” Another friend wanted to know how Rock could stay close to that person.
“If you’re only friends with your friends when they’re good, they’re not your friends,” Rock said he answered.
He added that standing by a friend “doesn’t mean condoning abusive behavior.” Then he turned to the bigger target.
Rock gave the usual Hollywood throat-clearing first, saying “it is great that marginalized people have a voice.” But the next line did the damage.
“The problem is we’re in the Old Testament right now,” Rock said. “The Old Testament has no forgiveness. The Old Testament didn’t work, so they had to write a remix called the New Testament.”
Marchese noted that some people now call the period right after George Floyd’s death “crazy.” Rock agreed, and he reached back to 1690s Massachusetts to make the point.
“So, my half a joke,” Rock said, “the Salem Witch Hunts. I’m sure the first three witches they caught were actually fing witches. But then you open up a witch office, and now you gotta start lying. Now, you gotta fing make s*** up ’cause you got overhead.”
The witch office has a payroll to meet
That joke lands because every American who worked in a big company or sent a kid to a government school after 2020 has met the witch office.
It goes by other names. Corporations call it the DEI department. Universities call it the bias response team. Human resources calls it mandatory training.
And Rock nailed the business model. Once an institution hires people whose paychecks depend on finding offenders, those people will keep finding offenders. Nobody in that office gets a raise for reporting that the building is clean.
“The problem is when you institutionalize it,” Rock said. “That’s the problem.”
Ordinary Americans never asked for any of this. Executives, administrators, and activists handed it down from the top, and working people who told the wrong joke or asked the wrong question paid with their jobs.
Rock also deserves some credit for reaching for the Bible to explain it. Forgiveness sits at the center of the Christian faith, and it is the one thing the woke Left never built into its new religion. The cancel mob wrote plenty of commandments and left out grace entirely.
But Rock wasn’t finished, and this is where he lost the plot. He told Marchese he’s “glad that all of this stuff happened” because “it needed to happen.”
Tell that to the people the witch office ran out of their careers.
Comedians keep saying it and Hollywood keeps ignoring it
Rock is hardly the first comic to break ranks. He isn’t even breaking ranks for the first time.
Fox News reported back in 2021 that Rock complained on The Breakfast Club that cancel culture produced “unfunny” and “boring” comedy. The same report noted that Jon Lovitz compared cancel culture to McCarthyism.
Jerry Seinfeld went on the New Yorker Radio Hour in 2024 and, according to Forbes, blamed political correctness and the “extreme left” for the decline of TV comedy.
So the people who actually tell jokes for a living have been waving red flags for years. And the industry around them kept lecturing anyway.
The audience noticed. LateNighter, which licenses Nielsen data, reported that Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Late Show, and Late Night with Seth Meyers each lost 70% to 80% of their viewers since 2015, according to the Deseret News. Late-night hosts traded punchlines for left-wing propaganda, and Americans changed the channel.
Predictably, the Left’s defenders showed up on cue. Kaivan Shroff, a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer, told Fox News Digital that Rock “is oversimplifying this in a way that is pretty self-serving.”
A Clinton campaign veteran calling a comedian self-serving for defending forgiveness tells readers plenty about who still staffs the witch office.
And notice what Shroff didn’t do. He didn’t deny the office exists.
There’s one more piece of this worth chewing on. Rock said recently that Trump got one thing right, and he sounded almost annoyed to admit it.
“It’s weird when somebody gets one thing right, and the one thing almost clears them of all their other sins,” Rock said. “The news is fake. He got that right.”
A liberal comedian now agrees with Trump about the media and agrees with conservatives about cancel culture, all while insisting he’s still on the other team. Maybe he is. But millions of Americans started exactly where Rock is standing and kept walking.
Marchese’s own phrasing gave the game away. He called the post-2020 period “Woke 1.0.” Software only gets a version number when somebody plans a 2.0.
Democrats who now edge away from the excesses of that era built the witch office, funded it, and cheered while it worked. And none of them have offered to shut it down. Rock got the diagnosis right, even if he flinched on the cure.
Sources:
Mediaite, “Chris Rock Compares ‘Wokeness’ to Salem Witch Trials: ‘Half a Joke'”
Fox News, “Chris Rock shreds ‘woke 1.0’ era, compares modern outrage to Salem witch hunts”
Fox News, “Cancel culture: Dave Chappelle and other comedians who have taken sides”
Deseret News, “Are late-night show ratings on the decline?”
Forbes, “‘Seinfeld’ Cast Clash Over Political Correctness In Comedy”