I pulled this Bret Easton Ellis quote from his recent appearance on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight. The 55-year-old author of “American Psycho” was on the show promoting his new book “White.”
“This is the one thing that has bothered me the most about the left. And as a creative it is something that worries me. I often wonder how you can be a writer, an artist, a director, a filmmaker, and allign yourself with the party that is basically subsidizing an authoritarian language belief on what you can say and what you can’t say and how you can express yourself or how you can’t express yourself. To me, I don’t understand how this is not more worrying to the creative community. Where will it end up? What is the dead end of this censoring in a way? I don’t know. There has got to be some kind of push back on it. I know neither side likes it. The left doesn’t like it and the right doesn’t like it and yet somehow we are enthralled to this and we are all following it. And I’m not sure why.”
You can be on the right or on the left of the current political conversation, but if you are a fan of artistic expression then, I ask you, how can you possibly disagree with Bret Easton Ellis on this? What is currently happening should be cause for concern to all artists. Whether they realize it or not, they are being hampered in truly expressing themselves through their own art. So, where’s the pushback Easton Ellis refers to in the above quote? When is it coming? We’ve gone down far enough, have we not?