The Sacrificial Lambs of the Riyadh Standup Scene

Originally published  via Armageddon Prose Substack:

You might be familiar with a recent jaunt a handful of comedians took to Riyadh to perform for the House of Saud brass.

Legacy and leftist media have attempted to turn this into a pseudo-scandal.

From the melodramatically titled “Laughter can’t launder what Saudi Arabia has done,” via The Washington Post (emphasis added):

“Fifty comedians walk into a repressive Gulf kingdom. That sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But there is little funny about some of the best-known Western comics trekking to Saudi Arabia, collecting large paychecks and agreeing to censor themselves at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which runs through Thursday.

The event in the Saudi capital is supposed to be another example of how the kingdom has become more open and tolerant under its modernizing monarch, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS. Really, it’s just the latest in a string of attempts to divert attention from his country’s atrocious human rights record by hosting showy international events. It’s also a fresh reminder of how many people will pick a payday over principles…

While the comedians are yukking it up onstage, human rights groups report that dozens of Saudi journalists, dissidents, women’s rights activists and peaceful critics remain imprisoned on bogus charges.”

Au contraire, Washington Post; vapid virtue-signaling can’t launder what you’ve done.

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”
-Matthew 7:3

Let’s see what The Washington Post had to say about “human rights” in the summer of 2021.

Via The Washington Post, July 19, 2021:

“It’s time to get serious about coronavirus vaccinations. Stop pleading and start mandating.

For the past six months, President Biden, joined by every public health authority in the land, has been begging Americans to get vaccinated. The “pretty, please” approach isn’t working…

There is vaccine hesitancy among many different sectors of the population, including reckless youths, granola liberals who believe in alternative medicines and African Americans who distrust the health-care system. Some are still persuadable, but many are not…

This is madness. Stop making reasonable appeals to those who will not listen to reason. (According to an Economist/YouGov poll, a majority of those who refuse to get vaccinated say vaccines are being used by the government to implant microchips.) It’s a waste of time. Start mandating that anyone who wants to travel on an airplane, train or bus, attend a concert or movie, eat at a restaurant, shop at a store, work in an office or visit any other indoor space show proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test.”

Related: After Years of Covering For Fauci, Washington Post Acknowledges Beagle Torture

Of course, the argument that the COVID “vaccine” was in any way going to end the “pandemic” was a demonstrable lie; the capacity of the “vaccine” to prevent transmission was never even tested in the trials used to foist it on the public.

Millions of people who otherwise would not have submitted were bullied by The Washington Post and all of their legacy partners into receiving a dangerous, experimental medical product — the death toll of which we may never fully know — all based on a mountain of provable lies.

Related: Study: COVID Shots Cripple Immune System — Possibly Permanently

But comedians doing a one-night show in Saudi Arabia — those are the real villains.

Right?

Which is the greater miscarriage of justice: dozens of political prisoners or millions (in the end, perhaps billions) of dead pharma victims and not a single consequence meted out to the perpetrators?

Tomato, tomahto?

—————————————–

[If you appreciate Armageddon Prose, please consider a $5/month or $50/year Substack subscription or a one-time digital “coffee” donation. For alternative means of patronage, email benbartee@protonmail.com.]

——————————————

And what about all of the sportsball billionaires who aren’t allowed to ever mention the industrialized oppression of the Uyghurs in Northwest China?

They get paid an awful lot of money to never, under any circumstances, mention their benefactors’ human rights abuses.

Noted Social Justice™ retard who won’t shut the fuck up about BLM LeBron James gets paid billions of dollars to use his celebrity to launder CCP propaganda, going as far as penning love letters to the regime in the official party newspaper that denies the Uyghur oppression — to deafening silence from the outlets pearl-clutching about a million-dollar payday for a weekend show by a handful of comedians.

Via Washington Free Beacon (emphasis added):

“NBA superstar LeBron James, fresh off a tour to China to promote sneakers as part of his $1 billion Nike endorsement deal, touted basketball as a “bridge” between the East and West in an unprecedented essay published by the Chinese Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily…

The essay marks a public relations coup for the CCP, which spends millions of dollars a year on propaganda to promote so-called people-to-people exchange between China and Western nations.

People’s Daily, the largest newspaper in China, serves as a clearinghouse for such propaganda. It plays a central role, for example, in the CCP’s campaign to deny Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang, publishing pieces like, “’Xinjiang genocide’ claim biggest lie of the century.” People’s Daily also owns a Chinese app that the CCP used to disseminate propaganda videos criticizing former secretary of state Mike Pompeo after the Trump administration first declared that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang in 2021…

The essay comes as James and other NBA stars seek to peddle their wares in the lucrative Chinese market after years of sour relations between the NBA and the Chinese government.”

And what of the Hollywood studios that do the same kind of performative fellatio of the CCP, that censor media produced for domestic American audiences on behalf of a foreign power to whitewash its image?

Where’s the same kind of condemnation for institutions like Paramount or the NBA, which generate exponentially more revenue servicing authoritarian regimes than a handful of comedians on a red-eye to Riyadh?

Could it be because giant institutions have outsize institutional power — The Big Club that George Carlin opined about?

And anyway, if we’re talking about the criminality of the Saudi regime, who financed and armed it from its very inception, and along with it a 7^th-century fundamentalist ideology, and installed it as the overseer of the Arabian peninsula in the first place?

The West did that, with a price tag of 400,000 lives. “My admiration for him [Ibn Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia] was deep, because of his unfailing loyalty to us,” remarked Winston Churchill.

But even if we took The Washington Post at face value, that all of this pearl-clutching is in the service of liberal reforms in Saudi Arabia and not opportunistic virtue-signaling at the expense of a profession the liberal class has coded as “right-wing” and denounced for helping Trump win, how does isolating the country from the influence of the West accomplish that goal exactly?

North Korea’s been isolated for decades; is it getting any closer to reform?

Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright starved 500,000 children to death to ostensibly target the Hussein regime for destruction, then later said on national television that half a million dead kids was worth it, even though it failed to achieve the stated objective.

https://youtu.be/KP1OAD9jSaI

So who’s the monster here?

Bill Burr doesn’t hold a candle to the criminals running the U.S. government.

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

Follow AP on X.

Subscribe (for free) to Armageddon Prose and its dystopian sister, Armageddon Safari.

Support AP’s independent journalism with a one-off, hassle-free “digital coffee” tip.

Bitcoin public address: bc1qvq4hgnx3eu09e0m2kk5uanxnm8ljfmpefwhawv