If you know who Lenny Bruce is, you’re old. You’re either a boomer or a member of the cohort that is now blamed for blowing it in the ’60s, despite the warning from Peter Fonda’s character in Easy Rider. Or you’re one of their children, a Gen Xer who resents the parental grip on family assets and public office while sharing your parents’ reverence for the ’60s. Boomers remember Bruce as a foul-mouthed stand-up comedian, the Abbie Hoffman of the comics, ruined by McCarthyite prurience and politicized prosecutions. Gen Xers, curators of a museum culture, know Bruce as the inventor of modern comedy and a free-speech martyr through the 1974 movie Lenny, in which Dustin Hoffman reenacted Bruce’s stage routines and legal disasters.
Boomer liberals are given a hard time, but they are right that race was the founding problem of American society and that Jim Crow laws were obscene. Bruce’s answer was not just legislative, but also linguistic. Disempowering the bigots in law only created legal equality. To live as equals, the language of discrimination needed to be disempowered. For his routine on this theme, Bruce turned the house lights on the audience and named them by insult like a racist auctioneer: “Three more sheenies, eight more guineas, seven wops, six greaseballs. I pass six dykes, four k*kes, and eight n*ggers.”
His argument was that as suppression increases the “power” of words, so their release defuses them. As only some of his insults require an asterisk, it would appear that Bruce was correct in linking suppression and the power of language. But was he right about the social benefits of release?
However, two recent cases suggest not. At a Rochester, Minnesota, playground on April 28, a white woman named Shiloh Hendrix was filmed seemingly calling a 5-year-old boy of Somali background a “n*gger” after, she alleged, he stole from her 18-month-old son’s diaper bag. The video went viral. Hendrix was racially abused online, and her address and phone number were publicized. She set up a GiveSendGo donation page, requesting $50,000 for “protecting” and possibly relocating her family. By May 8, the page had raised over $725,000, and Hendrix asked for a million dollars.
Many of Hendrix’s donors were enraged by an earlier GiveSendGo fundraiser. At a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas, on April 2, Karmelo Anthony, a black 17-year-old, stabbed Austin Metcalf, a white 17-year-old, through the heart after being told he was in the wrong seat. Anthony is now charged with first-degree murder. By April 30, his anonymously run GiveSendGo page had raised more than $500,000 of the $600,000 it sought for legal assistance and possible relocation. Unlike Hendrix’s page, Anthony’s page offered donors the pleasure of sending “a powerful message of community care and resistance in the face of injustice.”
Meanwhile, at the Barstool Sports bar in Philadelphia, patrons waved a bottle-service sign that said “F*ck the Jews” while ordering drinks. Viral footage showed a group of young people who thought it was hilarious. The clip’s poster, Temple University student Mohammed Khan, who discussed “Jewish supremacy” in a podcast with Holocaust denier Stew Peters, accepted $100,000 worth of Peters’s cryptocurrency $JPROOF, which purports to offer “Jew-proof” investment that bypasses “usurious Jewish bankers,” and opened the obligatory GiveSendGo page. Donor comments include “Zionist/Jewish/Israeli supremacy destroys infrastructure, nature, people, children, animals, values, morals, and anything else good and wholesome in this world,” “thank you for standing up to the six million lies,” and “I am Mexican but thank you for standing up to the Synagogue of Satan.”
A white supremacist and a Mexican give a brown-skinned Muslim funny money to own the Jews. It sounds like a Bruce skit, but it’s no joke. Liberalize speech, Bruce thought, and you turn the language of collective spite into a bantering, individualized equality. Speech was liberalized in the ’60s and further liberalized online after the ’90s, but collective identities strengthened. Legislative cures for racism, such as civil rights laws and affirmative action, defined Americans by racial grouping. As the government operated like GiveSendGo, Americans learned the new rules of racial identity and how to claim, as Khan now does, that “I am the victim.”
Bruce’s time was a honeymoon period when the old race politics were crumbling and the new had yet to arrive. Liberalization has emptied the cultural reservoir of restraint and compassion, the infinite depth of which Bruce presumed. What remains is a barren ground of collective, zero-sum resource competition. The Anthony, Hendrix, and Khan cases released the language of collectivized racism in its socially polarized, partisan modes. Anthony’s boosters, like Khan, speak the college-educated, Democrat-sponsored cant of racialized “resistance” and “speaking truth to power.” Hendrix speaks the antipodal argot of the MAGA base: unreformed, know-nothing, nothing to lose.
“If that’s what he gonna act like … ” Hendrix said at the playground.
One reason the Democrats lost in 2016 and 2024 is that most Americans don’t want to be governed as identitarian collectives. The Republicans will suffer a similar repudiation if the second Trump administration becomes identified with white racism and the online or woke Right. Most Americans still have something to lose, not least their rights as free individuals. That much, Bruce got right.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.